The Power of Words. Warwick native pens himself a life in the theater

8.30.98
Warwick native pens himself a life in the theater
By ELLEN LIBERMAN
Journal Staff Writer

      NEW YORK — It is John Belluso's fate to be noticed.
       Even in New York City, home to every human variation, a man in a wheelchair draws stares.
       The simple act of boarding the M-15 bus attests to this. The driver shifts into park and heads down the aisle for the switch that operates the wheelchair lift. The back doors part like curtains. For a few moments, Belluso is alone on a curbside stage that rises, then retreats into the body of the bus. The working women and the old men who don't yet need these ministrations, wait to board by the front door and watch.
       Every day, the pile of public moments grows. And in them, Belluso finds the material for another Act I or another character to populate his plays, unsparing on the subject of disability and society's perception of the disabled.
       "There's something very theatrical about disability," 28-year-old Belluso explains. "My plays are my chance to say, 'You've stared at me and now I'm going to stare at you and why you're staring at me.'"
       The maturing body of work by this high school dropout from Warwick's Oakland Beach has won several play-writing prizes as it has caught the attention of contemporary theater's successes such as Tony Kushner, author of the acclaimed Angels in America.
       "I think he's a wonderful writer, a very exciting writer," says Kushner, Belluso's mentor from New York University.
       Chris Smith, who this spring directed Belluso's one-act play Knot Stew, starring Kyra Sedgewick, for the Manhattan Ensemble Studio Theater, calls him "a major emerging playwright."
       This fall, Belluso's work will have its biggest venue yet. Last month, he won the Very Special Arts Playwright Discovery Award, a national competition for disabled artists. The prize is $2,500 and a Kennedy Center production. Belluso's Gretty Good Time will be staged Oct. 23-30 in Washington, D.C.

       AT ONE TIME, Sally Belluso's biggest fear was that her only son wouldn't even emerge into adulthood.
       When he was 3 years old, doctors diagnosed him with Duchenne's Muscular Dystrophy, a progressive, fatal form of the disease. At 17, John went from a waddling gait to a walker to a wheelchair. But then, his deterioration seemed to stop.
       During an annual physical at Boston's Children's Hospital, an older doctor passing by Belluso's posted x-ray immediately recognized that Belluso had been misdiagnosed. He identified the teen's condition as Engleman-Camurdrie Syndrome, a rare bone disorder that limits muscle strength.
       John Belluso would live. Now his mother's biggest worry was: how would he live?
       IQ tests indicated that John was extremely intelligent. But his high school grades were dismal. Tallying up the failed courses and unearned credits, Belluso's guidance counselor at Warwick Veterans Memorial High School informed him that he would have to repeat the 11th grade. Belluso quit school.
       Six months later, he earned his high school equivalency diploma and signed up for a philosophy class at the Community College of Rhode Island. John went out occasionally with friends, but his world was small. His mother toyed with setting up John, a self-described "comic book nerd," in his own comic book store business.
       "I felt desperate," she recalled. "He didn't seem to have any interests. I was so worried. I thought, 'Is he going to sit in front of the TV in a wheelchair all his life?' "
       That picture troubled Sally Belluso. She is a soft-spoken woman, whose outwardly mild manner masks a determination that propelled her into the world despite her own handicap and helped her raise children -- Sandra, Diane and John -- alone after divorcing Dominic Belluso in 1972.
       Although an accident at birth completely disabled Sally's right arm, she learned to type with one hand and traveled to the Middle East, the Far East and Europe as a civilian secretary for the U.S. Army.
       Initially, she was devastated by John's disability.
       "Having lived with a handicap all my life, I thought, 'Oh no, not one of my kids.' "

