By Maria Hodermarska, LCAT, RDT/BCT
I am a cis-identified, white female drama therapist, college professor, woman “of a certain age” and I am the mother of a young adult man who is a college student and who identifies, among many other things, as functioning on the autism spectrum. Before becoming a parent, I worked for years with adults who identified (and some who chose not to identify) as living with developmental disability, traumatic brain injury or functioning on the autism spectrum. To some extent, disability has been my world. But, ultimately, it is not my world: I have “stood [a]mong them, but not of them” [1] much as people living with disability stand in society “among” but not “of.”
I believe that it is my obligation as a parent, as an educator and as a clinician, to follow Paolo Friere’s invitation to challenge my “habits of thought” about disability in order to co-construct, or imagine into being, a world where everyone gets a seat at the table, even while we acknowledge that the meal will be different for each of us. I welcome you into my world.
…And you have lied so much to me
(Lied about the world, lied about me)
That you have ended by imposing on me
An image of myself.
Underdeveloped, you brand me, inferior,
That is the way you have forced me to see myself
I detest that image! What's more, it's a lie!--Caliban,in Aime Cesaire's, A Tempest
“…the motives hidden behind the mask are as numerous as the ambiguities that the mask conceals.” –Ralph Ellison
In theater, film and TV there remains a challenge of representation when it comes to portrayal of people with disabilities, particularly for people with autism or other developmental disabilities. People who do not identify as living with these disabilities are more often than not cast to play characters who are. Is this wrong? This has been the topic of some attention in recent years [2][3] I am curious if it is time to rethink these casting choices.
We have abundant examples of the performance of disability through a persona of disability in contemporary media. Boo Radley, Sheldon Cooper, Dr. Temperance “Bones” Brennan, were brought to us through actors who do not identify as living with disability. As the cultural consciousness in white, hetero-normative, patriarchal, cis-gendered and able-bodied “America” expands to include an awareness of the complex diversity of our world, more parts in film and TV are written about people with disabilities. But, they are not necessarily written, for people with disabilities.
Max, the son on the NBC TV drama Parenthood, was a character identified as functioning on the autism spectrum. The show’s creator, Jason Katims, has a son whom he identifies as living on the autism spectrum. An actor who does not identify as living on the spectrum plays the role of Max. Katims’s role as a parent, by his own report, gives him the credibility to talk about parenting someone on the spectrum and most likely informs the idiosyncratic humor and events occurring around Max in the drama. But how would casting a person who identifies as living on the spectrum disrupt the presence and performance of autism and the humor around disability that is engaged in the narrative? Would the audience be comfortable with the humor, if they knew that there was an element of laughing behind the back of the person with a disability? Autism is performed in Parenthood through an ableist lens and ableist perception of autism—the able parent’s perception, not the child’s.
“. . .how would casting a person who identifies as living on the spectrum disrupt the presence and performance of autism and the humor around disability that is engaged in the narrative?”
In high school my son took one of those personality tests that would help him to narrow his vocational prospects based upon his psychological profile and personal affinities. The test came back with the following recommendations: clergy, psychologist, comedian. All three roles are roles that, given his neurological diagnosis, might not be so easily accessible to him. But they should be. I was aware of how disability is performed for him in culture but his abilities are not afforded the opportunity to perform in the world.
One theoretical underpinning of my profession of drama therapy, Role Theory, posits that life is theater and that all human beings are a collection of roles. In drama therapy we think of roles as professions but also as ways of being in the world. “Autistic” is one way of being and seeing in the world that is as varied as the people who identify with the role. It is a role that everyone plays, at one time or another, regardless of diagnosis. Social engagement with each other is a choice or a game we play but not necessarily a requirement.
Of course, I can offer examples of a changing tide in casting. The first actor who identifies as living with autism was cast as the lead in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time on Broadway[4]. (Ironically, although it is a play about autism, most people living with autism find it impossible to watch due to the bright lights and lasers, the loud sounds, the “too muchness” of the stage craft.)
In the 1980s theater and opera director, Robert Wilson collaborated with poet, Christopher Knowles, who is also a person who identifies as living on the autism spectrum. They produced some of Wilson’s most important work like Einstein on the Beach. According to Arendell, “autistic perception is partnered with a postmodern
fragmentation and minimalist automatism.” Arendell argued that there is a level of appropriation in Wilson’s collaboration with Knowles and a fascination with Knowles’s different perception and worldview that is potentially patronizing. But in truth, their collaboration stands as a rare example of an aesthetic partnership that invited audiences into an autistic aesthetic and challenged neuro-typical norms of theater[5].
“Producing new work that disrupts ableist norms will bring us closer to each other.”
A new film by Rachel Israel Keep the Change (Kino-Lorber)[6] offers immersion into autistic community that is much closer to reality of lived experience with autism because the actors in the film are people who identify as living on the spectrum. It tells a truth about the experience of living with autism that it is like being forced to join a club no one would choose. The main character is sentenced by a judge, as a punishment for a crime, to attend a drama therapy/socialization group for people living with autism (the drama therapist is played by Heidi Landis, a real drama therapist and the group is a real socialization group. The punishment leads him into a community of peers in which he is challenged that in order to love, he must accept his identity as a person with a disability. “Keep the change” is an expression we use when we feel an abundance. The film highlights the “autos” and isolation that potentially can inhabit autistic experience, as it follows the main character into an experience of how a sense of abundance comes with a need to bring people closer, to be brave and flexible in relationship.
We should consider and rethink the ableist structures of performance--norms around vocal intelligibility, physicality, standing on stage facing an audience, looking at the camera, standing still, that people with disabilities may be unable to “perform”. These are the norms that Israel is challenging and working deeply within in her film.
Performing disability (by an actor who does not live with disability) requires performing through or within ableist norms of theatricality, physicality and vocality that guide our traditional Western understanding of performance. A new interdependency, as Audre Lorde wrote, could potentially arise from a reconfiguration of the hegemony, something that resembles a “mutual, non-dominant difference [7]. Producing new work that disrupts ableist norms will bring us closer to each other, into the discomfort of encounter and difference, towards the fear of our own otherness and offers more seats at the cultural table.
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2016/07/16/almost-all-disabled-tv-characters-are-played-by-able-bodied-actors-can-we-fix-that/?utm_term=.bb54d602b5b2
[4] http://www.playbill.com/article/watch-the-first-autistic-actor-to-play-curious-incident-of-the-dog-in-the-night-times-lead-role-in-rehearsal
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.
