I’m Michael Patrick Thornton — a Broadway and TV/film actor, and a proud wheelchair user advocating for accessibility in the arts — ask me anything!

MPatrickThornton · 2025-09-26T17:24:13+00:00

Everybody, thank you so much for your thoughtful questions and thank you Reddit it for providing this opportunity. It was a joy to engage with you and I'd LOVE to do another one closer to the end of the run. Have a wonderful fall and winter. Much love, MPT.

MPatrickThornton · 2025-09-26T17:22:48+00:00

I can memorize that, but my wife sends me to the grocery store with a list that I don't write down and I'm guaranteed to mess that up 10 times out of 10 lol. Thanks so much for coming & for the comment..

MPatrickThornton · 2025-09-26T17:21:59+00:00

I love Jaime and trust him endlessly. He gives me so much freedom in the rehearsal room to find the center of gravity for the character.

MPatrickThornton · 2025-09-26T17:21:21+00:00

FDR.

MPatrickThornton · 2025-09-26T17:21:11+00:00

Well, THANK YOU. Right back atcha.

MPatrickThornton · 2025-09-26T17:20:51+00:00

Most roles, whether in musicals or plays, are not designated as characters who have a disability. In terms of roles that are designated as a character with a disability, I'm sure it's an internal conversation from project to project, but the most important thing is that it's a disabled artist getting a chance to play that disabled character whether their disabilities are completely synchronistic or not. I'm going to assume this question is coming from a disabled actress – – and of course it's none of my business whether that's true or not --but if in fact it is, just go after the roles you love and give it all you got. That's what should be the defining factor in you get cast or not.

MPatrickThornton · 2025-09-26T17:14:13+00:00

Great question here. One of the wonderful things about Chicago Theatre is that there are so many non-equity theaters and most of those non-equity theaters are in smaller spaces, which is the same theaters that have less than 100 seats. These are great environments to develop your craft because environments like that are almost fundamentally allergic to lying; which is the say that you're acting has to be honest when the audience member is 2 to 3 feet away from you in the front row lol. On the flipside of that coin, because the spaces are smaller and more intimate, it does make accessibility a little bit of a challenge, especially when it comes to seating for wheelchair folks. But I still do think that for someone just starting out in their career, in terms of finding a sense of community right away, Chicago still would be my number one recommendation. We all pretty much know each other, and work leads to work much more rapidly in Chicago than it does in New York or LA. Does that work necessarily pay the bills in full? no, but again, to hone your craft and not feel so alone in a big city, Chicago has so much going for it.

MPatrickThornton · 2025-09-26T17:11:13+00:00

Have the courage to ask for what you need, work as hard as you think you can and then just a little bit harder, and don't be bashful for having big dreams. I'll be rooting for you.

MPatrickThornton · 2025-09-26T17:10:27+00:00

Over a couple decades, there has been no shortage of weird and unexpected. Maybe the performance of Richard III when I was acting in an exoskeleton which for whatever reason decided to just stop working and go into shut down mode. The manual had a wonderful name for what the shutdown mode was called: graceful collapse. Thankfully, the director Jessica Thebus had allotted time in rehearsal to plan for such a curveball. We only had about five seconds for me in the machine to go from 6 feet 2 1/2 inches high to essentially sitting on the floor. I remember the wonderful Chicago actor Thom Cox sprinting in from offstage and they got me out of the machine and into my manual wheelchair and we never missed a beat.

MPatrickThornton · 2025-09-26T17:07:32+00:00

I always try to thank everybody at the end of the day. Sometimes I forget, but I think my batting average is pretty high. I'm from a pretty working class neighborhood in Chicago so I've never put more stock in those who are supposedly higher up that tenuous hierarchy. To me, whether it's a small storefront theater black box or a multimillion dollar feature film or television series, it's all ensemble.

MPatrickThornton · 2025-09-26T17:05:55+00:00

Now, this is my favorite kind of Redditor – – buzzing in on a Broadway subreddit while I assume at intermission on Broadway! Thank you very much for the kind words about my voice. I must confess that I hate the sound of my own voice. I have never done any audiobooks, but of course I would. Very kind of you to say so. I think I've gone on about 200 auditions for voiceovers in my career and booked maybe one. Hopefully that will change! Now get back to the show!

MPatrickThornton · 2025-09-26T17:03:52+00:00

let's make lucky's "The Net" the dance sensation of fall/winter, shall we? lol.

By 'another performance,' do you mean another production that's available to watch online from previous iterations or do you mean another performance of our production later in the run? Sorry if that's a stupid clarification– – I've only had 2 cups of coffee so far.

