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The New Freak Shows

Are we free to gawk again?

a man without a shirt on stage
The Elephant Man. Photo by Joan Marcus.

That’s what Broadway audiences are doing during the revival of The Elephant Man, one of several stage shows and television series that are bringing attention back to the freak show. Of course, the theatergoers at the Booth Theater are looking at the very hot actor Bradley Cooper, shirtless and without any makeup to simulate deformity, which is different from the way carnival sideshow audiences in Great Britain 130 years ago looked at Joseph Merrick, the real-life, physically grotesque character Cooper is portraying in Bernard Pomerance’s play. Or is it different?

Freak Comeback?
It would probably be inaccurate to say that the freak show is making a comeback, for one of two reasons.

First, the traditional freak show is unlikely ever to become what it was for a solid century—a wildly popular form of entertainment. There were hundreds of them throughout the United States, according to Robert Bogdan, author of the 1988 book Freak Show, “from the smallest towns to the largest cities” with casts made up of people with “major, minor, and fabricated physical, mental, and behavioral differences”—dwarfs, giants, Siamese twins, bearded ladies, savages, snake charmers, sword swallowers, and fire eaters. In many of these shows, no matter what the “difference” was that got them hired, cast members were expected to perform, as we learn in Side Show, a revived Broadway musical about real-life conjoined twins Daisy and Violet Hilton who became popular singers and musicians in the 1920s and 30s.
 

The ensemble on stage
Side Show. Photo by Joan Marcus.

The traditional freak shows lost their popularity and dwindled around World War II, not least because the public began to see them as indecent, exploiting what we now call the disabled. One critic labeled the form of entertainment a “pornography of disability.”

One deeply ironic result of this change of public attitude is presented near the end of Side Show.  The “African cannibal” (actually from Hackensack, New Jersey) who had shared the bill with the Hilton’s at the carnival side show has become their personal assistant as they graduate to the relatively upscale world of vaudeville. He runs into the geek, the fortuneteller and the half-man/half-woman with whom he used to perform. They catch up on old times, the geek explaining that they ‘ve gotten out of show business, and now operate a bakery together.

“First the girls left,” says the geek, referring to the Hilton twins, “then do-gooders tried to save us from being exploited.”

“All they saved us from was being fed,” says the half-man/half-woman.

This underscores what Bogdan maintains: With just a few exceptions, the “exhibits” were themselves performers who “actively participated in the construction of their freak creation.” For some, it was the only way they could make a living—and a few made a good one.

But there is arguably an alternative reason why freak shows won’t make a comeback. Did they ever truly leave us, or just take a different form? 

But there is arguably an alternative reason why freak shows won’t make a comeback. Did they ever truly leave us, or just take a different form? How else to categorize the Guinness Book of World Records, entering its sixtieth year, or Ripley’s Believe or Not, with its various “aquariums” and attractions in thirteen states and Canada? Aren’t these more or less freak shows, with the previous mix of exhibition and performance skewing more to the former?

Freak Pride
The revived attention to freak shows on stage and screen comes accompanied with a revised vocabulary to make them more acceptable to modern sensibilities.

In AMC’s Freakshow, a “reality” series that began in 2013, a former music producer named Todd Ray runs a circus sideshow in Venice Beach, California that seeks to re-create the seedy establishments of yore, but put them in a new light. In the series premiere last year, Ray invites the tallest man in America (7’8”) and a bearded lady to join his show and meet the “extended family”—a sword swallower who calls himself a shock artist, a fire-eater, a little person, and a collection of living two-headed animals. The tall man, who is in law enforcement, tells Ray (and the viewing audience) that he feels uncomfortable with the word freak, and that he just wants to be thought of as normal. But Ray tells him: “Freak is a positive word. It’s a redefinition of the word.”

Something of the same strategy is under way in FX’s American Horror Story, whose fourth season is subtitled “Freak Show.” American Horror Story’s co-creator, Ryan Murphy, had some previous experience with a kind of over-the-top horror as creator of the TV series Nip/Tuck, about two plastic surgeons. Jessica Lange stars in the fourth season (as she has in the three previous season), along with heavyweights such as Kathy Bates, Denis O’Hare, Angela Bassett, and Frances Conroy. But Murphy also brought aboard Jyoti Amge, billed as the world’s shortest woman, and Mat Fraser, an actor and musician who was born with a condition called phocomelia, which results in foreshortened arms and no thumbs.

In interviews introducing the season, Murphy called Amge and Fraser part of his “special-abilities cast” and said: “We got this amazing cast, and I think, have given a voice to many people who don't have a voice. I'm very proud of them."

The implications of equating the casting of a horror show with the advancement of a civil rights agenda are mind-boggling. Even if self-serving of Murphy, it is not necessarily bogus to do so. In previous generations, a person with a condition such as Mat Fraser’s might feel lucky to get a job at a freak show promoting himself as Frog Boy or Seal Boy. Now Fraser plays such a character on TV, but the actor himself has become a celebrity—and he is using that celebrity status to call for the hiring of more disabled actors to play disabled characters, and for the hiring of more disabled actors period.

In an article written for the Atlantic over the summer, disabled playwright Christopher Shinn advocated for the same thing, asserting, “the exclusion of disabled performers allows people to simultaneously gawk and look away. The actor walking on stage to receive an award for playing a man who can't walk” is a lie that’s reassuring. Shinn also said: “Pop culture’s more interested in disability as a metaphor than in disability as something that happens to real people.”

Two actors attached at the hip
Side Show. Photo by Joan Marcus.

Both observations count as revelations for me as I think about The Elephant Man and Side Show, and before them, last season, Violet and The Cripple of Inishman. All four are about disabled characters that are viewed as freaks, and who view themselves as freaks. All four have been cast with some of the most attractive and appealing performers to appear on any stage—Bradley Cooper, Erin Davie, and Emily Padgett (among others), Sutton Foster, and Daniel Radcliffe respectively.  Nothing is done cosmetically to hide their appeal. (In fairness to Side Show, the Hilton sisters themselves were beauties in their youth—which I suspect was a large factor in their popularity. As for the ensemble of freaks in Side Show, they are in fact fitted with scary prosthetic disguises in this production, but, as predicted by Shinn, most take off their masks at the curtain call.) And (able-bodied) audiences can easily treat all four shows as an inspiring metaphor for the triumph over their own feelings of freakishness.

A clue to why there are so many such shows on stage lately might be contained in a passage in Act One, Moss Hart’s beloved theater memoir, in which he advances a “pet theory” that the theater “is an inevitable refuge of the unhappy child.” To alleviate his unhappiness the child retreats into fantasy, “a world of his own, and it is but a small step out of his private world into the fantasy world of the theater.” In exchange for acceptance into that world, one must be willing—even eager—to be gawked at (or, on the other side of the footlights, to do the gawking.)

To some, then, the life of a freak may not just be a useful metaphor for theater people. It seems nearly a job description.

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I think another reason that most performers' appearances are left largely unaltered is that heavy-duty prosthetics don't read well on stage. A few weeks ago, I saw 'Side Show' and 'Elephant Man' on two consecutive days. The make-up/masks of the troupe of freaks in 'Side Show' (pictured above) was far less convincing and far more distracting than Bradley Cooper's bare face. Even though he contorted his body and changed his voice and breathing, he obviously looked nothing like the actual Joseph Merrick, and yet his performance, his *suggestion* of Merrick, was more compelling and believable than the literalized 'Side Show' freaks. I believe the original production of 'Side Show' took a more minimalist approach with the representation of the freaks, and I wished this one had followed suit.

Thanks for this article! It's very interesting to see freak shows enjoying this pop culture moment.