Only a day removed from a red-eye journey from Iowa City to Edinburgh, Scotland, Aaron Pang is, in his words, a sleepy baby. Pang and crew did that thing you try to do when traveling: power through a night-turned-day sans sleep, hoping that your circadian rhythm can catch up to the change in time zones. But “the time difference is a bitch,” Pang admits.
Despite the lack of sleep, he’s excited for his visit. Pang’s Falling: A Disabled Love Story, an autobiographical solo show exploring his love and sex life while being disabled, is playing this month at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the world’s largest and arguably most famous performance arts festival.
I had the opportunity to chat with Pang about his journey with Falling, from its inception as a means to perform his MFA thesis in the University of Iowa Nonfiction program, to a play designed to push the buttons of the able-bodied gaze. He also shared some of his potential next steps after the dust settles on his month-long run in Scotland.
During our chat, the first Fringe performance of Falling was less than a handful of days away. “We’re doing some last-minute touches. The festival’s about to get stupid, which will be great.”
In the time between our interview and print time, the run of shows has already received positive coverage, including a review from the Guardian that calls it a “clever comedy,” and a “sweet yet sharp one-man show.”
Pang’s road to Edinburgh was a circuitous one, but always guided by a desire to tell stories. He grew up in the Bay area and ended up working in the tech sector while writing on the side. In his early adulthood, Pang underwent a series of surgeries to remove a benign tumor from his spinal column and woke up unable to walk. After two months “learning to walk for the second time in my life,” he walked out of the hospital with a cane.
“Are you curious about the cane?” he asks the audience in Falling. “Do you want to lean in and ask the question, ‘What happened?’ Because that’s the question. Everybody wants to know what happened, because when they see the cane, the cane is interesting, and they think that there’s a story there. Well, there is a story. There are two stories. One you’ve heard a thousand times, and one you’ve never heard.”
In 2021, he had the chance to perform a personal piece for The Moth, the influential storytelling platform. That same year, Pang was accepted to the University of Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program and used his time there to explore nonfiction writing in all its forms.
“I’m interested in what nonfiction writing can be,” he said. “After my first year [with the program] I went to L.A. for a summer and I did stand up. I’ve never done stand up before. I started writing jokes. I started to do a lot of irreverent things. I would drop my cane while up on stage and make people pick it up. I’d do all sorts of silly things that kind of make people uncomfortable.
“I was like, ‘Oh, I’m really enjoying doing stand up that can still make people laugh, but throw people off-kilter a little bit.’”
After his summer experience in the L.A. comedy scene, Pang described a feeling of “wanting to push people’s buttons, but also tell a more extended story.” Upon his return to Iowa City, this feeling led Pang to Riverside Theatre and their executive director Adam Knight.
“I was really lucky because Adam Knight was friends with someone in my cohort. I had this coffee with Adam and I had no idea what this coffee was going to be about. I said, ‘By the way, I have this piece that I’m writing. I would love to do even just a reading in your theater.’
“I would meet with Adam maybe twice a semester, and we would just check in. By the end of the second year, he said, ‘This sounds great. We’ll put it in the season,’ and I was like, holy shit. That is crazy. I did not expect anything to happen. It ended up being a two-week run at the Riverside Theatre.”
After the Riverside run, Pang performed Falling at a slew of venues and festivals across the country. “I’ve taken it to L.A. twice. Once for the Elysian Theater, which is a big clown stand up improv theater in L.A. I was part of one of their new works festivals called Spaghetti Fest. I went to San Francisco for their PlayGround solo festival. Most recently, I did the Hollywood Fringe for five shows over the course of the month, which was really fantastic and fun. And now I’m here in Edinburgh trying to take a big swing and see if it resonates with people.”
Mild spoilers for Falling: A Disabled Love Story below.
From accounts of the show, both far and wide, it does seem to be resonating with audiences. A big part of that resonance is its ability to play with structure and narrative expectations. The story culminates in a device that hearkens back to the YA novels of yesteryear, in what Pang calls “the choice.” He gives the audience control to decide the ending.
“It seems like a Choose Your Own Adventure,” Pang starts before stopping himself. “It is a Choose Your Own Adventure … and they always choose the same adventure.”
“The two endings are phrased like, ‘You guys don’t want to hear the sad ending. And so sad stories are never fully told. Which means we limit the type of stories that we can tell about disabled people.’ Literally my critique of it goes straight up until the choice. But then I rephrase it. And I go, ‘You get to hear about the continued frustrations of my disabled body, or you get to hear the new definitions of pleasure that I have come to learn in my disabled body.’
“And the moment people hear that, they’re like, ‘Oh, OK, cool.’ Then they immediately choose [the happy ending]. You just need to twist it a little bit. The finger on the scale is barely touching the scale and everyone’s just like, ‘Fuck it. We’re going with the happy ending!’”
You guys don’t want to hear the sad ending. And so sad stories are never fully told. Which means we limit the type of stories that we can tell about disabled people.
