Tekki Lomnicki is a brilliant solo performer and the creator of Tellin’ Tales Theater, which has produced and fostered creative work by people with disabilities for more than 20 years. Lomnicki has a disability that affects her height: she is a little person. She walks with a set of crutches and does her storytelling act mostly from a folding chair. When she’s seated, she stands the crutches up against the chair’s frame; when it’s time to get up, she picks them up again.
Lomnicki recalls reading Alice in Wonderland around this time and envying Alice her cake that made her grow tall. She wished there could have been a little bite of cake so she wouldn’t have to climb on any more counters or sit on phone books while she was learning to drive. But there’s more to the comparison. When Alice is tall, she lives in a tall person’s world. While Lomnicki is talking, we see the world the way she used to see it, a place full of inconveniences but also opportunities—like how the ramp that was installed in the stairwell, finally, to elevate her up to her bedroom made so much noise that it could drown out boys’ footsteps as they tiptoed up the stairs. There are new logistics for Alice to consider once she eats that piece of cake and her head hits the ceiling; it would be a good idea next Christmas, Alice says, to mail her feet new boots. Lomnicki’s story, like Alice’s, defamiliarizes the world we think we know, exposing our perception of it as merely one possible perception, our eye level as one eye level and not “eye level.”
Through 2/2: Sat 5:30 PM, Lifeline Theatre, 6912 N. Glenwood, 773-761-4477, lifelinetheatre.com, $10.