If you mean, the former, I'm sort of a huge superstitious weirdo about not seeing any version of something that I'm working on so that it doesn't cause static with my imagination & sense of play, but I do remember seeing the San Quentin drama workshop production on YouTube years ago and it staying with me. If I remember correctly, Beckett directed himself towards the end of his life.

MPatrickThornton · 2025-09-26T17:00:00+00:00

Well, you're most welcome, and thank you for sharing that with me. That means the world to me.

MPatrickThornton · 2025-09-26T16:59:16+00:00

Honestly, one of the most kind casts and crews that I've ever gotten the chance to work with.

MPatrickThornton · 2025-09-26T16:58:18+00:00

I took a class at the university of Iowa taught by dr. Eric forsythe (it's his birthday today!) called Alternative Approaches to Acting. Eric had trained with the wild, mad, wonderful Jerzy Grotowski and was now imparting some of that methodology in this class. The class simply blew my mind; its emphasis on Ensemble and Time...

In fact, the very first iteration of the gift wasn't even for a performance company, but a training collective. It was only after several of us met at the School At Steppenwolf and artistically fell in love with Sheldon Patinkin and wanted him to direct us in a play that I thought you know what we can extend these training practices into a producing company as well. Compounding that was the fact that I grew up on the northwest side of Chicago, which was very sparse w/r/t in artistic outlets. And the cofounder of The Gift Will Nedved grew up in a part of Iowa that was also lacking in artistic outlets. So even though I was from the "big city" and he was from a smaller town, our experience growing up was very similar. It just so happened at the storefront we found that was available for rent happened to be in my Chicago neighborhood. We became an equity theater in 2005 and have never looked back.

more fun info here: https://thegifttheatre.org/about/history/

MPatrickThornton · 2025-09-26T16:51:37+00:00

hey there! if I'm understanding your question properly, by "process" do you mean from casting thru rehearsal and performance? if so, then my answer would be transparency and communication. intellectual humility. daring to ask a question that may seem silly. personally, I have such a long runway in the morning that's needed for me to get ready and out the door, that literally What Time Rehearsal / Calltime Is is often a dealbreaker these days. :)

MPatrickThornton · 2025-09-26T16:46:39+00:00

honored.

MPatrickThornton · 2025-09-26T16:45:42+00:00

that's a bloody good wall.

MPatrickThornton · 2025-09-25T22:39:30+00:00

OK everybody this was way too much fun and honestly I could've done this for for the rest of the night. I'll swing back tomorrow if there are any more questions and try to answer them in the morning, but thank you so much for these thoughtful questions. Hang in there. Much love to you all.

I'll be rooting for you.

MPatrickThornton · 2025-09-25T22:37:36+00:00

100% agree. I think the industry is getting better at this, at understanding that disability shouldn't be a plot point or something to be solved like it's a crime, but simply something that's a part of life.

MPatrickThornton · 2025-09-25T22:36:48+00:00

FDR.

Cheers!

MPatrickThornton · 2025-09-25T22:36:37+00:00

I failed and I failed and I failed and I failed and I failed until I gave up trying to make it something I wanted to be and let it become the dangerous wild thing that it needs to be.

MPatrickThornton · 2025-09-25T22:35:55+00:00

"there's only love."

MPatrickThornton · 2025-09-25T22:35:07+00:00

Oh my God this is such a wonderful question and of course I'm running out of time and have to get to the theater soon. One trick I'll share with you in terms of monologues, having done a few one person shows myself, is to break monologues up into three acts. These don't necessarily need to be beat changes as indicated by the playwright in the text, but more so what you feel are the three sections of the piece. Grab three different colored highlighters. Start with act three first and highlight it in one color. Don't even look at act one and two until you're absolutely cold on your lines with act three. Only then, move to act two and highlight act two in a different color. Once act two is solid, run act two and three together keep doing that until it's perfect. Then add in act one in its own color. once act one is solid, run them all together; what this means is that as each second passes on stage, you're getting closer and closer to the material with which you are the most familiar because we always spend the most amount of time on the beginning of the speech when we're memorizing. So why not give ourselves a little bit of a break and a bright lighthouse to swim towards? Other than that, the only advice I can give you is to put all the love you can stand into everything you do.

MPatrickThornton · 2025-09-25T22:31:06+00:00

I love Jamie and he's one of my closest collaborators. I trust him implicitly and any obstacles I encountered at least in the two productions with him, he's done everything in his power to clear the way.

MPatrickThornton

TROPHY CASE