Winnipeg Fringe Festival show offering audiences a glimpse into the experience of living with disabilities

A show featured in the Winnipeg Fringe Festival is putting experiences of those living with disabilities front and center. The show — How I Met My First Neurodivergent Friend — offering opportunities on and offstage, as it’s produced by a cast and crew that themselves live with disabilities.

Adam Schwartz has been doing comedy for over a decade. His first show at the Fringe Festival was back in 2014 and he has been participating every year since then.

“I’m thrilled by getting all these opportunities to put on my shows at fringe,” said Schwartz. “Without being autistic and different, I wouldn’t have had this opportunity to create this community.”

Last year, Schwartz co-produced a show called Neurohilarity which featured neurodiverse comics, like himself. This year, in addition to Neurohilarity, he is fronting a new fringe show titled How I Met My First Neurodivergent Friend – a comedic storytelling show featuring an autistic cast and crew.

“It teaches people about autism and neurodiversity, not through telling people that they should be kinder, but how I should have been kinder and how I missed out on opportunities to make awesome and amazing friends.”

Schwartz says growing up, he separated himself from people who were different because he wanted to fit in, but realized it had the opposite effect on him. With this production, he wants to show that it’s okay to be different.

“The best way of educating people about disability and being neurodivergent is through humour because if you try to approach it head-on, people get their guard up. But if you approach it indirectly through humour, you’re able to connect with a lot more people.”

In this year’s festival, there are 143 shows with more than 1200 performances. Festival Manager Tori Popp says anyone can participate and do any kind of show, which offers a wide range of genres of shows throughout the festival.

“The Winnipeg Fringe is like the perfect place to put diversity in shows,” said Popp. “We have a lot of shows that centre around queerness, or trans rights, or neurodivergence. It’s just a great way to be able to get that information out to audiences in plays that have never been produced before.”

Popp says the festival line up offers plenty of opportunities to learn new things.

“If you’ve never seen a trans performer before (for example), coming to one of their shows, you will be well educated in what their life is like.”

Schwartz is looking forward to connecting with audiences in 15 shows throughout the festival, which runs until July 30th.

“I feel like I have been able to make a difference by being able to help people and hopefully people who were going through the same things I was going trough as a child and a teenager and hopefully they won’t go through the same feelings of being alone like I did.”