A starring role for disabilities
Done right, theater uses differences in stories that bring people together
Theater often seizes on the exceptional, the peculiar, even the pathological to get at the universal. Everyone, in his or her own mind at least, is an outsider in some way or another. It’s one of the things, paradoxically, that binds us together and makes us feel less strange and less alone.
Christopher, the autism-spectrum teenager at the center of “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,” stands in a long tradition of characters marked by a physical, psychological or emotional “condition” that sets them apart. In Shakespeare’s “Richard III,” the title character’s hunchbacked deformity is often seen as emblematic of his villainy. The hero of “The Elephant Man,” by contrast, becomes a fascinatingly becalmed blank slate for Victorian society projection in Bernard Pomerance’s play about the severely disfigured John Merrick.
“The Miracle Worker,” adapted from
Helen Keller’s autobiography by William Gibson, may be the most widely known and beloved portrayal of physical challenge. The connection forged between the deaf and blind Keller and her teacher, Anne Sullivan, becomes the sort of double redemption audiences cherish.
For Tennessee Williams, difference was always a point of dramatic empathy and identification. It’s as true of Laura Wingfield, the narrator Tom’s crippled and emotionally fragile sister in “The Glass Menagerie,” as it is of Blanche DuBois, the extravagant seductress who sinks into delusional madness in “A Streetcar Named Desire.”
Many playwrights have seen the treatment of mental illness as a political rallying cry with broader social implications. “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” adapted from the Ken Kesey novel by Dale Wasserman, treats the mental ward of a hospital as a metaphor for the battle between freedom and societal repression. Tom Stoppard set his “Every Good Boy Deserves Favor” in a Soviet mental asylum to explore similar themes. Tom Topor’s “Nuts” enacted questions about the rights and abuses of the mental health system as a courtroom drama.
With works such as “Children of a Lesser God,” the 1986 Mark Medoff play about deafness with a deaf actress cast in the leading role, a new consciousness about theater and disability began to emerge into the mainstream. The Deaf West Theatre company brought sign-language-enhanced productions of the musicals “Big River” and “Spring Awakening” to Broadway. Actors who are blind or in wheelchairs turn up more often onstage — and not only in productions that are “about” disability.
The complicated artistic politics of all this can create some swirling crosswinds. Sensitively done as it is, “Curious Incident” has taken some criticism for not casting an autistic actor in the lead role. Turbulence is never a bad thing in the theater, where audiences are routinely challenged to think and interrogate their own assumptions about normalcy. Differences, in the end, are the things we all have in common.