Disabled artists take the stage through Acting Without Boundaries

“What did you do?” his mother asked.

“Oh, the blind kid next to me turned them.”

That’s when Mary Thomas knew her son had found his people, and his niche. Will was 18 then. In high school in Wilmington, he’d taken an acting elective and discovered he had a knack for the craft. But a protracted medical crisis had forced him to withdraw from school.

“It was a dark time in my life,” he recalls. “Then a psychologist asked me, ‘What do you like to do?’ I said, ‘I like to act.’” Through an internet search, Will learned about AWB, a theater company based in Bryn Mawr for adults, teens, and children with disabilities.

“It gave me a purpose for living,” he says. Will, 30, is now an assistant director with AWB; he teaches acting in schools and medical facilities, and he mentors younger members of the company.

Attacks on the disability community

These are hard times for people with disabilities. Thirty-five years after passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act and more than 20 years after AWB was founded, folks with disabilities find themselves in the crosshairs of the Trump administration’s attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, coupled with cuts to the services that disabled folks rely on.

That, says Will, makes AWB even more important, as an agent for change—capable of transforming not only the company’s participants but also their family members, volunteers, and audiences.

“Why can’t you figure this out?”

Mary Thomas, now chair of AWB’s board, says a decade of observing and working with the company has taught her to question every assumption she might have made about a disabled person’s capabilities. It’s also made her less patient with the reasons theater-makers typically offer for not employing more actors with disabilities.

“When [directors or producers] say it’s too complicated to hire actors with disabilities, I think: in a world of creative and imaginative people, why can’t you figure this out?”

“[AWB] brings a sense of visibility,” says the company’s longtime artistic director, Neill Hartley. “Yes, this person’s blind or in a power [wheel]chair; that doesn’t mean they’re not intelligent, bright, rich, beautiful people.”

Patience and innovation

Directing productions that include people with a range of disabilities—those who are non-verbal or who have difficulty speaking; people who use walkers, wheelchairs, or power scooters; folks whose brain injuries make it hard to remember lines; actors too medically fragile to be onstage for long periods—requires patience, flexibility, and innovation, Hartley says.

For a production of The Sound of Music, AWB choreographed a wheelchair ballet; for other plays, Hartley and designers have re-thought set design and staging to work for all the actors involved—for instance, having an assistant onstage to guide a blind actor or placing a doorknob at a height reachable by someone seated in a wheelchair.

“I have high expectations as a professional theater person,” Hartley says. “I don’t dumb the material down. When people say, ‘you can’t,’ I say, ‘I think we can.’”

Launching an advocacy career

That’s the message AWB gave Simon Bonenfant from the time he was four. Now 23, he has acted in many of the company’s productions, from his debut as a peddler in the junior division’s Three Piggy Opera to his starring role last fall in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.

That part demanded strong vocal chops—Bonenfant has trained as a singer—and challenged him to bring more movement and feeling to the role. “There’s a lot of complexity, a lot of emotion” in the role of a favored brother whose siblings resent him so fiercely that they plot his capture and death. “One of the things I worked on is being more expressive throughout the songs,” Bonenfant says.

AWB was not only his entrée to performance; it was the launch pad to Bonenfant’s current work as a consultant for cultural organizations trying to make their offerings more accessible. With Philly Touch Tours, he has trained people to create audio descriptions of exhibits, botanical gardens, and performances; he also chairs the Accessibility Cohort of Greater Philadelphia, a group of more than 50 arts and culture organizations that meets monthly for collaboration and support.

“I’m blind, and I’ve had to do a lot of advocating throughout my life to get where I am,” Bonenfant says. Working with AWB “helped me in being able to express myself clearly and confidently and not be afraid to share that with the world.”

In the current climate of fear and vulnerability, especially among marginalized communities, Bonenfant says, AWB’s work is essential. “It sends a message that we matter, that people with disabilities are part of this country and this world, and we are not going to go away.”

“You need other people”

At a winter rehearsal for the AWB seniors’ fall 2026 show (the company’s junior division will perform The Great Race: The Tale of the Chinese Zodiac in March), Will parked his wheelchair in the center of a room where actors and volunteers gathered at small tables to discuss the characters they’ll play in an adaptation of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.

Maria Ceferatti, AWB’s music director (and Bonenfant’s mother), led the actors through a series of questions: What is your character’s age? Do you have any hobbies? Is there anything you’d like to change about your life?

“What are some of the major themes of A Christmas Carol?” she asked the group. “Family,” someone called out. “Redemption.”

Will took the notion personally. “I think about myself as a young Scrooge. When I joined AWB, I wasn’t the most humble person. I had an ego. I’ve been here 11 years, and there’s something I take with me from each of you. That’s what Scrooge learns—that you need other people.”