2025 DENVER GAZETTE TRUE WEST AWARDS: DAY 3

From film to Broadway, Denver disability artists ‘are living proof that anything is possible’

When five students created Denver’s first disability theater company back in 1989, it was to create performance opportunities they were never going to get at a dumping ground first called – I kid you not – “The Boettcher School for Crippled Children.”

“The idea of any disabled kid pursuing a dream to perform was discouraged back then,” said one of those founders, Katheen Traylor, who did not listen.

But the Gang of Five could not have imagined then who was going to walk through the doors they opened when they founded Phamaly Theatre Company – or what their followers would go out into the world and do on their own.

Here’s what just four Phamaly alumni have accomplished in 2025:

• Actor Jenna Bainbridge made more Broadway history on March 4 when she joined the cast of “Wicked” as Nessarose, marking the first time the role of Elphaba’s wheelchair-using sister has been played by an authentic wheelchair-using actor on Broadway. That’s 19 “abled” Nessaroses ago. (Marissa Bode, who also uses a wheelchair, plays Nessa in two “Wicked” films that have grossed $1.1 billion worldwide.)

• In celebration of Warner Brothers Studios’ 100th anniversary, Regan Linton was chosen one of six filmmakers from around the nation to write, develop and direct 20-minute film adaptations of the studio’s iconic films through a contemporary lens.

Linton chose “Jack and the Beanstalk,” and turned to fellow Phamaly alums Jeremy Palmer to co-write the script and Kalyn Heffernan, MC for the local hip-hop band Wheelchair Sports Camp, to score the film.

Linton insisted that her film be made in Colorado, which generated union-scale employment for 26 crew and 14 cast members – including 11 disabled actors. (The film, part of a collection called “Reframed: Next Gen Narratives,” dropped in January and is still streamable on HBO.)

• Palmer, meanwhile, is teaching screenwriting at the University of Southern California while riding high from the 2024 release of his own feature film screenwriting debut: “Detained” (now streaming on Prime Video and AppleTV.)

• In March, Linton co-created and performed in a play called “The Menagerist” as a guest artist with Denver’s all-original Buntport Theater Company. “The Menagerist” comically articulated Linton’s frustrations with revered playwright Tennessee Williams’ take on Laura Wingfield in his classic play “The Glass Menagerie.”

And Linton was just getting started. In June, she was in New York taking part in a workshop production of “Titus Andronicus” at the Public Theatre (think birthplace of “Hamilton”) with other deaf and disabled artists. And in October, the vaunted Actors Theatre of Louisville staged the world premiere of a new immersive play written by and starring Linton called “​​FDR’s Very Happy Hour.”

“The simplest way to describe it is that it’s a happy hour with a dead president,” Linton said with a laugh. And that dead president is her (playing FDR). “But it’s also a transformative, interactive attempt to get us to start talking to each other again by using humor and history to explore both FDR’s legacy and our current political climate.”

It was just announced that Linton will next take FDR to Broadway’s Jerry Orbach Theatre for three performances Jan. 9-11 as part of a national conference called he APAP|NYC. That’s the Association of Performing Arts Professionals’ annual gathering in New York City that draws booking agents and presenters looking to book promising new shows.

• Then there is Jason Dorwart, a published author whose four advanced degrees include a Ph.D. in Critical Disability Theory and a law degree from the University of Denver. He is Assistant Professor of Global Theater Studies at Hong Kong Baptist University, where he teaches theater history, disability studies, dramatic literature, improv comedy, directing and dramaturgy.

Talk about an alumni network.

“I think the takeaway here is that anything is possible – and these four are living proof of that,” said Phamaly Artistic Director Ben Ranaan. 

“When the five founders of Phamaly started this amazing company, they came to realize they weren’t the only five who wanted an opportunity to perform. So they said, ‘OK, I guess we can do that.’ What’s changed in the past couple of years, I think, is that it’s not just the actors who want to perform – the world wants to see them perform, too. So the mission has grown to bringing more people into the world of disabled theater.

Palmer, who grew up in Parker and attended Chaparral High School, was born with one lung and multiple heart defects. Linton, a graduate of Denver East High School, was paralyzed in a car collision while in college and lives with a T-4 complete spinal cord injury. Dorwart, a  graduate of Bear Creek High School, is a quadriplegic from a spinal cord injury in 2000. All three have at least one master’s degree. Bainbridge, a graduate of Castle View High School in Castle Rock and the University of Denver’s Lamont School of Music, has been partially paralyzed from the waist down since a spinal injury at 18 months old.

