Victoria Lewis
IN PRAISE OF PLAYS not The Christmas Carol
WANTED: Readers
I have one goal with this essay: to get you to read more plays.1 Read them alone or together,
preferably together, like a book club, only better, less passive but not as intimidating as charades or
Pictionary. And if you enjoy reading then I urge you to follow Mickey Rooney's suggestion voiced in numerous
Depression era films: "Hey, kids, let's put on a show!"Get someone, you maybe, to put up a production.
Or just read another play together. It's fun and cheap. Given the longevity and success of "negative"cultural
memes concerning disability, it's important to mount a counter-offensive if only around your dinner table. If we
expect the dominant media forms to get disability right, we may be in for a long wait—it is an expensive medium
with a lot of normalizing gates to go through to make it on to a screen. There are literary gatekeepers in theatre
as well, as I'll talk about later.
Why recommend the pokey, old, pre-industrial art form of the theatre in a post-industrial age? Because plays can
do something that the law, or political action or critical studies cannot: they can disrupt and rewire a cultural
circuit, not by legislation, but by playing. A lesson from history. Legend has it that in 1862, when Abraham Lincoln
was introduced to Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, he greeted her saying, "So you're
the little woman who wrote the book that made the great war!"Sadly this anecdote, testifying to the power of
the pen in creating social change, is apocryphal and embedded only in the memory of the extended Stowe family (never
recounted by the author herself) and probably over time believed to be true by those affectionate relatives. Long
before Brian Williams' memory/hubris betrayed his fans, the demands of storytelling have massaged memories into dramatic
memes.
I am interested here however in another strand of faulty memory in this anecdote. It was the play of Uncle
Tom's
Cabin that introduced the majority of Americans, for good or bad, to Stowe's story of plantation life, not
the
novel. Critic Eric Lott estimates that at least three million people saw the plays, ten times the first
year
book sales. George Aikin's adaptation of the novel was the most popular play in England and America for 75 years.
That figure does not include the blockbuster success of the so-called "Tom"plays, basically minstrel
shows
that re-inscribed damning African-American stereotypes loosely based on the novel's characters. And just a
reminder:
no actors of color were allowed on the legitimate stage at this time, so in all those thousands of productions
African American characters were played by white actors in blackface.
One of the most intractable stereotypes of disability in popular culture—cheerful, pitiful Tiny Tim in A
Christmas Carol—followed a similar trade route to colonize our collective imagination. It was through
dramatizations (stage, film, and television) not in the pages of a book that Dickens' most successful short story
achieved cultural immortality. There have been at least 51 film and television adaptations of the story since 1901.
Live theatre productions appeared almost simultaneously with the book's publication in 1843. Dickens himself created
a version to be read out loud rather than read silently. Stage productions continued to multiply from then till today.
In 2013, 17% of major theatres (those paying union wages) in the US produced a version of the Christmas Carol.
As a point of comparison, the most produced play of the 2013 season (not counting the "holiday"shows like
A Christmas Carol) was the new hit, Clybourne Park, Bruce Norris's controversial take on Lorraine
Hansberry's Raisin in the Sun. Clybourne Park had 16 productions nationwide, representing 3% of
the country's legitimate theatres.
But this profusion of professional productions of Christmas Carol is just the tip of the iceberg. Smaller
productions abound—in alternative companies, schools, churches, and community theatres. The play is not about
to go away any time soon, not as long as it continues to bring in audiences for the holiday slot at theatres from
no I am okayelite to amateur. Not only is the central character of Tiny Tim, the manifestation of innocence in the face of injustice,
not leaving, he will most likely continue to be played by a nondisabled actor. Actors "blacking up"is no
longer acceptable in public performance, but "cripping"up is acceptable and often is rewarded the industry's
highest accolades. 2
My point here is that theatrical performances, even on a creaky old stage, can play a powerful role in shaping how
we see the world. Contemporary disabled playwrights have been offering counter narratives to the prevailing stereotypes
of the disabled figure, but they have had a tough time getting their work to the public. We need to find ways to get
these plays out—readings, writing residencies, and amateur, academic and professional productions. We should make
this effort not only to complicate the assumptions about disability that pervade our cultural economy, but also
support the playwrights themselves.
