Disability and Accessibility

In this first installment, Artistic Director Jeffrey Carpenter discusses the origins of Bricolage’s OjO: The Next Generation of Travel performance.

Stephanie Barton-Fracas, artistic director of Nicu’s Spoon, New York’s first and oldest inclusive theatre, talks about inclusivity as a necessary reflection of our current society.

Jonathan Mandell on the Deaf West Broadway production of Spring Awakening. 

Justin Kaiser explores the issues of representation and neurodiversity in casting for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.

Producer Jack Eidson writes about the challenges he’s faced casting  The Lilliput Troupe  with little person actors.

Ruth Zamoyta of New Jersey Theatre Alliance describes obstacles to theatre attendance faced by patrons with disabilities, and some programs in New Jersey that are working to overcome them. 

Scholar Eli Van Sickel examines the casting of able-bodied performers to play disabled characters through the performances of Bradley Cooper, Daniel Radcliffe, and Kevin Spacey.

Scholar and dramaturg Magda Romanska on the connection between humor and disability.

Aditi Brennan Kapil and Jack Reuler of Mixed Blood Theatre share the Disability Visibility project with hopes of improving the relationship between the American theatre and disability.

Putting his dichotomies to work, Mickey Rowe explains how his autism helps him to be a better actor.

Is it appropriate for a non-autistic to play the part of an autistic? 

Are we free to gawk again? 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.

We produced "A Christmas Carol" and adapted our own versions of "Peter Pan" and "The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe". The students reveled in the attention from their sold-out audiences. These children weren’t just spectators; they were the stars of the show. To a child who is constantly told, "You won’t be able to do that," by teachers or medical professionals, this was an unexpected feat.

In this installment of the Disability in Theatre series, Kevin Becerra interviews Adina Tal, Founder and Artisitc Director of  Nalaga’at Center in Tel Aviv, on her production of Not by Bread Alone. 

The Wheelock Family Theatre, Boston was started by four people: Andrea Genser, Susan Kosoff, Jane Staab, and Tony Hancock. The mission of the theatre was to make a professional theater that would be accessible to everyone, with a multicultural cast, with black, yellow, white, green people. When you start defining people by color, just pull in green and blue and orange, like the Muppets. We just want to widen our embrace. The priority was to be affordable, but from the start, we would always have a show that was interpreted. That was in 1981, and we worked with a lot of people to make that happen. Audio description started around 1990 at Imagination Stage, and Wheelock Family Theatre was drawn to it, as we wanted to cast a wider net, and include blind people.

We did "Pippi", and we had American Sign Language interpretation every weekend. This is because Wendy Lement, the producer at Wheelock, directed the play herself, and wanted the interpreters to be integrated with the cast. They were signing performers, rather than interpreters. They were each assigned a character in the cast, had their own blocking, and dressed to blend in onstage. "Pippi" was unusual in that the interpreters/sign performers rehearsed with the cast from day one until the opening night. They started from scratch, not knowing who the characters are, and worked alongside the cast to develop them. (This interview was conducted in ASL, and was translated and edited by Ariel Baker-Gibbs.)

Not only is the portrayal of disability by a non-disabled actor equivalent to blackface—what we in the disability community derisively call “cripping up” (pretending to have a disability)—universally accepted as a technical skill tucked away in an actor’s bag of tricks, it is always applauded and more often than not, rewarded. 16 percent of Academy Award winners have received the coveted statue for playing a character with a disability; just two of those winners were disabled actors. If you think this phenomenon exists only in Hollywood, consider the 2013-14 New York theater season.

Ariel Baker-Gibbs sheds light on the accessibility of theatre to a deaf audience.

So I ask, is there a way to make disability a part of the world of a play, without reducing it to stereotype or "triumph-over-adversity" tales? Is there a way to make disability business as usual while sharing it with someone unaware of the daily accommodations involved? Is it possible for disability to serve as a metaphor for the emotional and social deficiencies we all carry around? Can it be the driving examination of a play without seeming wholly negative?

Alice Stanley writes about experiencing Chuck Mee's soot and spit, an experimental play about the artist James Castle featuring deaf and cognitively challenged actors.