Deep Soap: Let’s Get Serious

By Sara A. Bibel
Fancast.com

Night Shift Casts Real-life Parents of Children With Autism

Sometimes soap operas really get it right. On tomorrow’s episode of Night Shift, written by longtime General Hospital writer Karen Harris, Jagger (Antonio Sabato Jr.) attends a support group for parents of children with autism. Casting director Mark Teschner chose to cast actors who are raising special needs children in real life as other members of the group, adding verisimilitude to the scene. Performers Neill Barry, Ellen Bry and Christine Romeo spoke with me about why this is such an important storyline and the challenges of raising a child with autism.

Was your dialogue based on your own personal stories?
Bry: [The writers] came up with the basic storylines. But they’re very accurate. We heard from the writer that she went to a lot of blogs by parents of autistic children and got a lot of her information that way.

Have you been following Night Shift’s autism storyline?
Romeo: It was fascinating to watch because you don’t see autistic children portrayed in different ways. There’s usually a sort of traditional portrayal. It’s a person who doesn’t talk. Stone is interesting because he has communicative skills but he has repetitive behaviors and that will trigger an outburst. Every autistic kid is different. That something a lot of people don’t understand. [Kids] can have good social skills but have behavior problems. That’s why they call it Autism Spectrum. It’s like an umbrella of severity. You fall somewhere on it.

Bry: It goes from the very severe to the very high functioning. They’re trying to portray Stone as a much more high functioning child on the spectrum. Nonetheless, what I’ve seen, frankly he’s got better communication skills than any high functioning autistic child I’ve ever seen. I think they could have given him a little less. But apparently as the storyline goes on he’s going to lose some of those skills.

How do you balance the responsibilities of raising a child with special needs and an acting career?

Barry: My son Wyatt has cerebral palsy. There are certain similarities to autism. He is considered high functioning. I can’t speak for everyone, but [taking care of him] has become a way of life. Dealing with my career and raising a special needs child is like any challenge you would have with children. It’s hard sometimes to balance and continue with it as you go through this business of show.
Romeo: I was just working on a film for six days straight. When you have 6AM calls – and I’m a single parent – it just gets crazy. When you get the job you’re excited for about ten seconds and then it becomes the drama of, “What am I going to do with Abby? Who’s going to take her to school?” Because there are only certain people who can do that. The joke is, they say, “Bring her on set.” I say, “Okay. She’ll be running camera in about 30 seconds.” My child is very curious. She’ll run on set and dance around.
Barry: Or be buck naked.

[Everyone laughs.]

Romeo: By the way, that is in my character’s little story [on Nightshift] that I tell, and it’s really accurate. Some of the things these kids do are funny. It’s not funny when they’re 30. My daughter is ten. She does do crazy, kooky things like put on a Dorothy costume in the dead of summer and wants to knock on the neighbor’s door – things that most ten year-olds wouldn’t do any more.

Barry: Even the line about changing the diaper at seven months and at seven years-old – I can completely relate. It’s horrifying, but it’s just something as parents that we deal with. There are plenty of parents who say, “I can’t do this. I don’t want to do this anymore.” But a lot of parents deal with this. It’s very difficult sometimes. There’s a very high divorce rate among married couples when they’re an autistic child involved.

Romeo: They say it’s about 80%. It’s just not what you signed up for and the added responsibility is huge. It gets a little easier as they get older.
Bry: Also you’re more accepting. Eventually you just deal with the fact that this is now the status quo. I have two kids with autism and one typical kid. There was no way I could juggle two kids with autism and a career at the same time. Now they’re older, they’re teenagers. But I had to take a decade off. I went underground and it was not easy. It definitely cut into my own personal career goals. The only way I’m able to have a career is to have extraordinarily good help and a good support team of therapists that I can count on to deal with the kids when I’m away.

Barry: Support is imperative whether it be family or caregivers. Certain states have terrific help and certain states don’t.

