Theatre / Drizzle Boy, by Ryan Ennis, directed by Daniel Evans, Queensland Theatre. At The Playhouse, until November 16. Reviewed by ALANNA MACLEAN.

Ryan Ennis’ Drizzle Boy is a play that deserves careful and different attention. Not only is it written about the growing up of an autistic boy, it is also written by a playwright who is himself neurodivergent.

The boy is played by neurodivergent actor Daniel R Nixon. And the appreciative opening night’s audience contained people and families who live that experience. It’s meant to be seen from the inside, not the outside.

Drizzle Boy has a passion for space and space travel and is starting university studies in physics. He meets a cheerful and chatty young woman (Judy Hainsworth) there and they clearly have much in common. Is she, too, neurodivergent? But relationships are not his strong point and neither the university staff nor his parents understand his struggles.

His parents (Hainsworth and Anthony Gooley) struggle to cope with him but are endlessly supportive. Hainsworth and Gooley also play a raft of other supporting characters including having fun with the highly assertive first woman in space, Russian Valentina Tereshkova and the brooding demon Baphomet, all shaggy fur and horns and truculent aggression. Both actors deal with rapid changes of costume and character with style and energy.

Nixon is on stage the whole time and it’s an energetic and insightful journey. The action is in fact mostly going on in Drizzle Boy’s mind and tuning into that is what the audience has to do.

There are lots of bells and whistles in Christina Smith’s set, evocative of that dark spaceship in Alien and full of doors and panels and trapdoors, but also holding the promise of a planetarium where Drizzle Boy can examine and explain the universe in a quietly logical way.

And he is also explaining himself. The play ends up being a statement rather than an observation. The emphasis finally is on “This is who I am” and Nixon finds that place very well indeed.

A show with a difference, about difference, that deserves to find its audience.