In service of this mission, I offer some plays written by disabled playwrights that I find interesting. This
is not definitive or comprehensive. If you know of other plays or playwrights I have neglected to mention, I hope you
will respond to this essay with that information. If you question my choices, let me know that too. Be aware that I
have narrowed the field for practical reasons. First, these are plays, multi-charactered dramas, not solo pieces. Solo
pieces rely on performance by a singular artist, but multi-charactered dramas require a variety of actors—good
for a reading. And it would just be too hard to choose a few solo shows given the depth of the field.
Second, I have only included plays in print and accessible with the click of the computer mouse or through an
interlibrary loan. But I am aware that this filter may miss talented theatre artists because of the difficulties
disabled playwrights have had in getting to the stage, much less published. Chirsty Johnston makes this point in her
excellent 2012 Stage Turns: Canadian Disability Theatre offering up a list of accomplished disabled Canadian
playwrights that deserve to be anthologized but in the meantime seem to be thriving in an alternative Canadian d
isability theatre that outstrips anything currently active in the States. Check them out: Alex Bulmer Kevin Kerr,
Terry Watada, and Uchatius and hope that an anthology is on the way. 3 I have listed a few unpublished
plays in the accompanying bibliography. The playwrights, like John Pixley (Jury by Trial),might be open to
discussing access to these pieces.
But now, more about why we all have such limited exposure to these plays.
INSPIRATION PORN and LITERARY DEPARTMENT GATEKEEPERS
In terms of plays about disability (my own…) … I was told that two…
were "too depressing" for transfer beyond the fringe, although both reflected my life and my experience
of being disabled in Britain. . . . Maybe it remains for able-bodied writers to write about disability, because
they know what the able-bodied market can bear.
James MacDonald, playwright 4
The metaphor of disability has been so successful in the imaginative arena that it now functions as real. As a result,
the nondisabled theatrical gatekeeper (literary department, artistic director, etc.) often feels they know better than
the disabled artist does what is the correct story to tell about disability–the dramaturgical equivalent of the
well-meaning bystander who insists on helping the blind subway traveler by pulling him or her by the cane
towards an unwanted destination. Thus British playwright James MacDonald In the above quote ironically suggests that
nondisabled writers should write disabled stories since they know what the public "can bear."
While playwright John Belluso was studying playwriting at the Tisch School for the Arts at NYU, one of his teachers,
a famous Tony-award-winning playwright warned John, that he was "ghettoizing"himself by writing plays about
disability, and forgetting that he was "handi-capable."Fortunately for us, another Tony-award-winning
playwright Tony Kushner (Angels in America) told John that disability was his subject. Belluso's
brief but prolific career (he died at the age of 36 in 2006) proved Kushner right. Susan Nussbaum's black comedy
No One As Nasty was judged "unlikable" and "too angry"by a preeminent American theatre that had made
its reputation flouting censorship. Disabled artist Judith Wolfe's play Shelter was rejected by a regional
theater literary department on the grounds that Wolfe had "denatured and trivialized" the experience of disability.
The reader missed the fact that "denaturing" disability was the playwright's intended effect, a desire to destabilize
the conventional interpretation of the meaning of the disabled body in civic life and on the stage. As solo artist
Cheryl Marie Wade once observed, most theater professionals "are still looking at Whose Life Is It Anyway?
as a valid disability play." James MacDonald experienced the critical lash of this position first hand in a review of
his play Bread and Circus Freaks. He recalls:
A [London] Times reviewer … averred that Whose Life Is It
Anyway?
offers a far better view of disability than my play. In that Brian Clarke's play is really about euthanasia,
its
disability statement could almost be seen as fascistic.5
But some have broken through. And one of the earliest was David Freeman and his astonishing play Creeps.
Setting: the Institution
DAVID FREEMAN's Creeps
I've woven some pretty shitty rugs in my time. But whenever we have visitors, there are always
one or two clowns who come over and practically have an orgasm over my rug, no matter how shitty we both know it
is.
