For seventeen years, Karin Fekko kept a secret, which became the seed of an unexpected stage career.
The secret in question was her multiple sclerosis. “What moved me is 17 years of silence” about the chronic illness: “I lived a sort of double life for too long, and when I finally started sharing it, I felt that it was a story that I wanted to tell.”
As an academic and a writer, prose at first felt like the appropriate medium. But she was also flirting with comedy, in the form of training at The Second City and Comedy Bar, before she turned to solo storytelling in 2023. She traces the final shift to the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic. Given her autoimmune disorder, she spent long stretches of the pandemic masked and shut in, so when restrictions were finally lifted, the idea of writing a memoir alone at her desk no longer appealed.
“I just wanted to be in a room with people,” she admits. “I could never have really imagined how deeply you can connect with people when you’re all just sitting in the same room together.” And comedy was the vehicle: “A lot of the topics I was interested in talking about were difficult and dark,” she notes, “and comedy allows for that kind of welcoming entrance into subjects that can feel uncomfortable.”
The result is her breakout solo show, Multiple Neurosis, in which Fekko traces her journey from concealing her MS while pursuing the security of a tenured academic career to confronting the ableism that shaped her understanding of disability. Moving between seven autobiographical stories and a series of recent dreams, the work spans from 1985 to its creation during medical treatment in 2025, offering a surreal, candid exploration of Fekko’s evolving conception of her disabled self.
The show earned a five-star review and a “Best of the Fest” nod at Edmonton Fringe 2025. The show’s marketing captures the show’s central provocation: “Do I look like someone with MS? People would say ‘no,’ and that’s the problem.” In conversation, she explains what that skepticism looks like in practice. “Even in this second year of touring, people have asked me after the show if I have MS. Or they think maybe someone else wrote the show, and I just performed it.”
Fekko’s neurologist puts the proportion of Canadians with MS who don’t use mobility aids at roughly 70%, a fact that surprises most. “There’s a lot of work to be done in terms of invisible disability awareness” when it comes to MS, she notes, especially because “it’s ‘Canada’s disease’. One in 400 Canadians have it.”
This awareness gap is what pushed her past the Fringe toward a wider platform. On May 30, Fekko released Multiple Neurosis as a filmed special on YouTube, timed to World MS Day. “I felt like I really wanted the opportunity for anyone” —including audiences outside her Fringe tour cities—“to be able to see it any time,” she explains. But this was also a choice in personal accessibility: “One of my biggest areas of disability is fatigue…. The chances that I was lying in bed for the whole day so that I could bring my best energy are, well… that’s what I do. I have limited energy,” she laughs, “and I can absolutely bring it on stage.” With YouTube, she can scale that limited energy.
Her brand-new show, Who’s Gonna Push Your Wheelchair?, delves into territory she has avoided until now: domestic violence, financial precarity, and family estrangement. The response to Multiple Neurosis “gave me the courage to talk about other things I hadn’t really gotten into,” she acknowledges. Specifically, it helped her to overcome what she calls internalized ableism: “I had a deep shame and embarrassment around my illness, which it took real time to overcome.” Once again,the material is unflinchingly candid—this time about the “$4,000 on my RBC credit card that I stopped paying”, and about the years it took “to even forgive myself” and the “shame for me to, at 35 years old, have my family bail me out of a financial hole.”
The show’s title is a brutal verbatim from a former partner who, to keep her in their relationship, told Fekko that no one would want a life with her because of her illness. She dramatizes this moment in her show, voicing a pithy retort that she didn’t manage in the moment: “Hey, asshole! They’re electric!” But this comment hit her hard. “It was a real sucker punch,” she nods. “I understood immediately how cruel and manipulative it was. It absolutely clarified for me that the relationship was not safe.”
Her comfort onstage has a perhaps unexpected source: the classroom. By day, Fekko is a design professor at OCAD University (where she is Karin von Ompteda). During her two Fringe tours, she has performed largely for strangers, with the benefit of “a strange anonymity… you make these intense, really emotional connections with people you’ve never met!”. But now Fekko is bringing the show to her own neighbourhood at Sweet Action Theatre, where colleagues and old friends are expected in the audience. (Her OCAD dean, on hearing about Fekko’s double life as a performer, saw the link right away, since “design is storytelling.”) Fekko won’t alter the show but admits that “It’ll be interesting this time because I will recognize them.”
“I have to put it out of my mind a bit… it’ll feel new, especially with colleagues!”
Tickets are pay-what-you-can, between $10 and $20, with flexibility for anyone facing a barrier. Who’s Gonna Push Your Wheelchair? runs August 18, 21, and 22 at Sweet Action Theatre. Tickets are available at sweetaction.ca.
© Arpita Ghosal, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