       TODAY, BELLUSO has no time for television nor room for a TV set in the tiny apartment he shares with two roommates.
       His room is decorated in a style he describes as "early West Warwick Salvation Army." A lamp mounted to the ceramic head of a woman illuminates the nubby olive couch. Paperbacks level the bookcase.
       He lives on 29th Street off Second Avenue, way south of the East Side's sleek upper reaches. Since he graduated from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, in 1996, Belluso has survived on his modest monthly Social Security check. He earns a little from reading manuscripts for Fine Line Features, a film company. The rest of the time, Belluso writes at a tiny desk, undisturbed by the pigeons that flap and coo in the dingy courtyard outside.
       After seven years, Belluso has been in New York long enough to slough off the anxiety that shrouded his move from the Bellusos' Cowesett apartment complex to these cracked and crowded streets.
       He is much more at home in Manhattan than he might ever be in his hometown. He knows the sneaky steepness of streets that other pedestrians perceive as pancake-flat. On the sidewalk, throngs he once feared now flow around his steel-frame wheelchair like a river slipping past a stone. There is always someone to help him mount a steep curb.
       It's more than a world away from his sheltered life in Rhode Island. There, he lived in the pages of Herman Melville's Moby Dick and REM's soulful rock. Since his disability came on gradually, he had always been in regular classrooms in school. He wasn't so much scarred by schoolyard taunts, as he was utterly detached.
       "Looking back on it now, I think I was really bored with school," Belluso says. "And there was that feeling of being separate and distant. You always have a sense of otherness."
       As he drifts back to that time, the years of defensive non-feeling seem knit into his expression. His features are a boy's, centered on a moon face. Heavy-lidded eyes make him look sleepy behind crooked, black-framed glasses. Belluso's movements are slow, almost languorous, as though he were moving through water.
       But his look brightens as he recalls the two hours that changed everything.
       As part of a college course assignment, a friend had to attend Trinity Repertory Company's production of Julius Caesar. Belluso tagged along.
       His friend had no enthusiasm for Shakespeare, but Belluso was awestruck.
       "I still remember the production of it. It was the most alive form of art I had ever seen," he says. "The excitement, the palpable excitement of it. To see this empty space come alive with energy. By the second act, I had decided this is something I want to be involved with, but I didn't know how."
       Belluso signed up for some theater courses at CCRI. He thought he'd act in plays or stage-manage them. But he was encouraged to write plays by a professor who gushed over the three-page scene Belluso had written for an Introduction to Theater course.
       He was elated to discover during a college fair that New York University offered a bachelor's degree in play-writing. Despite Belluso's pathetic high school record, he was accepted into the program on the strength of his stellar college grades and his writing samples.

       AT NYU, BELLUSO blossomed, producing six one-act and three full-length works. As a senior in 1995, he won the John Golden Playwriting Prize and at his master's degree graduation ceremony a year later, the faculty awarded him the Dramatic Writing Program's 1996 Graduate Playwriting Award. He was short-listed for the 1996 Manhattan Theater Club Playwriting Fellowship and the 1997 Princess Grace Playwriting Award. He recently won a month-long artist's residency at the (Edna Saint Vincent) Millay Artist's Colony, in Austerlitz, New York, to work on the new play he is researching, now titled The Body of Bourne, about Randolph Bourne, a turn-of-the-century writer and social critic who was disabled.
       His plays are supernovas: characters explode, plots take stomach-churning turns, time swings back and forth. At the core of each work, the disabled character's internal feeling of wholeness is at odds with an imperfect body. In Knot Stew, which last fall won the Moving Arts Theater Premier One-Act competition, a pregnant woman takes her smoldering cigarette and jams it in her belly, popping the balloon underneath her shirt. Her father, who lost his legs in an auto accident, appears as his recently mangled 15-year-old self.
       Gretty Good Time, originally a workshop production at the Los Angeles Mark Taper Forum, weaves the story of a polio-stricken woman's internal debate on suicide with a history lesson on the Hiroshima Maidens Project. This American act of contrition brought 25 disfigured victims of the World War II nuclear bombing to New York's Mount Sinai Hospital for free surgical treatment.
       The theater has always been littered with disabled characters, Belluso says, ticking off a few: The Glass Menagerie, Sunrise at Campobello, Richard III, My Left Foot, Children of a Lesser God. But the characters, more often than not, are created by writers who have never struggled with physical handicaps. Their creations tend to be made of cardboard, propped up before the audience as a victim or an inspiration.
       Belluso, a former Muscular Dystrophy Association Jerry's Kid, has found himself a reluctant player in these roles. Kindly bus drivers still ruffle his hair sometimes -- a "there-you-go-slugger" gesture normally reserved for little boys. His favorite euphemism for the disabled is "handicapable."
       "There's a lot of fear in the able-bodied community. We all have the potential of becoming disabled and if we live long enough, we will. It's easier to contain the disability if I'm treated as a child," Belluso says. "(My work's) really about taking what I've been given and turning that around."

