By Kelsey Maurine Brickl
A Broadway wardrobe professional recently used social media to publish an important, detailed account of the often thankless work that happens after the curtain comes down. In that account, the professional pointed out that wardrobe staff may know which guests are expected before the performer does. They establish where the performer wants to receive each person, determine how much time is available, and facilitate the visits backstage.
The professional who described this work has done nothing wrong. The post was generous, informative, and useful. It also documented an access problem that Broadway rarely acknowledges. The industry has built an ordinary system for bringing invited guests backstage while leaving many non-ambulatory wheelchair users unable to enter the places where those visits occur.
This exclusion reaches far beyond a missed social visit or one that briefly engages in the informal networking upon which so many careers in theatre thrive, flourish, or flounder.
Backstage is a workplace. Dressing rooms, wardrobe rooms, wings, green rooms, rehearsal rooms, production offices, interview locations, backstage toilets, and connecting corridors are where theatre professionals perform their jobs and develop professional relationships. Critics and journalists conduct interviews. Designers confer with performers and colleagues. Producers, writers, directors, technicians, makeup artists, donors, executives, and invited industry guests meet one another there. Informal conversations that begin backstage can lead to employment, coverage, collaboration, investment, and future productions.
An ambulatory professional may be invited into that working environment as a routine matter. A non-ambulatory wheelchair user who cannot transfer or climb stairs may be excluded before anyone considers their qualifications.
Too often, we also see Disabled people used as tokens to show that the theatre industry is trying to be “inclusive.” A Blind person is hired. An ambulatory wheelchair user who can use a few stairs is cast in a production. But this physical pattern is familiar, emotionally painful, and profesionally exclusive.
A theatre may provide wheelchair seating in the auditorium while maintaining backstage routes that depend upon multiple flights of stairs. An accessible symbol near one entrance may lead to a public area without reaching the dressing rooms. A lift may serve certain floors while leaving wardrobe rooms, toilets, rehearsal areas, or the stage itself inaccessible. Staff may know how to receive a wheelchair-using audience member and have no operational plan for a wheelchair-using employee, critic, designer, performer, or invited professional.
Audience access cannot stand in for professional access. A person’s ability to watch a Broadway production establishes nothing about whether that person can work on it.
Theatre owners frequently invoke the age of Broadway buildings as though history itself installed every remaining barrier and now forbids its removal. Historic structures do create real engineering constraints. They also undergo continual alterations for automation, sound, lighting, premium hospitality, security, branding, production effects, and commercial priorities. The Americans with Disabilities Act contains specific accessibility rules for existing and qualified historic buildings; historic status does not create a blanket exemption from accessibility obligations. The governing questions concern what can be made accessible and what alternatives must be developed, rather than whether the building is old enough to end the discussion.
Broadway has had decades to examine these routes. Near-total exclusion is the result.
Disability is not a contest, but the consequences are especially stark for non-ambulatory wheelchair users. Someone who can walk briefly, transfer, or climb several stairs with assistance may be offered an improvised route and be able to use it. That solution has no meaning for a person who cannot physically leave a power or manual wheelchair. Carrying the person is dangerous, degrading, and frequently impossible. Carrying a complex power wheelchair is generally impossible.
An employment system that quietly depends upon workers being liftable still systematically excludes wheelchair users, and that isn’t just wrong. It’s usually not lawful.
Wardrobe labor makes the scale of the problem particularly visible. IATSE Local 764 describes itself as the union representing wardrobe workers in film, television, and live performance in the New York area, including Broadway. Its members perform dressing, costume construction, maintenance, alterations, problem-solving, and other work requiring movement throughout production spaces. Local 764 therefore has an institutional reason to determine whether non-ambulatory wheelchair users can enter the profession, qualify for membership through available work, reach their assigned workplaces, use backstage toilets, evacuate safely, and perform jobs without depending upon colleagues to overcome permanent architectural barriers.
These are labor questions. They belong in discussions about collective bargaining, workplace safety, employer obligations, training, job assignments, building alterations, and contracts. A union committed to the power and dignity of workers should know how many workplaces covered by its agreements are inaccessible to non-ambulatory members and prospective members. It should know what happens when a qualified wardrobe professional uses a wheelchair and cannot reach the wardrobe room.
The Broadway League and theatre owners have corresponding responsibilities. Accessible professional routes cannot be created through optimism at the moment a Disabled worker arrives. Each theatre needs an accurate access audit covering employee entrances, stage access, dressing rooms, wardrobe and makeup facilities, rehearsal and meeting rooms, toilets, lifts, refuge areas, evacuation procedures, and every route connecting them. Productions and unions need that information before recruitment, hiring, assignment, or professional visits occur.
Broadway often speaks proudly about representation. Representation onstage cannot excuse exclusion behind it. Casting a Disabled performer while requiring wheelchair-using workers and professionals to remain outside the ordinary backstage life of the production leaves the institution structurally unchanged.
Ghost Light Access documents theatre as a workplace as well as a place of public accommodation. The important disability rights compliance and equality access work includes audience seating and stage-door crowd management, but the inquiry continues through the doors the public rarely sees. Who can enter? Which floors can they reach? Where can they work? Can they use a toilet? Can they evacuate? Can they participate in the professional and social exchanges the industry already facilitates for others?
Broadway already possesses the labor, technical knowledge, money, and operational sophistication required to address complex production problems every day. Non-ambulatory wheelchair users should no longer be treated as the one problem the industry is permitted to leave unsolved.