The actress, producer and four-time U.S. Paralympic champion opens up about her years of portraying Ani, a quadriplegic, dignity within her work and grappling with audiences and an industry still learning about disability.
“We had the most lovely, generous audience ready to laugh and cry with us — just a glorious group of humans came. But I really had to work hard not to fall too much into self-indulgent emotion,” Sullivan says, about her final performance. “I do not live in that space, so for me to get through the show was a real big hurdle emotionally. I’ve spent six and a half years on and off with this character and with this person, and she’s become so dear to me. I’m so protective of her.
Ani is a character Sullivan, a bilateral above-knee amputee, says she has become “so protective of,” fending off characterizations of her over the years as “so mad” and “so angry.” She’s wounded, the actress notes, and that takes a toll. But in that hurt, thestar has found comfort and camaraderie with a character in Martyna Majok’s Pulitzer-winning play whose very presence on any stage, let alone Broadway, is a historical act. Right down to her very last performance.
“I said to David backstage right before the bathtub, ‘I’m going to do the best I can but —’ He was like, ‘It is what it is,'” she recalls. “It was all good until he started to leave and I say, ‘It’s been nice to get to know you.’ I could barely muster those words out of my mouth. I almost feel like I was saying that to Ani, not to Eddie. I was saying to her, ‘It’s been nice to get to know you.
You were with this play through every iteration, from Williamstown to Broadway. Can you talk about the significance for you of that transfer to Broadway, especially during a period when the whole country was rethinking its relationship to disability due to a global pandemic? There’s definitely a sense of importance. There’s a level of importance and there’s a level of people taking the play seriously when it’s on Broadway, where it has that sort of pedigree on top of being a Pulitzer winner. I think people were more receptive to it. They were more eager to check it out and be like, “What is this whole thing about?” More so than when it was just a play Off-Broadway having not won a bunch of accolades, gotten a bunch of critical acclaim, and all of those things.
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