Hasn’t stopped any of them.

Local audiences will fondly remember them from dozens of Phamaly productions, just a few being: Bainbridge as Belle in “Beauty and the Beast”; Linton as a haunting Aldonza in “Man of La Mancha”; Palmer as the favorite son in “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat”; Dorwart as tough-love father Ferris Layman in “The Diviners.”

All four might have gotten exactly where they were destined to go on their own. But Phamaly made sure they didn’t have to.

“Phamaly was the seed. It was the way in,” Linton said. “Yes, there’s a whole world since then that I have continued to move into, and I’ve carried myself and pushed myself to each next step. But if Phamaly hadn’t shown me that it was possible, I don’t know that I would’ve kept going in that direction.”

Bainbridge’s latest Broadway history comes after last year’s history, when she was cast in the Broadway musical “Suffs.” That made Bainbridge the first wheelchair user to originate a role in a Broadway musical – ever. She later recorded a greeting for audiences who attended Phamaly’s staging of “A Chorus Line” back in Denver. In it, she said (to wild applause): “To all those who still believe that a disabled actor can’t possibly act, sing and dance at the level of professional theater: Do us all a favor and (bleep) off.”

That Linton parlayed her Warner Brothers commission into a collaboration with fellow Phamaly alum Palmer is a point of particular pride for the company.

“Phamaly is where we met in 2005,” she said. “That’s where we learned to collaborate with each other and discovered our similarly wonky senses of humor. When I think about artists I want to collaborate with, it’s often the people who have a slightly askew vision of the world that makes them uniquely creative. I think Jeremy and I just get each other.”

Linton knew the issue she wanted her workplace comedy to address: That it is somehow frustratingly still legal for some employers to pay people with disabilities less than minimum wage. She asked Palmer, an actual teacher of the art of screenwriting, to co-write, help with cinematic structure, punch up the dialogue and navigate notes from the studio.

“And I said yes,” Palmer deadpanned. “That was pretty much of a no-brainer. But also, this was  an opportunity to highlight an issue that doesn’t get talked about much on the disability-rights spectrum. I definitely feel like what we came up with is an entertaining spin on that issue, while also paying homage to the source material.”

Palmer sees the “Beanstalk” film project as a powerful example of two artists seeing through the original mission of the Phamaly founders “as far as opening doors for people with disabilities and giving them a wider platform that they haven’t had before,” he said.

It’s funny – maybe the right word there is “embarrassing” – to think that, 15 years ago, people like me were measuring the success and impact of Phamaly in much more microscopic terms. Back then, real progress meant other area theater companies were finally starting to cast accomplished Phamaly actors for roles in their own shows that had everything to do with their talent and nothing to do with their disabilities.  

Progress? Yes. But were we all underestimating what the greater mission of Phamaly could be about?

“I think as humans, we are conditioned to underestimate ourselves, because we have to be humble, and we always have to be grateful, and we have to constantly ‘apologize’ in a way for our talent,” Ranaan said. “One thing I am really trying to instill in this new generation of Phamaly actors is this idea that ‘I don’t have to apologize for myself in this world,’ and ‘I don’t have to apologize for myself on stage.’

“The minute you start believing that as a disabled artist, then the world is going to start believing it, too. And once you believe that, hey, you belong – whether that is on the Miners Alley stage, or the Arvada Center stage or on a Broadway stage – you belong.

“That’s when you walk into an audition room and people go, ‘Oh, this person is here with a purpose – and not an apology.’”

Note: The Denver Gazette True West Awards, now in their 25th and final year, began as the Denver Post Ovation Awards in 2001. Denver Gazette Senior Arts Journalist John Moore celebrates the Colorado theater community throughout December by revisiting 30 good stories from the past year without categories or nominations.

Stream ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’

• The easiest way to find “Jack and the Beanstalk” on HBO is to search for the series’ overall title: “Reframed: Next Gen Narratives.”

• If you don’t have a subscription to Max, you can sign up for $9.99 and cancel at any time.

• The other adapted titles in the Warner Brothers series include “A Star is Born,” “The Adventures of Robin Hood” and “Calamity Jane.”

More True West Awards coverage:

• 2025 True West Awards, Day 1: Matt Zambrano

• Day 2: Rattlebrain is tying up ‘Santa’s Big Red Sack’

• Jenna Bainbidge will make more Broadway history with ‘Wicked’

• Buntport Theater buys the house

• At Buntport Theater, the ‘Glass’ is more than half-funny

• Mark Ragan and Jessica Robblee: The 2024 Colorado Theatre People of the Year