Calgarian pens play about party girl who wakes up blind, based on true events

Finding humour in her challenges through play A 32-year-old Calgary woman is sharing her story about becoming blind, in a play she wrote and stars in.

Ashley King suddenly went blind while halfway around the world.

Now, the 32-year-old has written a play about the ordeal.

King wrote Static: A Party Girl's Memoir, and is also performing in a production of it.

It's about a young woman whose life is all about booze, boys and late-night parties, until she wakes up blind while on holiday.

"I wanted people to see the raw humanity of struggle," said King. "But also the humorous side, so that we don't just sit in the dark despair or difficult side of going through something really traumatic."

In 2011, after graduated high school, King took a year off to travel.

She was 19 years old and living in Australia when she took a trip to Bali.

"While I was in Bali, I was poisoned by methanol and it made me go blind," she said.

"I saw doctors in New Zealand for about a month, but when I came to Canada soon after it happened, about a month or so, doctors were telling me that I need to start learning to live with what had happened, as opposed to waiting for something to change."

King says it took her about two years to adjust to life back home in Calgary without her sight.

She's now legally blind and has graduated from Mount Royal University with a journalism degree. She then spent two years learning to become an actor.

"When you're looking for work, they always say to write your own work, to give yourself work," she said. "So that's what I did."

She wrote the play, and then spent the next two years with Kodie Rollan, artistic director with Chromatic Theatre, to fine tune it and get it from page to stage.

"I remember meeting Ashley, and she told me this story, and then I read the script and immediately I thought, 'Oh, we need to invest in this, and then we need to produce it,'" Rollan said.

"It was really important for me as an artist as well, to make sure that she had an environment of care as she was putting out such a vulnerable story, so we never at any point forced her to put in anything she wasn't comfortable with."

King says the way she has coped with her visual impairment at such a young age is by looking at the humorous side of it, but it has taken years for her to get to that level of acceptance.

"There's been obviously really, really difficult days and hard days," King said.

"But I've been able to look back and think, 'Wow, that was actually a really stupid, funny thing that happened. That wouldn't have happened if I hadn't been blind,' so I've kind of taken all these anecdotes and put them into a story that hopefully is different from your typical inspirational disability-type thing that we often see."

Chromatic Theatre teamed up with Inside Out Theatre to host the production.

"For me, it really shows the magic of theater and why we do this," said Rollan. "Stories that are so full of comedy and lightness can tackle really tough subjects and still put in that heart and that empathy that audiences can connect with."

The production is ending, but will soon be turned into a podcast, and King says she'd like to take it on the road.

"I hope that the show lives on past this iteration," she said. "I would love to tour the show, if I could make it across Canada that would be fantastic, if I could take it to the Edinburgh Fringe in Europe, I would love to do that."