UNCSA alumnus Gregg Mozgala, after years of performing on some of Off-Broadway’s finest stages, is enjoying a well-earned banner year. He recently completed a national tour playing the title character in “Teenage Dick,” a modern take on Shakespeare’s “Richard III” centered on the experience of a high school student with cerebral palsy, and this summer he appeared in “Richard III” itself, alongside film and theater star Danai Gurira, in the Public Theater’s revered Shakespeare in the Park season. This fall he will cap off the year with his Broadway debut in Martyna Majok’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Cost of Living,” reprising the leading role he performed in the play’s premiere at Manhattan Theatre Club in 2018.

Gregg can credit that success not only to his acting but also his producing skills. In 2012, determined to make disability and people with disabilities more visible on the nation’s stages, he founded The Apothetae, a New York-based theater company dedicated to the production of works that explore and illuminate the disabled experience. The Apothetae has developed several new plays and adaptations from and with both established and up-and-coming artists — disabled and non-disabled, Deaf and hearing — and it is through The Apothetae’s commissioning program that playwright Mike Lew completed “Teenage Dick.”

In this interview with Pier Carlo Talenti, Gregg describes how an understanding of his cultural lineage as a disabled performer led him to create a company that celebrates displaying disabled bodies and their stories with unassailable authenticity.

http://www.greggmozgala.com/

http://www.theapothetae.org/