A Curious Incident of Watching a Play about Autism with my Autistic Kid

Last week, my youngest suggested we see a high school play, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, because a friend of hers was in it. I had read the 2003 book when it came out, and I had forgotten most of the story. I remember it started with a bit of a mystery about who killed a dog, but I had forgotten much of the rest. Imagine my surprise when I was handed a flyer on “Neurodivergency” along with the program. Both kids who came with me identify as neurodivergent, one with ADHD and the other on the autism spectrum.

As we took our seats and my memories of the book started flooding back, I reflected on how much my life had changed since I read it. The main character and narrator is on the autism spectrum, and at the time I read the book, I knew almost nothing about autism. Growing up, I had a neighbor whose daughter was on the spectrum and was non-verbal. She was generally very wild, but when I took out my trumpet, she would stop in her tracks and just look at me playing. That, and Rain Man, were the extent of my knowledge about autism when the book came out.

Our kid was born two years later, and it was another seven years before we received an official diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder (although Sensory Processing Disorder was diagnosed a few years earlier). Fast-forward, as I’m writing, they are turning 21 in two days. They (their preferred pronoun) were always mainstreamed in school, though with an IEP, and eventually went to a twice-exceptional program at a midwestern university. I’m biased as a father, but I believe they are smarter than I am and have a bigger heart than mine.

My kid is also very attuned to the complexity of the portrayals of neurodivergence in popular culture, and they have taught me a thing or two about the subject. (I even wrote this blog post about the subject.) As the expression goes, “If you know one autistic person, you know one autistic person.” You can’t generalize about autistic people, just as you can’t with any type of person. It’s a “spectrum” because it spans a range of behaviors, capabilities, etc. And yet, time and again, the media portrays autistic people as being clueless about social cues, overly literal (and unable to understand irony or sarcasm), clumsy, difficult to communicate with, unemotional, and often, underneath it all, brilliant.

So as I sat down next to my autistic kid, I wondered whether they would enjoy the play or find parts of it offensive or reductive. That’s generally how they’ve responded to some other portrayals, such as TV’s The Good Doctor, sometimes jokingly imitating the main character by yelling, “I AM A DOCTOR!”

It also didn’t help that the staging, though entertaining, portrayed the main character, Christopher, as having many different voices in his head. Alongside Christopher, his parents, and a few other characters, Christopher was surrounded by six or eight other performers who often represented an expansion of Christopher’s consciousness. For example, when a noise grew too loud, or Christopher couldn’t deal with a situation, they and Christopher would lie on the ground together, curl up in fetal positions, and cover their ears all at the same time. I don’t know if this staging was based on the original version of the play or something introduced by the director (who was also my daughter’s English teacher). Either way, I wondered whether this view of more “voices in one’s head” was less representative of autism and more of schizophrenia.

Christopher was a high school student attending a special school and preparing for an A-Level Mathematics exam, a special test in Great Britain (where the play takes place). He also said that nobody at his school had ever taken that test before. I smiled, because (not-so-humble brag) my kid was invited to take a special math test at their high school that hadn’t been taken by anybody in eight years. So in this sense, the “brilliant” stereotype, at least in certain areas of study, held true.

Throughout the play, my kid was stimming in ways that Christopher never did. They shook their legs a lot, held onto the play’s program, and crumpled it from time to time. It didn’t bother anyone around them, but I occasionally suggested they put the program away. At other times, they covered their face. It wasn’t until the intermission that I asked, “Are you enjoying this?” Their response was a simple but enthusiastic “yes.” I was glad, as I had been concerned throughout.

When the play ended, the audience stood and gave a standing ovation, so loud that my kid had to put their hands over their ears, just like Christopher. They asked if they could leave. But then the room quieted down, and there was somewhat of an encore. The crew came out to join the cast, and the cast and crew took turns reciting complex math problems like they were Christopher’s character. It was fun and amusing, and some of them twirled or danced during parts of it. Then, when it finally ended, the loud applause returned. My kid asked if they could leave, and I obviously said, “Sure.” When we met them outside the high school auditorium, they said several of the math problems mentioned weren’t very complicated…but they were for me.

I found the book in the house when we got home and poked around in it a bit. All in all, if you have a chance to see this play or read the book, both are very entertaining. While Christopher’s character was sometimes stereotypical, he was realistic and always a good soul with good intentions.

No matter what you might feel about depictions of neurodivergence in the media, sometimes you just have to recognize that fictional characters are one person, and if you know one fictional autistic person, you know one fictional autistic person.