Following in the footsteps of other local theaters — including Millburn’s Paper Mill Playhouse and State Theatre of New Jersey in New Brunswick — Mayo wants “to make the theater a place everybody can enjoy,” General Manager Ed Kirchdoerffer said.

“This is a great opportunity to let a group of kids who sometimes feel excluded to feel like they’re a part of something,”  Kirchdoerffer said.
It’s a timely move: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last year reported that 1 in 41 children  living in the state have been identified with autism spectrum disorder. That’s about 2.5 %. Nationally 1 in 68 children have autism spectrum disorder, about 1.5 percent.

Mayo’s first step towards being more inclusive is a partnership with The Miracle Project, a respected national program that uses music, dance and theater to reach children on the autism spectrum. The non-profit is currently offering two of the project’s courses.

The second is offering sensory-friendly performances like this one. The changes to “The Rainbow Fish” will be relatively subtle: The house lights will stay on during the performance and the sound system will be turned down a notch. Audience members will be welcome to move around during the one-act play or encouraged to take a break in a “chill room” set up for that purpose.

But those tweaks make an incredible difference, said Gary Blackman, managing director of ArtsPower National Touring Theatre company, which produces the show. His company has been producing these sensory-friendly productions for about five years and have seen an uptick in requests for them.

“Adapting the light and sound levels removes something that may be a stimulus, but it doesn’t affect the quality or the integrity of the show at all,” Blackman said. “It’s not as formal as a regular performance, but that’s fine with us.”

At the suggestion of autism experts, Mayo hosted a “Meet Your Seat” open house for ticket holders last week so the theater wouldn’t seem foreign and scary. It also sent out documents with photos of the theater and the auditorium to set expectations.

On the day of the performance, there will be family bathrooms available instead of single sex ones.

“We want to create an environment that’s comfortable for everyone,” Kirchdoerffer said

“The Rainbow Fish” is based on the popular 1992 book by Marcus Pfister.

In the story,  a fish with colorful scales finds friendship when he learns to share and look at inner beauty, not outer appearances. The stage show features illustrations from the book, which excites audiences, Blackman said.

The show’s stated target audience is ages 4 -10, the same age range recommended for Mayo’s second sensory-friendly performance, “The Little Prince” on May 7.

But  Kirchdoerffer stressed that all ages are welcome.

“Sometimes families with a child on the spectrum don’t have as many opportunities to go out and feel included,” he said. “This show is a respite. It is set-up so they  have a place to go.”

The Rainbow Fish

Mayo Performing Arts Center

100 South St., Morristown

Tickets: $12-15, available online at mayoarts.org. Feb. 8

Pulitzer Prize Finalist “Hurricane Diane” Debuts at Red Bank’s Two River Theatre.

All is not right in one upscale New Jersey cul-de-sac: a storm is brewing; marriages are crumbling; and the god of wine, sex and revelry is in town eager to conscript a few followers. These are the conditions that underlie the ambitious world-premiere play “Hurricane Diane,” by Madeleine George — a 2014 Pulitzer finalist for “The (curious case of) Watson Intelligence” — now running at Red Bank’s Two River Theater. Full of quick, funny wit, the play is a comedy with designs on high-minded social critique.

Its success in the latter endeavor is spotty — the play’s late portions run a bit off the rails — but “Hurricane Diane” remains a droll treat and a smart mockery of suburban stasis.

The play opens as Diane (Becca Blackwell), “a lesbian separatist permaculture gardener from Vermont,” announces her true identity of Dionysus to the audience, telling us that the time is ripe to come out of seclusion and gather a train of acolytes. She has deemed New Jersey the spot of prime pickings (the play was a commission by Two River, and George, a playwright in residence at the theater, capitalizes on plenty of opportunities for inside jokes with her Garden State audience).

But Diane’s quest will prove more difficult than presumed, as her first target, Sandy Fleischer (Mia Barron), shows little eagerness to abandon the comfortable suburban mold. Undaunted, Diane intensifies her efforts in targeting Sandy’s friends around the cul-de-sac: Renee (Nikiya Mathis), Pam (Danielle Skraastad, regularly hilarious as the Jersiest of these Jersey women), and Beth (Kate Wetherhead).

Her friends are more easily won over than Sandy. But Diane knows she has to get Sandy to achieve achieve a proper cult.

The play is most fun when examining the slow, reluctant departure of these women from their hardline suburban principles. Rachel Hauck’s perfectly minimalist set fills Two River’s black box space with only a kitchen marble countertop and sink, adorned with a few stools and wine racks (we’ve all been in this house: the kitchen is about 400 square feet, and no doubt surrounded by 3,000 gaudy more).

The only marker of when the play moves from one kitchen to the next is the lady of the house’s dish towel of choice. Identical floorplans and neatly manicured backyards suit these women just fine, and so Diane must pull out all the stops to lure them into her natural habitat of paw-paw trees and hedonism. In their resistance, George finds space aplenty to mock suburban ideals.

Obie-winner and Broadway veteran Leigh Silverman directs with an inventive eye for using the space’s minimalism, and original music from the folk/rock duo The Bengsons underscores the ritualism into which the play progresses. Ultimately the play looks quite different at its conclusion than it did ninety minutes earlier, in part because of the natural world imposing itself on the constructed, but mostly because of the spiritual journeys of George’s four women.

Such drastic changes inevitably seem abrupt in a short play, and “Hurricane Diane” doesn’t avoid this pitfall. But the questions that the play’s conclusion asks about human’s relationship with nature and its forces resonate.

Hurricane Diane

Two River Theater

21 Bridge Avenue, Red Bank

Tickets: available online (http://www.tworivertheater.org/).

Reprinted from NJ.com