Pete, worker, sheltered workshop for "victims"of cerebral palsy
From Creeps, by David Freeman
Premiering in 1970, and winning the prestigious Chalmers award in Canada, David Freeman's Creeps received
an Off-Broadway production in the US in 1974 and won the young writer the New York Drama Critics Circle award for Best
New Playwright. The play calls for 10 actors, eight of whom are physically disabled.6 Set in the men's
bathroom of a sheltered workshop for people with cerebral palsy, bears theatrical witness to wrongs that would not find
political analysis and advocacy until later in the decade. The props list calls for urinals, toilet paper, cigarette
butts, and urine bottles. Bodily function, the need to piss and shit, and the retreat to the men's room provide the
only refuges the infantilized young men have from the institutional staff's demand that they constantly perform the
role of cheerful, grateful cripples. Pete, Sam and Tom struggle in their various ways against the enforced uselessness
of their world, despising the do-gooding Shriners who "molest … them in the name of charity"with hot dogs,
marching bands, clowns and balloons. Freeman allowed his characters to rage, not as the bitter cripples of popular
mythology, but as pawns caught in a web of exploitation and daily humiliation. Social scientist and disability studies
pioneer Irving Zola identified denial of anger along with denial of sexuality as one of the major contributing
factors to the invisibility of disabled identity in the modern era. He explained, "We were socialized out of our
anger."
Creeps also broke new ground in the gritty realism with which it depicted life for disabled people. Like
the 1902 audience of Maxim Gorky's Lower Depth, set in a seedy homeless shelter, who feared that they would catch
fleas from the actors, audiences of Creeps found themselves in close proximity to a grubby toilet that
almost smelled. Several playwrights since Freeman have set their plays in institutions for the disabled and elderly.
James MacDonald's early Balance is Stillness takes place in a "special needs"center in the West
country. John Belluso sets Gretty Good Time in a nursing home. I am pushing my genre boundaries here, but
Mike Ervin's brilliant blog, "Smart Ass Cripple,"regularly returns to his years (1969-1974) at the state
boarding home for cripples, that Ervin re-christens the "Sam Houston Institute of Technology,"S.H.I.T.. I
keep waiting for someone in the vibrant Chicago disability culture scene to turn those stories into a play.
Old Myths: New Flawed Heroes
LYNN MANNING, Shoot!
Lynn Manning wrote his one-act, three character play, Shoot! in Irene Oppenheim's Available Light Workshop
at the Los Angeles Theater Center 7 using Shakespeare's King Lear as a catalyst. Adaptations
of classic plays are a familiar strategy of marginalized voices seeking an audience in the cultural market place.
From Hip-hop versions of Aeschylus, to Anouilh's Antigone for an occupied France, to Kaite O'Reilly's
appropriation of Euripides The Trojan Women for peeling discussed later, playwrights approach
the stage cloaked by a sort of Trojan Horse of classical legitimacy which they then employ to reveal fractures
within contemporary personal and public given circumstances. For Manning, the story of Lear came to him as "the
story of a black man, once considered a warrior to be feared, now viewed a weak pusillanimous blind man to be pitied,
even taunted."To revenge himself on the punks that tease and humiliate him for his blindness, Manning's protagonist
Donny purchases a gun, legally, this being America, and pursues a tragic course. The radical shift in status that Lear
underwent spoke to the young poet's own experience of acquired disability8 in the world of South Central
Los Angeles.
Shoot! is not so much an adaptation as an improvisation on Shakespeare's tale of power struggles, family and
old age in a mythical, Celtic Britain. Manning takes his theme—"unrelenting self-interest to the detriment
of all others"—from Shakespeare, but the other parallels are loose and ambiguous. What Manning most completely
transfers from Lear is an atmosphere of chaos, danger and loss, where struggles for power, status and
territory are unavoidable and lethal and family hostilities are fought with the weapons of war. The poet appropriates
a mythical Celtic Britain to depict the war zone of South Central Los Angeles at the end of the 20th-century and Lear's
mistreatment at the hands of his family to evoke the disrespect and devaluation the disabled person experiences in
public life.
