As I said in my review of Moonchild, Matteo Esposito had contacted me about watching and reviewing his plays. A reading of Sorting It Out is available from the Online Play Reading Group at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8fEDk32mh4.

Like Moonchild, Esposito’s Sorting It Out is a piece of disability theatre, but I think this play is more thematically complex, it part because we get more action to dramatize elements of the autistic experience and in part because we get a wider range of perspectives on the role of people with disabilities in society. The play begins with Ed (Evan Schweitzer) and his father Frank (Caius Wallen) leaving the doctor’s office—Ed potentially has some kind of disease, but the test results aren’t back yet. On the way home, Frank decides they’re going to stop off at the home of his friend Nick (read by Esposito himself in the Online Play Reading Group production), who has autism. Nick and his homemaker Bob (Adam Jacques) prepare some coffee and cookies. When Frank and Ed arrive, Ed is incredibly rude to Nick, showing no compassion and even questioning his disability. Nick repeatedly stims—self-stimulates—with a string, which enrages Ed even further. Tensions rise, and at the climax, Ed even goes so far as to directly insult Nick, which leads Nick to head banging—an autistic behavior in which the person repeatedly hits themselves in the head. Bob tries to calm Nick, which Frank grabs Ed to stop him attaching Nick after Nick accidentally hits Ed. Then Ed’s phone rings. The conflict is broken as Ed learns that he’s been diagnosed with severe multiple sclerosis—a debilitating condition which can cause severe pain, sensory issues, and neurological degeneration. In the following scenes, Ed, now relying on a walker, visits Nick again to apologize for his callous behavior. He even brings Nick a blue string as a peace offering. Blue is a color of autism awareness, and the string is how Nick stims. Nick tells Ed about how he had once felt helpless and hopeless, until he met Bob, who was kind and supportive. Nick promises Ed that if he ever needs someone to be supportive, to be kind, that he can come to Nick.

One of the most engaging things about this play is the complexity of Ed’s character. While we know that he likely has some kind of medical issue, he is such a hard character to like throughout much of the play because he’s rude, impatient, and downright nasty to Nick—while Nick, for his part, is very kind and tries to be hospitable by offering coffee and cookies, which Ed takes as an insult. It’s easy to dislike Ed as he becomes increasingly hostile to Nick, seemingly over unimportant things that Nick has little ability to manage. However, Esposito doesn’t just give us a rude villain, he gives us a character whose own anxiety about his potential illness poisons him against Nick. When we learn, toward the end of the play, that Ed has severe multiple sclerosis, his actions become much more comprehensible. He projected his own fear of being disabled outward into aggressiveness toward Nick—Ed’s own anxiety about being unable to do things for himself, or struggling against his own body and mind color his anger toward Nick for having autism.

This is, ultimately, a redemption story. Ed is redeemed at the end of the play, as he comes to accept disability, both his own and Nick’s. And he is redeemed by Nick’s kindness and willingness to provide support.