Aaron Pang
I stammer in replying to this revelation. It feels at once poignant and frustrating. Maybe not frustrating, but—
“It’s just sad, right?” Pang offers. “There’s something very funny about it. It’s a very ambivalent experience, performing it every night and getting the same result, because it proves my argument, right? The last few shows have been brutal. At Riverside, I think there were enough artists and writers in the audience that about 20 percent of the audience voted for the sad ending. Right now, it’s like, fucking 10 people in an audience of 60-70. And you go, ‘Wow, this is brutal in terms of just how much of a landslide it is.’”
This makes me think of the type of audiences that Pang performs for. I ask what he thinks would happen if he did this show for a disabled audience. Would it be different?
“I think that it would be different but it also really depends on what type of disabled audience. If it’s disabled audiences who are socially conscious, I think they would choose the sad ending. But if it’s newly disabled people, it would become a lot less obvious what they would choose. Because we are susceptible — there’s a point in my show where I talk about how I want the happy ending for myself. Because I live my life as a disabled person, I’m confronted with the fact that I can’t always exactly get the thing I want and therefore I learn to live with the thing that I have. I’m not going to pretend that I’m going to accept everything because ‘Oh, I fully love myself now.’ That’s just a lie we tell ourselves.
“That becomes the interesting dynamic where, if it is a completely disabled audience who all have long-term conditions, I think the results would be quite different … This is what’s exciting about the Fringe at Edinburgh, sometimes the audiences are really small. If you have three people in a room, you just need two irreverent people who hear the message and vote the other way.”
While reading about Pang and his work, I made a note about the concept of the “able-bodied gaze.” I shared with him my reaction to one interview in particular, in which he seemed to push back on the idea of being vulnerable in this performance.
“People are always like, ‘Oh, it’s so vulnerable that you’re telling the story.’ I know that this is still a vulnerable act that I am doing, but… I go to therapy, and I understand my relationship with a lot of this stuff already.”
“It’s not vulnerable for me to tell the story in the way that I’ve intended it to be a show that is meant to be consumed,” he continues. “It is vulnerable to talk to family members about these experiences, right? It’s vulnerable because there’s real stakes there. I don’t give a fuck about the random person who comes that doesn’t like me or the choices I’ve made in the show.
“Those questions about vulnerability come from people who don’t understand the work that it takes to produce art that is confessional, right? The thing I learned is, don’t write about it until you’re ready to write about it. You can write about it when it just happened, but don’t try to write it into something consumable. Sometimes we [writers] have so little to write about that we are so excited to write— I’ve seen this with friends who go and have a hospital stay. You can tell that they’re salivating to write about it immediately. And it’s like, dude, one: chill the fuck out, because you went into the hospital for three days for an appendix burst. Sure, it was painful, but chill. And I’m saying this as someone who’s only been in the hospital for like two months, versus someone who has to fucking do chemo for six months. There’s scales to this so, again, chill, right?”
At one point in the performance, Pang takes off his leg brace and stands up. It’s a moment that elicits awe from the audience, despite how routine a motion it is for Pang.
“But I put it on stage to make you feel the awe, and then try to make you notice you feeling that awe,” he explained. “Another really fun part about having performed it quite a few times is that sometimes people don’t fucking get it. My show is very rhetorical, and the message is very clear. I’m really saying it as clearly as I can. And there are still people who come up to me and are like, ‘You’re such an inspiration. I can’t believe what you’ve overcome.’ And you’re like, damn, like, fucking shit, you know?”
It’s not hard to find similar instances of folks not quite getting the message. That same glowing Guardian review closes by declaring that, “Pang is brave in his willingness to talk about a sex life that deviates from the social norm…”
Falling, directed by Connie Chen, continues its Edinburgh run through Aug. 25. Beyond that, Pang tells me has big hopes for the show, and for himself. (After all, it was just last year that Edinburgh Fringe awardee Richard Gadd saw his one-man show Baby Reindeer adapted into a mega-hit, Emmy- and Peabody-winning Netflix miniseries.)
“This show has a lot of stories that can be turned into TV. I would love to take this story and to turn it into a book of essays and then some sort of thing for the screen, that would be really fun. But I also want to stop working on this piece of IP for a little bit,” he says.
“In the show, I talk about how I fostered dogs during the pandemic for about a year. Seven to nine very chaotic pit bulls. And it was very, very fun. I want to have a dog on stage that I’ve trained and I’m trying to talk to about something. That seems really fun and really chaotic, and has a lot of interesting theatrical mechanics to it that isn’t just like, ‘Oh my God, look at the fun tricks that the dog’s doing.’ It’s like, can you tell a story with a dog as a fellow actor on the stage? That feels very interesting. It seems very, very hard.”
It reminds me of the old TV adage: don’t work with babies or animals.
“Oh, exactly,” Pang responds. “But where does that adage come from? And how can we take it and manipulate it into something emotionally interesting and resonant?”