Disability meets Saturday Night Live:
PAUL RYAN, VINCE PINTO, BILL TRZECIAK
P.H.*reaks: the Hidden History of People with Disabilities
MIKE ERVIN The History of Bowling
Since the beginning of a conscious disability drama the most common strategy used to attack received notions of the
physically different body is laughter. After a spinal cord injury that resulted in quadriplegia actor Susan Nussbaum
was recruited for a disabled role in an "inspirational drama" which fortuitously drove her to write her own plays. She
remembers:
It gave me the idea that the wrong way to go was sappy shit, and the right way was shoving our
differences in people's faces and using humor, the humor in the disability community that had been so much a part of
my recovery.
What Nussbaum shares with fellow Chicagoan Mike Ervin as well as Paul Ryan, Vince Pinto and Bill Trzeciak of
P.H.*reaks is a desire to turn the official story upside-down, to break open the clichés and seriousness of
the common images of disability. They rely on the comic review—skits, songs, dances, jokes—the choice of
political theatre artists since at least as far back as the 1920s and Ervin Piscator's R.R.R. (Red Riot Review). Employing
time-honored comic strategies of deflation, exaggeration, and inversion, they rout the status-quo.
None of Ervin's and Nussbaum's early comic sketch shows such as The Plucky and Spunky Show made it into print.
But the comic sketches in P.H.*reaks echo the form and tone of such efforts. In fact Ervin and Nussbaum's
Remains Theater in Chicago created a sketch with an identical premise to Vince Pinto's "Hot Dog"scene in
P.H.*reaks. A young disabled man buys a hot dog in the park and begins to eat it. Soon the media descends along
with sportscaster Howard Cosell, and the hotdog consumption becomes a super-hyped sporting event and inspirational
story. Quite independently Remains created a similar skit, only this time the magical object was a carton of yogurt not
a hotdog that invoked a media feeding frenzy (forgive the pun).
Comic sketches alternate with naturalistic scenes and documentary/found material in P.H.*reaks. In
"Changing of the Guard,"writer Vince Pinto reduces the revered Franklin Roosevelt to an inanimate dummy
that gets tossed around by secret service officers rehearsing how to make FDR not look disabled in front of the public.
Humorist Paul Ryan jumps into the dark world of the carnival freaks and emerges with an exotic princess of small
stature who turns the medical tables on the country doctor who comes to gawk with a bottle in his hand and the privilege
of his profession. Bill Trzeciak dreams up a golf tournament in Las Vegas, pitting a patriarchal god, the "Old
Boy,"against Mother Nature. When the two deities stumble into a Vegas telethon broadcast while chasing a wayward
ball, they encounter a young disabled woman recruited for the show. To the "Old Boy"she's a tragic object of
pity, to Mother Nature yet another example of the infinite variety of creation.
If you are looking for a play that can reach a college audience and which delivers a subliminal gut punch to
received notions of disability, try Mike Ervin's The History of Bowling. Bowling is a four character,
sharp, hilarious take on disabled college life, sex, sports, doctor's notes, missed phone calls, betrayals and nude
portraits. There is a satisfyingly prickly, opposites-attract love story between Chuck and Lou, exploiting not only
conventional rom-com tropes such as world-weary cynics vs. starry-eyed narcissists, but also visible vs. invisible
disabilities. There is a comet and communication via sprays of floral room freshener, the latter used by Cornelius,
Chuck's blind and deaf college roommate. Cornelius is a con artist and lady's man who leaves any attempt to pity the
handicapped gasping in the dust as his chauffeur-driven limo peals out for the pleasures of Atlantic City. I've seen
several productions of Bowling and directed one myself. It never fails to please and instruct.
BIG IDEAS
JOHN BELLUSO's Pyretown
SUSAN NUSSBAUM's No One As Nasty
One of the niftiest things that plays can do is reveal the bankruptcy of universal ideas, of those deep
cultural and seemingly intractable myths that shape our lives. Sam Shepard took on the Myth of the American West in
almost every play. Henrik Ibsen eviscerated idealists in The Wild Duck. Eugene O'Neill battled against
the "pipe dreams"of romanticism. Comedy is one weapon in this war on platitudes—hence the many satirical
takes on telethons by disabled comedy troupes and writers. But sometimes ideas themselves become the fodder for
theatricalization.
