The disabled take the stage.

Like many professional actors, Randy Sands dresses flamboyantly. The day I stand outside with him, chatting while he smokes a cigarette, he is wearing a brightly colored scarf on his head, topped by a baseball cap. A stocky man of thirty, he sports a red belt with metal studs, sunglasses, and twelve colored armbands, emblazoned with slogans ranging from "Courage Faith Love" to "Drive Out the Bush Administration."

Inside, Sands has a little trouble with some lines in a new play he is rehearsing. Told that his character is that of a plumber who is also a rap artist, Sands asks for "two turntables and a microphone." He is confused when he's told to do his faux-scratch routine on the back of the plumber's snake he's carrying. Finally, staff member Moritz Burnard comes in and stands next to Sands, rapping with him. Burnard's job title is artistic associate, though he's really part director and part job coach. Sands is a professional actor with a cognitive disability, and he and Burnard work together at the Encore Studio for the Performing Arts in Madison, Wisconsin.

Just as the often-offensive Farrelly brothers are winning unlikely praise from groups such as the American Association of People with Disabilities for utilizing actors with disabilities in the recently released The Ringer, a growing number of theater companies are employing disabled actors.

Interact Center for the Visual and Performing Arts was founded in Minneapolis in 1992. It began solely as a theater company, but the group expanded to include a gallery space in 1996. It produces two original plays a year and has toured both nationally and internationally. Its actors are paid as independent contractors for time spent in rehearsal and performance.

Former Executive Director Gregory Stavrou estimates that about 97 percent of the people who appear onstage in the center's plays have disabilities, including developmental disabilities, traumatic brain injuries, physical disabilities, and mental illness. Stavrou feels it is important to incorporate the experiences of individuals who are culturally marginalized. "They have important perspectives that need to be part of the dialogue," he says.

Ultimately, working with actors who have disabilities isn't that much different from working with their nondisabled colleagues, Stavrou says.

"All actors have strengths and weaknesses," he reflects, "and it's the responsibility of a good director to work with those strengths and weaknesses so the actors can grow."

Marcy Weiland had some trepidation the first time she went to see an Encore show. "I expected it would be consciousness raising and people doing things not as well as other people could do them," remembers Weiland, a Madison theater staple and former artistic director of the independent Mercury Players Theatre. She confesses that she anticipated "sort of a Special Olympics attitude" but instead was surprised. "It had a level of artistry I wasn't expecting," she says. Weiland liked it so much that she ended up working for the group for two years.

Created in the fall of 2000, Encore is a repertory theater company comprised of sixteen actors who have disabilities and six staff without. The actors are paid between $50 and $300 per performance, depending on the size of their roles. The company has nearly twenty plays in its repertoire and it performs both in theater settings and at conferences for service providers around the Midwest.

Kelsy A. Schoenhaar has stood at Encore's helm since the group's inception. Strikingly tall, she jokes that she is "five foot seventeen." In addition to playing dozens of instruments, Schoenhaar has written all of Encore's plays. She finds it helpful to know her actors as well as she does. "They all have areas of tremendous talent," she explains, "and areas that need to be written around."

Schoenhaar focuses on writing realistically about the lives of people with disabilities, as well as about the low-paid workers who support them. She prefers to avoid glorifying her characters and instead hopes to humanize them. "Our portrayal hasn't necessarily been that of the heroic," says Schoenhaar. "People with disabilities can be heroic and inspiring, but they can also be jerks, and we need to portray that as well."

Real Life, a recent Encore production, focuses on four characters with high-functioning autism, sometimes known as Asperger's Syndrome. (Schoenhaar herself says she believes she falls within the "autism spectrum.") A local critic, Kenneth Burns, called Real Life "one of the most moving theatrical productions I've seen in some time."

The play is also hilarious, thanks in part to the work of actor Christie Stadele, who has autism and is blind. Stadele memorizes dialogue almost instantly, says Schoenhaar. She plays piano and has close to perfect pitch. She is also a natural comedian.

Stadele tells me about how she worked in a sheltered workshop before coming to Encore. "I hated that place," she says, noting that she relishes her time at Encore because she doesn't have to do the same thing every day. But during our conversation, she is also distracted. She mentions that she is hungry and can't wait to get home and have her snack, and she is worried about whether her ride might be arriving soon. Her Real Life character, Linda, displayed these tics in the play to much laughter.

And what is it that Stadele likes most about being in Encore? She loves the fun, the variety, the people. But the best thing, says Stadele, is the applause at the end of the night. "It's really fun when I get a standing ovation," she says, "being up there and hearing the clapping."

Beth Lucht is a freelance writer based in Madison, Wisconsin.