By Maria Hodermarska, LCAT, RDT/BCT
In drama therapy we have long created therapeutic theater performances that place illness or disability on stage in front of an audience. (See more about therapeutic theater here.) With increasing frequency, actors with visible physical disabilities are being cast in productions that may or may not have an intended therapeutic purpose. We are thinking about the impact on audiences and performers of doing so.
General theater audiences are not used to seeing disabled bodies performing on a stage. A new generation of theater makers and performers are boldly and bodily challenging the aesthetics of ableism in the theater.
But what happens to predominately able-bodied audiences safely hidden in the dark when viewing performers on stage who are actually living with, for example, visible, physical disability? Do we consign the actors to a separate category of something less than theatrically legitimate, even when the character herself is disabled? Are we, in Julie Salverson’s words, “eroticizing injury?”[1] Or, are we witnessing an important new approach to theater-making?
One vivid example of these challenges can be found in Sam Gold’s (2017) Broadway production of Tennessee William’s The Glass Menagerie. Gold cast Madison Ferris, an actor with muscular dystrophy who uses a wheelchair as Laura. Laura is the sister of Tom Wingfield, the play’s protagonist, and the daughter of Amanda Wingfield. The play is primarily about the relationship between these three people. Laura was originally written as a character who ambulates with a limp the result of a bout of pleuresy as a child.
Ferris’s body, in particular, not her performance, was the subject of much press. Rex Reed’s review, “found her struggle alarmingly distracting enough to throw the whole play off balance. For an actress who knows too well this might be her last chance to be cast in a major role on Broadway, the experience is probably a dream. For the audience, it’s something of a nightmare.[2]”
In this production Laura is carried and placed in her wheelchair by her mother, Amanda; at another point she must crawl, pull herself across the floor, to her wheelchair, which invites—commands really—the audience to gaze at her disabled, struggling body for a significant length of time. Audiences as well as reviewers felt challenged by the invitation. Reed wrote that the actor’s disability turns the lyrical and passive nature of the character into a “pitiful, grotesque invalid.” I might suggest that in this transformation, the opposite occurs and is evidenced in Reed’s critique. The character is afforded greater agency, presence and potency for an audience through the disability of the actor.
Hilton Als, in the New Yorker, asked, “Why is Ferris’s disease called upon to generate a spectacle, the ‘drama’ of this scene? This kind of manipulative bid for tension is a trick that reveals not Williams’s understanding of illusions but Gold’s lack of comprehension.”[3] Als seems to suggest that Ferris’ disabled body is part of the deconstruction of the poetry of Williams’ text.
“A new generation of theater makers and performers are boldly and bodily challenging the aesthetics of ableism in the theater.”
Ferris’s body becomes the performance. It is her body that challenges, for some, the delicacy of illusion seminal to Williams’s text. The actor’s body destabilized the text and the audiences and offered a new overlay on it. This implicates the audience in new ways and invites the audience potentially into the relational questions that challenge to some extent the poetic realism of William’s great play.
Here are the ways that I am implicated.
The presence of non-fictional disability on the stage intensifies Tom’s infamous departure at the end for an itinerant life. In this production, he is leaving, amongst other things, his discomfort with a disabled sibling whose dependence on him in the future (if not in the present) will be total; Laura’s paraplegia becomes a metaphor for the desperate predicament faced by siblings of people with disabilities. The eternal binding of caregiving that disability presents for a sibling is a story with which all siblings are familiar. In most families, as with the Wingfields, the choice is stark and desperate for the sibling: either enter into the expectations of responsibility or leave forever. In the play it is clear that, for Tom, no amount of alcohol or distance or time can erase the sad knowledge of the responsibility abdicated.