For me one of the most gorgeous riffs in all these plays is John Belluso's aria to Darwin and earthworms in
what he called his "HMO romance," Pyretown. In this two character play Harry, a young, disabled
working class man, meets Louise, a stressed out single mother with a chronically ill child, in a hospital emergency
waiting room. A romance ensues and the young man encourages Louise to enroll in community college. Helping her with her
biology homework, he spins out an interpretation of Darwin that upends the claims of Social Darwinism, redefines
"fittest,"and makes a stand in favor of community over individualism. Perhaps it is also a coded
love-song—Harry arguing that he would be a better partner for Louise than her estranged abusive husband. The
lesson begins:
It's not all about "survival of the fittest," not all of it anyway… [S]ometimes the
"fittest" doesn't necessarily mean the strongest, that's a mistake … It's a mistake the Victorians
made which got passed down through the years, "Social Darwinism." They totally distorted his work.
Darwin loved earthworms, most people don't know that, he probably learned as much from studying earthworms as he did
monkeys. They're fascinating creatures, they work really hard… they don't care that we're stronger than they
are; they're caring for the soil we walk on, and farm on and grow our food on and all of that.
Everything passes through their little bodies, they are, really, the only thing that makes the world continue, the
only things that continue to live in nature are things that have, at one time, passed through the bodies of worms.
Susan Nussbaum's No One As Nasty slyly challenges one of the most deeply embedded platitudes assigned
to the impaired body: "Everything happens for a reason."The play begins with an opening comic monologue
which rejects all efforts to assign meaning to the disabled figure. Janet addresses the audience saying:
You meet someone or not, it's an accident. Either it happens or it doesn't, it's strictly a
matter of coincidence. I don't think we draw people to us when we are "ready."And the Hiroshima maidens got
burned and disfigured—there's a word—"disfigured"—because of, why? Because. They were in
Hiroshima. They were too close to avoid the fire, too far to be consumed. If I was 5 seconds earlier or later I
wouldn't be this crip now, my life would be on some different time line. It was an accident, it had nothing to do
with whether I was a good or a bad person. We don't live in an ordered universe where there are reasons and "it's
for
the best" or this happened so I and others " could learn."No. It was an accident like the whole
human race is an accident. Like the dinosaurs got blown away by a meteor.
Nussbaum wrestles with the Myth of Meaning to create new ways of thinking about the disabled person. Her most
obvious tool is humor, but there's more here than jokes. There is a sense of grace, despite Nussbaum's insistence
on the messy, uncontained, impaired physical plane. I have written elsewhere at length about this play.9
Suffice it to say I am a fan.
Theatricalizing history
JOHN BELLUSO The Body of Bourne
JAMES MACDONALD Unsex Me Here
When devaluation and discrimination happen to one person, it is biography, but when …
similar experiences happen to millions it is social history.
Dr. Paul Longmore
One of the biggest shifts in the modern understanding of disability is that it is a social construction not a
medical condition. Playwright John Belluso took as the ground of his writing, a belief that disability is not a
"biological experience,"but instead "a multifaceted network of social phenomenon which is informed
by historical context."10 Plays recovering the hidden history of people with disabilities emerged as
the disability rights movement progressed and disability studies programs took hold.
Reclamation of the past to support a communal identity in the present is a common strategy in political and
community-specific cultural practice, whether defined by language, nation, class, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation,
or physical/mental difference. A short play list exemplifying this kind of theatrical resurrection would include Luis
Valdez's Zoot Suit; August Wilson's ten-play cycle on African American history; Caryl Churchill's Top
Girls; Moises Kaufman's Gross Indecencies: the three trials of Oscar Wilde; David Henry Hwang's Death
and the Railroad, and many more.
I include two such plays here: one a biographical epic exploring the life and legacy of turn-of-the-last-century
disabled intellectual Randolph Bourne, John Belluso's The Body of Bourne; the other, an investigation of the
T-4 genocides under the third Reich, James MacDonald's Unsex Me Here. Unfortunately, The Body of
Bourne, is not published in an affordable acting edition as are many of Belluso's other plays but is listed on
Amazon in a 2001 edition for $44.00. The play deserves to be published in a more accessible version because of its
significance and artistic merit. It contains: Randolph Bourne's extraordinary prose; Belluso's poetry and witty dialogue;
a setting in the Greenwich Village of the progressive era, when labor organizers, radical women, writers and playwrights
sat around common tables hammering out a new American identity; and an argument for a disability identity and history
as its dramatic spine. That argument was a direct result of a collaboration between Belluso and historian Paul Longmore.