Bry: California’s pretty mediocre. You have to be hopeful that you have enough to pay for it and that you are an extraordinarily good advocate because you have to fight school districts and regional centers and a lot of systems in order to get the funding that you need.

Romeo: The disability is one pain. The system is another. I’ve actually wept more over the regional center than my daughter’s disability. I’m from Boston. I have no family here. And I’m divorced. I don’t have a team of specialists who are going to rescue me.

Bry: My aggravation has been the LAUSD [Los Angeles Unified School District]. You have to be the parent from hell to get any funding from these entities which are supposedly out there to help you.

Barry: You have to be diligent or you’ll get nowhere.

Romeo: The bottom line is, in all due fairness, the state has a lot of problems. This is one of them. The diagnosis rate keeps increasing. If the school system would just accept the fact that this isn’t going away and in-house shifted budgets to deal with these kids, they’d save a lot of money.

Bry: The problem is that everyone is very myopic. The government is going to have to get hip to the fact that we have created a very toxic environment. Nobody knows exactly what causes it, and my own personal bias is that there are multiple causes, but basically the world has become a toxic place. One in every 144 births turns out to be autistic. The government and the medical community better get their acts together. It’s not going away. It’s getting worse. We’ve got to clean up the environment and deal with this to get the funding and the resources that these kids need.

In your opinion, is the increasing number of cases a function of improved diagnostic tools or is the number of children with autism actually dramatically increasing?

Bry: I think both although you cannot go from twenty years ago their being one or 2 in 15,000 births to 1 in 144 births. That’s not just better diagnostics. It is an epidemic that’s growing.

Barry: It’s happening in the womb. That’s what needs to be made clear to the public. It’s not like these kids are born and suddenly become autistic. The diagnostics are getting better. Wyatt was born at one pound, thirteen ounces. Five years ago he would never have survived. But it’s very toxic out there and the Moms don’t know what’s happening out there.

Bry: It’s reached critical mass. Everyone is becoming aware that autism is all around us. Something has to be done.

Romeo: Autism is more frequently diagnosed than five other major childhood diseases combined. It’s odd socially that I could be at a cocktail party talking to a pregnant woman and then two years later her child is diagnosed. I love that this show is tackling this issue. I love that a character like Jagger, played by Antonio Sabato Jr., a handsome, normal has a son who has this. Sometimes you think “it’s only people like them.”

Bry: It’s normal people, as opposed to, “That oddball over there. I could see how he could have an autistic kid because he’s so weird.” Typical people are having autistic kids. Loads of celebrities.

Romeo: There are numerous celebrities that I wish would come forward and speak the truth. Gary Cole’s been very public about his daughter. Aidan Quinn’s come forward.

Bry: Joe Mantegna, Jenny McCarthy, Sylvester Stallone. There are loads.

Romeo: Bravo to the writers on the show. I also love that Stone is a seemingly bright and interesting kid that sort of snaps. His kind of autism is a little atypical but I like that it’s portrayed in a way that’s not obvious. My daughter’s autism isn’t obvious right away. She’s a beautiful girl. But spend an hour with her and you’ll see it. It sort of unravels itself. She suddenly won’t answer you or she’ll go off in the corner. It’s not like she’s rocking back and forth, not speaking, like you sometimes see it portrayed. I like that the storyline educates the public to the kinds of autism that are out there. With high functioning autism a lot of times it doesn’t manifest itself until the kid is one and one-half or two.

Bry: My two boys were developing normally. The first time that they weren’t on the bell curve was that they didn’t start talking at two and a half. A lot of kids seem normal until something triggers it and they fall into the world of autism.
Barry: Hats off to the producers, the writers, and Mark, the casting director for hiring three actors who have special needs children. It’s beautiful. That’s a start right there. I have never been involved in anything where they’ve wanted that. Talk about authenticity. It’s wonderful. It helps.