What was also performed for me in the production are the relational aesthetics[4] of disability in my family—how I metaphorically carried my son through diagnosis, treatment, education and independent living, how my deep frustration with the time it takes (like a crawl across a stage) to get anything substantive done in the bureaucratic systems is ever present, how my desire to reject the caregiving role performs, how futile my battles for “normalcy” seem, and—truth be told—how my desire to reject my caregiving role performs in my rejecting behavior with both of my children. It is so easy to fantasize about an inclusive world that does not exist and to create protective fantasies that can be the opposite of constructive.
These, of course, are my issues, not my sons’. My dark challenges are revealed through a casting choice in a familiar play. Ferris’s body offers me a chance to reflect upon my own life and behaviors which allows me to recognize in so many ways, the Amanda in me.
Ironically, a play about the impossibility of ever escaping reality is a play that audiences may traditionally seek out in order to justify our desire to escape truths rather than our need to confront them. The consequences of illusion or delusion are so dire in the text and yet the injection of real disability in the play circumvents the illusion for me and forces me to confront things.
“It is so easy to fantasize about an inclusive world that does not exist and to create protective fantasies that can be the opposite of constructive.”
One wonders what the reaction would have been if the actor cast as Laura was able-bodied, not a wheelchair user in real life but simply directed to use a wheelchair and crawl across the stage. If audiences knew that she was ambulatory but “pretending” to be crippled, like so many previous Lauras in thousands of productions that preceded this one were. Would that have been a more palatable performance of disability for the audiences? Or would an able-bodied actor’s “performance” of paraplegia been a source of outrage? What is it about the performance of disability for real held within the fiction of the play that is so disturbing?
When our intolerance to difference is performed for us, it hurts. Our initial impulses are so often to avoid or reject the decentering for some safer ground of predictability, symmetry, the comfort food of a Laura who only pretends to limp. Able bodies can perform disability. Disabled bodies not only perform it but also question our sense of our own compassion and challenge our bigotry.
Drama therapist, Nisha Sajnani, wrote about audiences in theater that openly place illness or disability or social condition on stage, as implicated witnesses. Sajnani sees these performances (whether intended for therapy or not) as opportunities to consider as audiences how we invest in “maintaining divisions” between illness and health, ability and dis/ability, and the like.[5] Her invitation into a relational aesthetics offers us a path to manage the affects and effects of our witnessing. The embodied aesthetics of Gold’s production implicated me in this necessary, relational taking of accounts.
An important challenge of this generation is to enter into a greater capacity to tolerate discomfort and ambiguity that confronting a disabled body can provoke. Our willingness to embrace that challenge is essential to the continued capacity to matter and evolve as theater professions and as a society.
[1] Salverson, Julie. (2001) “Change on whose terms? Testimony and an erotics of injury,”
Theater 31, 3, 119-125
[4] Sajnani, N. (2012). The implicated witness: Towards a relational aesthetic in dramatherapy. Dramatherapy: The Journal of the British Association of Dramatherapists, 34 (1), 6-21.
[5] Sajnani, N. (2012). The implicated witness: Towards a relational aesthetic in dramatherapy. Dramatherapy: The Journal of the British Association of Dramatherapists, 34 (1), 6-21.
About the Author:
Maria Hodermarska, MA, RDT/BCT, LCAT is an Assistant Clinical Professor of Drama Therapy at New York University. She is a Licensed Creative Arts Therapist (LCAT), a Registered Drama Therapist (RDT) and Board Certified Trainer of Drama Therapy (BCT), a Credentialed Alcoholism and Substance Abuse Counselor (CASAC), and an Internationally Certified Alcohol and Drug Abuse Counselor (ICADAC). Her work spans both the creative and applied psychological uses of the theater arts, most often within NGOs, community-based mental health programs and alcohol/substance abuse treatment programs serving un-served or under-served populations.
Ms. Hodermarska is the coordinator of creative arts therapies for Project Common Bond, an international symposium for young people who have lost a family member to an act of terror, armed or inter-religious conflict. She is former Ethics Chair and current Ethics Committee member for the National Association for Drama Therapy and is a former Education Chairperson for the same organization.