As the play attests, the task of writing disability history in either critical or dramatic form is more than an additive
process. It is not enough to insert a neglected figure into an existing theoretical frame, because that frame will most
likely have absorbed the dominant narrative of disability: "an individual triumph over a personal tragedy."What
the epic The Body of Bourne aims for (and accomplishes I believe) is a radical realignment of American
identity informed by a reimagined disability identity.11
James MacDonald's' Unsex Me Here (Intellect Press, forthcoming Spring 2015) is set in Hadamar, a small
town in the Limburg district of Hesse, Germany, in the years between 1933 and 1947. Hadamar was a psychiatric hospital
used by the Nazis as the site of one of six T-4 Euthanasia Programs which performed mass sterilizations and mass
murders of undesirable members of German society specifically those with physical and mental disabilities. Approximately
14,000 disabled adults and children died at Hadamar. Two Hadamar Tribunals into wartime activities were held at the
close of the war. The play is shaped around those tribunals with numerous flashbacks to life at Hadamar.
James MacDonald, a British playwright with cerebral palsy, has written over 30 plays, many published.12
His last collection, Russia, Freaks and Foreigners, was set in post-soviet Russia. According to his long-time
collaborator, director Martin Harvey, MacDonald is attracted to the post-Soviet world because there prejudice is
"expressed openly and not sanitized by English niceties or American correctness; emotions that are fully expressed
and which can swing violently from tears or anger to laughter."3 Though the plays reflect a firsthand
knowledge of the country, MacDonald's Russia is also an imagined place: a cut-off world ruled by bureaucracies where
your fate can turn in a second. Macdonald's Russia, Harvey suggests, represents the experience of disability.
Unsex Me Here's courtroom frame provides stage time for many witnesses. The characters are for the most
part based on the actual perpetrators of the Hadamar atrocities including Dr. Hermann Pfanmuller and Dr. Werner Heyde
. But as the title suggests ( Unsex Me Here) quoting Lady Macbeth's prayer to the dark forces to ready her for
regicide, the focus of the play is on the women involved in these mass murders, the female nurses. These characters
too are historical: Irmgard Huber, Emmy Bellin, Kathe Gumbmann, Minna Zachow, and others. How did nurses, women
dedicated to healing, come to participate in the mass murders at Hadamar, killing over 14,000 children and adults
through starvation, lethal injections and gassing? How does the "following orders"argument play out in a
hierarchical, gendered medical culture? The reasons offered—none acceptable to be sure—are nearly as
numerous as the number of characters.
For example, in an early scene, MacDonald introduces Dr. Hermann Pfanmuller, one of the most virulent proponents
of the euthanasia of disabled children. In a scene that recalls the historical record, Dr. Hermann holds up the
corpse
of an infant to demonstrate the superiority of starvation as a method of eliminating "useless eaters,"explaining enthusiastically:
For me, as a National Socialist, these creatures represent a burden on the health of the nation.
We do not terminate them with poison or injections. This would only provide new slanderous campaign material for the
foreign press and certain Swiss humanitarians with nonsensical views of what constitutes human sovereignty. ( Holding
up corpse.) I ask you in all rational thought—is this human?
At this point the doctor's presentation is interrupted by the late arrival of a new young nurse who has just been
accepted into the Reich Association of Nurses, Kathe Gumbmann. Hermann enquires if she is tired from her journey. Kathe
replies:
KATHE: Not very [tired], but that goose [the corpse] reminds me how hungry I am—
famished!!
HERMANN: Goose? (Laughs.) So you think this is our supper?
KATHE: The game in these parts, I've heard, is wonderful.
HERMANN: It certainly is! (Laughs.) Want me to cut you a slice?
This grotesque exchange establishes Hermann as the kind of moral monster familiar from Holocaust narratives.
