Fundraiser Planned For Recovering Artist

New Haven artist and designer Edmund B*Wak Comfort faced a harrowing health crisis in the spring that saw him lose both of his legs below the knee as well as a few of his fingers. Now home from the hospital, he has found family and friends rallying to help him, including a performance from the Regicides improv comedy group this Saturday, Aug. 26 that will double as a fundraiser to help him meet living expenses while he recuperates.

“After the incident, I really appreciate being here,” Comfort said. ​“I realize how precious it is, all the things I took for granted. It is amazing that I still get an opportunity to be here.” He thinks of friends and family who have passed. ​“I was on the verge of being one of them,” he said, ​“missing all the beautiful things that life has to offer.”

As Comfort related in a statement for the fundraiser, he checked into the emergency room at St. Raphael’s on March 31, 2023. ​“Earlier that day I said, ​‘I feel like I have the flu.’ A few hours later my feet began to swell and then get as hard as a rock. Walking down the stairs sounded like clock-clock, clock-clock, clock-clock,” he wrote. In the ER he was given morphine and had an allergic reaction. ​“I woke up in the ICU with tubes stuffed down my throat,” he wrote. He had pneumonia and a bacterial infection in his bloodstream, leading to septic shock. 

As a result, both his legs below the knees and a few of his fingers had to be amputated. The sepsis also caused kidney disease, which required dialysis. He spent months in the hospital recovering. In the five weeks since he was discharged, he has been at home, undergoing physical therapy.

With his hospital stay, ​“I was put to a test,” Comfort said. ​“I was Jonah in the belly of the whale.” But he also found strengthened faith. ​“I found myself not once blaming God,” he said. This was partly because ​“I was getting the love back that I put out” into the world. ​“Family stood by me all along,” he said. ​“God left me just enough to get by.”

Comfort’s health crisis was also a severe blow to his income. Before he went to the emergency room, he had been making art and clothing, working on sets for theaters, and remodeling houses. ​“I felt like I was at the top of my art game. I was living, making a few ends meet,” he said.

Part of his income lay in the theater world, a path that began in 2000, when he started working at Roberto Clemente Leadership Academy on Columbus Avenue as a paraprofessional. He helped the students there with theater productions and fashion shows, and decorated the halls. One day he accompanied students on a field trip to Long Wharf Theatre. On seeing the sets and other technical aspects of the theater world, he said, ​“I was more mesmerized than the kids.”

He went on to study art and set design at Harlem School for the Arts and got connected with the Cornerstone Theater Company in Los Angeles, which offered him a fellowship at the Mark Taper Forum in that city. That experience led him, when he returned to New Haven, to projects with Long Wharf Theatre, Yale Repertory Theatre, and other theaters in the area. He met the crew of Broken Umbrella Theatre and began working with them as well; as news spread of his hospital stay, the theater company in turn reached out to help out.

“B*Wak has been working with us almost as long as we’ve been in town,” said Ian Alderman, Broken Umbrella’s executive director. To Alderman, Comfort’s work on Broken Umbrella’s sets as a scenic artist, across multiple productions, was integral to helping the theater company grow. ​“In the beginning the muscle was the impressiveness of what we were able to do on the stage, and B*Wak was a big part of that,” Alderman said. ​“Our ensemble has always been made of people meeting and knowing one another,” and ​“B*Wak kept on coming back.”

Shortly after Comfort’s hospitalization, ​“I had heard through the grapevine that he was going through some issue, but I didn’t know how bad it was,” Alderman said. When the details emerged, Alderman notified the rest of the Broken Umbrella crew. ​“Everyone was mortified for him,” Alderman said. They responded unanimously: ​“What can we do?”

The decision to make one of the Regicides performances a fundraising event was an easy one, and Comfort was amenable. ​“I’ve been talking to him for the last couple weeks,” Alderman said. ​“He asked if he could bring a DJ and we said ​‘of course.’” Comfort then responded with: ​“I hope you have enough chairs.”

“We expect to have a good crowd,” Alderman said. In honor of the cause, the Regicides’s improvs will likely ​“try to play to some of B*Wak’s strengths.” ​“What would you do to help out a friend?” one prompt may read. ​“Name a place where graphic t‑shirts would be needed,” may read another. 

“We’re going to help him raise $5,000. I would love it if we could rock that a little higher,” Alderman said. Comfort ​“hasn’t lost that spirit — the spirit of an artist, and the spirit of a man who knows how to survive. From the moment I learned about it and reached out to him, he was positive.… He’s been supporting people with his art, and now it’s time for us to support him with art.”

On one level, Comfort said, ​“I know what to expect” from Broken Umbrella from years of working with them. But on another level, ​“I’m just dying to see what they’re going to perform in my honor. It’s going to be an eye-opener.” The funds raised will help with living expenses and will help Comfort hang on to his studio, ​“so I have a place to go and create when able,” he said.

The help of family, friends, and community has led to a shift in attitude for Comfort. ​“I’m a person who won’t ask for anything,” he said. But ​“I have learned that people offering me help and giving me things isn’t just for me, it’s for them as well.” He has learned to feel less self-conscious about asking for and accepting help. In the end, ​“I’m just grateful,” he said.

The slow pace of healing has its frustrations. Comfort’s mobility remains very limited as he learns to get around on crutches and prosthetic limbs, and as his bodily strength slowly returns after months in a hospital bed. ​“I’m stuck in one spot for hours a day,” he said, and ​“I haven’t stood still for 50 years.” He fights feelings of uselessness, too; they’re part of the ​“ills that go along with the wills,” he said. As he works through recovery, ​“my mind is ahead of my body,” he said. ​“I’m just anxious to get back to being a part of life.” He’s eager to start making art again, to ​“see what I’m capable of doing,” but ​“I have to fall back and chill, and let it heal.”

Comfort has also found his creative energy focused on learning how to best adapt to his new circumstances. ​“Creating ways to move and function is interesting to me,” he said. This ranges from learning what combination of using rails and crutches works best for going up and down stairs to learning how best to get dressed, even if ​“I still put my pants on one leg at a time,” he said with a laugh. ​“Everything is physical therapy, a workout, an exercise.” He is sometimes impatient to be able to drive again. ​“I was thinking of creating another leg just for driving,” he said.

Comfort’s latest rounds of physical therapy, meanwhile, have shifted their focus to his hands, the means by which he does his art and makes his living. ​“Once I get my hands to do what I need them to do, all is ready,” he said. The first goal is to figure out how to use an airbrush again.

He still has his studio on Whalley Avenue near Sherman, just a couple blocks from his residence on Goffe Street. ​“I still have to clean up my shop from the last time I left it,” he said. He has ideas for projects to work on when he returns, ideas about mask making and prop making for theater. He would also like to teach younger artists about artistic and entrepreneurial skills. But he imagines the first thing he’ll do when he re-enters his creative space is ​“airbrushing a background,” he said. ​“Just to show that I’m back.”

The Regicides’s performance and fundraiser for B*Wak happens at The SmokeStack, 446a Blake St., on Aug. 26 at 8 p.m. Click here for the online fundraising page for B*Wak.