Bodies in Commotion: Disability and Performance

Disability’s Invisibility in Joan Schenkar’s Signs of Life and Heather McDonald’s An Almost Holy Picture

Disability’s Invisibility in Joan Schenkar’s Signs of Life and Heather McDonald’s An Almost Holy Picture stacy wolf The mind’s eye echoes the mind’s ear. Words act. They are elements of the scenic investiture affecting, synesthetically, light space rhythm pattern sound, but they also resound at the deepest level of the mise en scène, through self time memory consciousness as well. —Herbert Blau, Blooded Thought Performance is the art form which most fully understands the generative possibilities of disappearance. Poised forever at the threshold of the present, performance enacts the productive appeal of the nonreproductive. —Peggy Phelan, Unmarked From the nineteenth-century “freaks” in P. T. Barnum’s sideshows, to the early-twentieth-century “deformed” patients in medical theaters, to the latetwentieth -century heroic “cripples” in realist drama, physically disabled bodies have appeared on the stage. Whether stared at with curiosity, gazed upon with titillation, perused with prurience, or studied with admiration, visibly disabled bodies seldom occupy a drama’s center stage. Rather they function to allow nondisabled characters to demonstrate their generosity and nondisabled spectators to experience their normalcy. Disabled bodies’ 302 corporeal presence creates in nondisabled spectators what David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder describe as “the double bind of fascination /repulsion with physical difference.”1 Scholars in disability and performance studies have articulated a range of critical and theatrical solutions to undo this double bind. For example, Rosemarie Garland Thomson analyzes the dynamics of “the stare” of presumptively able-bodied spectators at a freak show and how it allows them to buttress their sense of normalcy in relation to the stared-upon disabled body; Carrie Sandahl critiques theater ’s persistent metaphorization of disability; Victoria Ann Lewis surveys a range of playwrights’ dramaturgical strategies that are “aimed at exposing the ‘constructedness’ of the disability identity in order to eliminate it” and that celebrate “‘disability cool’”; and Chris Strickling demonstrates the importance of disabled performers telling their own stories in their own bodies.2 Each of these analyses contributes to disability performance studies in signi‹cant ways, using the ‹eld’s theoretical tools and analytical methods to attend to the presence of speci‹c bodies at the site of live performance . This essay will consider a different theatrical manifestation of physical disability: invisibility. Two plays by contemporary American women feature female characters who have visible physical disabilities that are not seen on stage. In Joan Schenkar’s Signs of Life (1979), Jane Merritt suffers from multiple neuro‹bromatosis, or “Elephant Man disease,” and she is described as “a monster.”3 But on stage, the actor playing Jane appears as nondisabled. In Heather McDonald’s An Almost Holy Picture (1995), Ariel is born with lanugo, congenital hypertrichosis lanuginosa, a neurological condition that causes her body to be covered with golden hair.4 But Ariel is a character in the play only through the protagonist’s description of her; she is not embodied on stage at all. These plays differ completely in content and form, in tone, mood, style, and effect. An Almost Holy Picture is spare, with one actor, few props, an almost bare stage, and a churchlike atmosphere. Signs of Life, in contrast, is like a circus, with numerous actors, a three-sectioned set, and many events happening at once. Still, both plays grapple with the complexity of representing physical disability in theater, and both solve the dilemma in the same way: by eschewing visual representation altogether . Both plays instead use language to evoke the characters’ physical disabilities, and they rely on the audience’s imagination to conjure characters whose disabilities are rendered solely in speech. These plays are also similar in how they go about representing the disability unseen on stage, as they employ an extravagant, even excessive vocabulary of the visual and the visible. Both are saturated with visuality in language, with references to vision and seeing, with metaphors and images of sight, with descriptions that are detailed, rich, and evocative. ThematiDisability ’s Invisibility 303 cally, each play negotiates questions of visibility, vision, and the visible; each considers what can be seen, by whom, and to what end. Because both plays features characters with visible physical disabilities that are represented aurally rather than visually, the plays construct a particular and particularly active position of listening and imagining for the spectator. Live performance offers a range of opportunities for the representation and embodiment of characters and of actors with disabilities. Charles Mee, for example, speci‹es at the end of each of...