Watching Dancing with Dad at Stein Auditorium, the performance raises a question that shadows many parents’ lives: who will care for a child when the parent is no longer here? For the father of an autistic son, that anxiety acquires a particular urgency. It concerns care and security, but also understanding. Who will recognise the person his son is, and make room for the way he experiences the world?

Presented by Maneesh Verma and Collective Madness, the play brings this uncertainty into an intimate encounter between a dancer father, played by Sumeet Nagdev, and his autistic son, portrayed by Arjun Kachroo. The father tries to help his son imagine a life beyond his presence. Yet their exchanges also reveal how much the father himself must learn: about his son’s feelings, his responses, and the possibilities of a relationship in which both can speak and be heard.

The performance conveys the sense of a father and........

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