Daily Inspiration Quote by Camryn Manheim

Broadway sells itself as the peak of live storytelling, then quietly builds its temples around a single assumption: you can hear. Camryn Manheim’s line works because it names that contradiction without turning it into a scold. She starts with “one of the things I did,” a modest, almost throwaway phrase that signals this isn’t a performative crusade but practical labor. The flex is in the casualness: accessibility isn’t framed as charity or “special programming,” but as part of what you do when you show up in New York and take its cultural ecosystem seriously.

Her choice to spotlight New York’s “wonderful deaf community” is doing double duty. It’s praise, but it’s also an implicit correction to how the city is usually mythologized. The subtext: the community is already here, organized and vibrant; the problem is the institution that hasn’t bothered to meet it. That flips the usual narrative from “bringing theatre to the deaf” to “broadening theatre’s definition of its audience.”

“Making Broadway more accessible” is deliberately broad, and that’s strategic. It leaves room for the unglamorous specifics - captioning, interpreters, sightlines, staff training, ticketing systems that don’t punish disabled patrons - without reducing the project to a single tech fix. Coming from an actress, the intent lands as insider accountability: the people who benefit from Broadway’s prestige should also help renovate its norms.

In a cultural moment when inclusion is often packaged as branding, Manheim’s phrasing keeps the focus on infrastructure. Not representation as a poster, but access as a door.