Hello

Edmonton's Concrete Theatre has been touring this award-winning play for grade 9 students to schools across the country for 12 years. Many of the students who've seen the show over its history, have come back to tell the company how the play helped them navigate sexual pitfalls later in life, or prevented an early pregnancy. They've performed in front of kids with special needs before (for a deaf audience, it took two hours just to do the first half), but the heavy participatory nature of the play itself, means its different for every audience who sees it, and every cast who performs it, every single time.

Today, the students from Streetsville and Mississauga just happen to have Autism or Asperger Syndrome and I'm playing the part of Jane Goodall, the outside observer. A piece of all of us here (cast, crew, me) is excited to see how a highly interactive sex-ed play would play in front of this audience. Actually, the fact that we assume it could be remarkably different(even the fact that I'm writing about it now) says more about us than it does about the students in the audience.

Autism: The Musical probably set the current standard for the public as a window into the arts as therapy for autistic children, but (surprise, surprise) today's show wasn't full of uncontrolled outbursts or complete emotional shutdowns typical of autism's public face. So, if this isn't going to be a blow-by-blow of the challenge faced by cast members in kid wrangling, why did it make ThisAbility this week? First of all, the attitude that we should even be educating people with disabilities (much less those with mental disabilities) about sex, in a way that isn't disability specific, is still much rarer than it should be.

Are We There Yet? represents the blatantly correct assumption that disabled people are, and continue to be, sexually active, so they should be educated sooner rather than later. If anything, the fact the students had autism and aspergers enhanced the experience, as many of them had insights and perceptions