       VICTORIA LEWIS directs the Mark Taper Forum's Other Voices program, a new-play development program for writers with disabilities. From the first Belluso script she read, Lewis was hooked.
       Lewis invited Belluso to Los Angeles last summer for a two-week workshop. He returned in November for a reading of Gretty Good Time as part of the Forum's tenth annual New Works Festival, which showcases new playwrights selected from all of its development programs. Belluso was invited back recently to moderate a panel discussion about images of the Disabled in Literature and Theater.
       "I was thrilled. I felt he had real goods," said Lewis, who was once passed over for acting jobs because of her own withered leg. "He was speaking out of a deep understanding of disability. He wasn't frightened or ashamed and trying to fix it. John does a brilliant job of explaining that word special and creating disabled characters who are both good and bad, noble and ignoble, poetic and prosaic."

       ON A RAINY Friday night, a group of Belluso's former NYU classmates unveil their production of Challenger, his first full-length work. They had cobbled together several thousands of dollars in -- literally -- Mom and Pop grants and mounted it on the stage of Third Eye Rep, an auditorium in a New Age spiritual and healing center.
       The door manages to block out the droning chants elsewhere in the complex but the scent of sandalwood snakes through the cracks. Challenger is on full boil, the chaotic story of four deranged siblings and their attempt to hire a hit man to murder the father in Las Vegas.
       The performance is muddled and noisy, but the audience of well-wishers and relatives applauds enthusiastically. Chris Smith, who has been trying to develop Belluso's talent as part of the Manhattan Ensemble Theater's Youngbloods playwright's program, sits in the second row.
       Smith concedes "John's got a long way to go before he gets to Broadway."
       Still, Smith believes in Belluso's talent. He's got "voice," Smith says. It's what directors, agents and producers look for when scouting The Next Big Thing. Smith has pushed Belluso into associations and collaborations with more established theater people. It's led to a collaboration with legendary director Joseph Chaikin. Belluso will write a play that Chaikin will direct, working with a company of disabled actors.
       "I hope he gets produced," says Lewis of the Mark Taper Forum. "His work needs not to be read in rooms. But with the attacks on the National Endowment for the Arts, nonprofit theaters are forced to become more commercial and conventional to make money. It's a hard time to be experimental. On the other hand, I think that John is finding and will find allies who will see to it that he finds a stage."
       In these invitations and small-scale productions are the seeds of a full-time career as a playwright. With each accomplishment, it seems to be an attainable goal, Belluso says.
       The Joe Chaikin project is picking up steam. Next month, rehearsals for the Kennedy Center production of Gretty Good Time begin, directed by Paul Douglas Michnewicz, who often works with the Very Special Arts program. On Oct. 26, Belluso will take center stage at the awards ceremony and reception.
       "It's going to be nice, after the Hare Krishna rep company or whatever it was," he says with a low giggle.
       Even if the big break doesn't come, Sally Belluso is grateful for her youngest child's transformation.
       "It's a testament to the human will," she says. "That they can overcome their handicaps when they have a goal for themselves."
       That would be the last thing John Belluso would write about. He doesn't want to "overcome his handicap." He just wants to be the guy who heads off into the sunset with his sweetheart.
       "You never see a sexy, naked disabled person," Belluso said. "That's my goal in the theater."

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