Playwright Tim J. Lord received the inaugural Apothetae and Lark Playwriting Fellowship for a writer with a disability, a two-year award spanning 2017-2019. His work has been developed and produced at theaters across the United States, and he will be the writer-in-residence at the William Inge Theatre Festival in Independence, Kansas, this spring. Here, he talks about his career path, the connection he found with disability in his work, and the importance of honing your craft.

VSA and Accessibility: Where are you currently based?

Tim J. Lord: I grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, bounced back and forth between coasts for a while, landed in New York for about 10 years, and returned to the banks of the Mississippi River (via Minneapolis, Minnesota) for a year. Currently I live in Rockville, Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C.

VSA and Accessibility: What is your area(s) of artistic practice?

Tim J. Lord: I’m predominantly a playwright, though I’ve been known to act, direct, and design lighting.

VSA and Accessibility: Please tell us a little bit about your career path—what steps have you taken to get where you are today?

Tim J. Lord: I started writing plays in undergrad at Knox College, a small liberal arts school where students could pretty easily produce their own stuff, so I was able to mount two of my plays during my senior year. After I graduated, I sought out collaborators who I trusted to give me productive feedback. Then in 2001, I got hired to work at Trinity Rep in Providence, Rhode Island. I was a big fan of Paula Vogel’s and a friend connected me to her. She took me under her wing, exposing me to writers I’d never heard of and eventually invited me to be a part of her graduate playwriting workshop where I really started to experiment with my craft and discover my voice as a writer. At the end of that workshop she pushed me to consider going to graduate school and I ended up attending the University of California, San Diego, where I met some amazing friends and future collaborators.

From there I moved to New York and was thrilled to be surrounded by so much theater and so many talented folks, but I also struggled with the balance of just getting by and making the time to write. After a number of years stuck in the hustle, I landed a job at The 52nd Street Project. The stability and the energy of working with the kids of the Project allowed to me re-focus on my writing and to get proactive again. In 2017, I was awarded a Jerome Fellowship at the Playwrights’ Center which required me to move to Minneapolis for the year, and that was essential because so much of my work is still set in the Midwest. The whole year proved to be an opportunity to reconnect with that energy and to get to live among the people who form the basis of many of my characters. I was also awarded the Apothetae and Lark Fellowship for a disabled writer in 2017, and the combination of those two fellowships really allowed me to work solely as a writer for a year and re-connect with my craft and my confidence.

Here are the themes that I keep coming back to for how to make a living in theater in this crazy world: If you believe in your work, you’ve got to find ways to stick with it, because it can take a long time to get accolades and institutional support—get out as regularly as you can, meet fellow artists and support their work, see plays both good and bad, assume that you have more to learn, ask for what you want and be specific. Also, you shouldn’t say yes to every opportunity that comes your way, but you shouldn’t say no because you think that a “better” opportunity is going to come along. I had a small production of a play in Brooklyn in 2016. It didn’t get the attention I thought it deserved, but it provided a much-needed opportunity to develop the script and the resulting draft got me both my Jerome and my Apothetae and Lark fellowships.

VSA and Accessibility: What current projects you would like to share with VSA members?

Tim J. Lord: This past fall, I was awarded a finishing commission for my play We Declare You a Terrorist by Round House Theatre in Bethesda. (You’ll have to stay tuned for some exciting news about that.) Last June, I was the Reg E. Cathey Writer-in-Residence at The Orchard Project where I started writing a new play called The Hard Price, which features a character born with a limb difference and her father, an Army vet with traumatic brain injury who is grappling with the fact that his ability is increasingly being wrested from him. This spring I’ll be the writer-in-residence at the William Inge Theatre Festival in Independence, Kansas, where I’ll continue to work on that play and hope to return to working on my play On Every Link a Heart Does Dangle; or, Owed,which I workshopped at the Lark last spring and was the culmination of my Apothetae fellowship. (I continue to look for a producing partner on that play.)

VSA and Accessibility: How does disability influence your work?

Tim J. Lord: I spent most of my writing/artistic life not really thinking about disability. I was born with a limb difference (my left arm and hand are underdeveloped due to amniotic banding syndrome) and my parents weren’t the overprotective types—they always encouraged me to do whatever I wanted and to find a way to adapt. When I met Gregg Mozgala (founder and artistic director of The Apothetae) a number of years back, however, he encouraged me to recognize that I was a part of the disability community and people wanted to hear my voice in that light and that I could become a real advocate for the community. When I thought about it, I realized that I have spent a lifetime adapting to the “normal” world and that my characters were doing the same. I hadn’t crafted them thinking of them as having disabilities, but they were all misfits struggling to find their way in a world that views them as defective. Since receiving the Apothetae Fellowship, I’ve gotten to meet so many stellar artists from the disability community. I want to work with them and as a writer I can create roles that force our theaters to employ them, so I’m trying to do my part to get more work for all of us.

VSA and Accessibility: What advice would you share with emerging artists with disabilities?

Tim J. Lord: It’s an exciting moment we’re living in where we can really embrace disability as a part of who we are and as an asset. And there are theaters who are really trying to do the good work of considering accessibility as a broad-reaching concept where an accessible theater is a benefit to all, not just a necessary compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act. But challenges remain, obviously, and there are plenty of old-schoolers who refuse to join us here in the 21st Century. I think it’s important to try to hold all our institutions accountable for the role they play when it comes to hiring artists with disabilities, but it’s also important to get work and to keep honing your craft. So make sure you’re also getting work with the companies who are already there for us, where it won’t be a fight to get the accommodations you need—places that have been striving to be more inclusive since before it was “cool” to do so, like The Lark and Queens Theatre in New York and Mixed Blood Theatre in Minneapolis. And if there’s no one near where you live, consider doing your own thing like National Disability Theatre has been doing. Find your people, challenge yourselves to make the best thing you can, and then put it out there. (And I think that’s good advice whether or not you’ve got a disability.)

Follow Tim J. Lord at www.timjlord.com and on Twitter and Instagram @timjlord.