But, a few pages later, the new Reich Association nurse Kathe Gumbmann14 comforts a mother surrendering
her disabled child, explaining:
KATHE: We're not monsters, you know… But we're in the midst of world conflict, you
know, when resources need to be targeted properly. In peacetime, of course, your energies are directed toward the
child who needs you the most, the unfit child. The others are able to cope by themselves. In wartime, however, our
emphases shift. We rely on our healthy young people. They carry our national destiny with their strength. And suppose
your community is unexpectedly besieged? Your mother's instinct is to protect the weakest, naturally. Reason
will tell you the healthy child is the more important…because he is the one on whom the whole nation depends.
Do you understand?
By presenting a varied and multiple cast of characters with multiple defences for their deadly acts, MacDonald
exposes the virulent seed that permitted this nightmarish world to flourish: that idea/belief/law that some lives
are worth more than others, that some lives are not worth living at all. The play, like Bourne, interweaves
history and fiction. While two young starving disabled women plot an escape with a sympathetic nurse, the sounds of
a party filter into the room. The staff is celebrating the 10,000th gassed and cremated disabled person with beer
and dancing. The escape plan is a fiction but the party is documented in the historical record.
French historian Jules Michelet recovered the stories of the workers and peasants of France's pre-revolutionary
past believing his task as an historian was "to make a family, a common city between the living and the
dead."15 Both The Body of Bourne and Unsex Me Here reconstruct times and places
when disability was a determined, negative social category, embedded in medical and legal protocols, often with deadly
consequences. Arguably time-traveling with these playwrights, "making a common city between the living and the
dead,"strengthens our communal bonds in the present. We are reminded that not so long ago financial and moral
arguments supported policies that kept disabled people from work and education and took their lives in the name of
mercy.
KAITE O'REILLY
peeling
Nothing changes by changing the content only.
Rachel Blau DePleiss
The Pink Guitar: Writing as a feminist practice.
Kaite O'Reilly is an Irish award-winning playwright whose work has been produced in eleven countries worldwide.
In order to discuss Kaite O'Reilly I have to introduce another layer to this essay which has focused in a somewhat
traditional manner on playwrights and playtexts. I have played lip service to the multidisciplinary nature of theatre
and its interweaving of literary, visual and applied arts in the hopes that you will get these plays off the page in
some fashion and the simplest and cheapest way to do that is to give them a reading.
Kaite O'Reilly's play texts are verbal wonders but they inseparable from their staging, their collaboration with
directors and actors. Plays always are, but O'Reilly has brought something new to the table. I want to look briefly at
one play, peeling.
First performed in 2002, peeling
is a collaboration between O'Reilly and director Jenny Sealey. Since 2007, Sealy has been the artistic director of
the famed Graeae Theatre Company. Established in 1980 by Nabil Shaban and Richard Tomlinson, Graeae is Britain's and
one of the world's leading theatre companies of people with physical and sensory impairments. O'Reilly's and Seeley's
creative leap illustrated here in peeling
has been to use access technologies, such as sign language interpretation and Audio Description, not as
"add-ons"but as integral elements in the creative product. O'Reilly explains: "As a practitioner, I am
particularly interested in work that uses "access devices' to inform the process, product and therefore the
aesthetic."It is not enough O'Reilly asserts, echoing feminist theorist Rachel Blau DePleiss, to change the
content, the form must change as well.
O'Reilly's play peeling
is a loose adaptation of Euripides The Trojan Women (415 BCE). The original play tells the story of the
defeat of Troy through the eyes of the conquered women who survive, their husbands dead, their city in flames. The
women are now spoils of war and will be shared among the conquering Greeks. Astyanax, Hector's young son, is condemned
to death to prevent him revenging his father's death in the future. The play's climax comes when Astyanax's body is
presented on his father's shield to his grandmother Hecuba. He has been thrown to his death from the battlements of
Troy. O'Reilly will take this the classic story of infanticide and occupation and generate a related myth concerning
children, state and individual violence, and disability.
But first she puts a new game in play. In the opening stage directions you find a list of abbreviations that will
appear throughout the script:
(AD) denotes audio-description
(SSE) denotes sign-supported English
(BSL) denotes British sign language
More set-up: we do not see or hear the main play, the "deconstructed"Trojan Women which is
in progress. Instead we see three women, sitting inside three fake hoop skirts/sculptures, their torsos and heads
free. They are the chorus of the play, Deaf and disabled actors. When the women are lighted with a bright spotlight,
then, and only then, are they visible and audible to the imagined audience of the "real"play and speak
lines from the "real"play. When the lights go out they are neither seen or heard by the "real"audience
and they chat with each other. At all times they are seen and heard by us, the live audience in the theatre.
Confused? If you were reading the play out loud together, this would be so much easier.
Here is a fragment to illustrate O'Reilly's use of interpreting and audio description. Alfa is Deaf and uses SSE
and BSL. Remember: (AD) means the actor is providing audio description not acting their character.
CORAL Mothers' faces wet with tears
ALFA [interpreting in SSE] feet dancing, on and on until there was no
more land to dance on and their feet tripped on air and, hands clasped, dancing, dancing, they danced out and plummeted
to their deaths.
BEATY (AD) There is a pause in Alfa's signing hands—a hesitation before
her
fingers— the children and Mothers—descend. [following Alpha's rhythm]
Descend.
CORAL (AD) Beaty's eyes fill with tears
The actor Beaty disagrees with Coral's audio description of her reaction to the children's deaths:
BEATY No they don't.
ALFA (AD) She stares at Coral viciously.
BEATY They don't
CORAL Okay.
BEATY Say it.
CORAL (AD) Beaty's eyes do not fill with tears. (A beat).
BEATY (as self) Thank you.
Hopefully the theatrical fun of this kind of running commentary comes through on the page, but cleverness is not
the (only) point here. This interchange is our first hint of the real story of the play, which I will leave you to
discover yourselves. There is a big idea in this play and it has to do with disabled women's sexuality, abortion,
and forced sterilization. The play is funny and smart, moving through high and low registers without flinching, while
revealing layer by layer (hence the title) the complex lives and histories of the three disabled characters.
Conclusion:
Hopefully this sample will move you to seek out these plays and others like them. Playwrights need a
home to thrive, creative collaborators, and an audience. Consider adopting a playwright for a night or a semester.
If you do put together a reading, could you take a group selfie and email it to me
(victoria_lewsi@redlands.edu)? Just identify the photo by play title, playwright and who is in the room and where that
room is. If you get me just that photo, academic that I am, I promise you will receive extra credit when the final
reckoning arrives, say around the time of the next Oscar ceremonies.
Endnotes
11 Sections of this essay first appeared in Beyond Victims and Villains: Contemporary Plays by
Disabled Playwrights, ed. Victoria Ann Lewis (Theatre Communications Group, Inc., 2006); and Victoria Lewis, "
The Dramaturgy of Disability," in Points of Contact: Disability, Art and Culture, eds. Susan Crutchfield and
Marcy Epstein (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 2000).
I am grateful to James MacDonald for sharing the playscript of Unsex Me Here pre-publication.
2 In case anybody missed it, Eddy Redmayne just won the 2014 Oscar, Golden Globe and BAFTA (British
Academy of Film and Television Arts) awards for Best Actor for his portrayal of the disabled scientist Stephen Hawking
in The Theory of Everything.
To view the full list of endnotes Click here.
Plays
Baizley, Doris and Victoria Lewis with Isaac Agnew, Mary Martz, Ben Mattlin, Peggy
Oliveri, Steve Pailet, Vince Pinto, John Pixley, Paul Ryan, Leslie Sneider,
Bill Trzeciak, Tamara Turner, "P.H.*reaks: the hidden history of people with
disabilities," in Beyond Victims and Villains, Theatre Communications Group, 2006.
Belluso, John. The Body of Bourne. Playscripts, 2001.
To view the remainder of the plays Click here for a printable list.
Victoria Lewis is a pioneer in theatre and disability, working since the 1980s in a variety of
theatrical models—grassroots, community-based, academic, regional not-for-profit, and television and film. In 1982,
with the support of the California Arts Council and Los Angeles's Mark Taper Forum, Victoria founded the Other Voices
Project dedicated to providing theatre training for people with disabilities and creating new texts. In 2000 she
received a PhD in Theatre from UCLA and joined the Theatre Arts faculty at the University of Redlands. Victoria is
the editor of Beyond Victims and Villains: Contemporary Plays by Disabled Playwrights, Theatre
Communications Group,
2006.
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