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Literature and Medicine 21.2 (2002) 312-316



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Book Review

Peering Behind the Curtain:
Disability, Illness, and the Extraordinary Body in Contemporary Theater


Thomas Fahy and Kimball King, eds. Peering Behind the Curtain: Disability, Illness, and the Extraordinary Body in Contemporary Theater.New York and London: Routledge, 2002. Xiii + 179 pp. Clothbound, $75.

Disability theater has been around for several decades; dramatic works that engage disability, for at least 2,500 years, since the playwrights of ancient Greece. Theater scholarship that explores disability issues, however, especially work interrogating the cultural "truths" about disability and illness that enter dramatic works and performances, has only begun to enter the mainstream of theater journals and academic publishing. Peering Behind the Curtain is a recent such example. 1 Broadly framing "disability theater" to mean "drama written and performed by disabled artists, and/or staged works about disability and the social construction of physical difference," the collection introduces us to examples of each (p. x). The first section of the book is scholarship on twentieth-century theater; the second part includes interviews and essays from disabled actors and a disabled playwright, plus an entire short play.

Although the works explored in Section I are familiar items on academic syllabi and stage company repertoires, making this a useful book for teachers, the diversity of the essays can be problematic for the collection. Not only the disciplinary homes of the scholars but also the approaches to the plays vary widely in their theoretical orientation and intensity, especially in terms of awareness of disability studies scholarship. This diversity provokes alternate readings of the book: is it an inclusive collection whose multiply situated looks at the theater of disability and illness resist a party-line perspective, or is it a collection without sufficient self-awareness of its theoretical and political eclecticism? An introduction that foregrounded the very real differences within the collection would have made it considerably stronger. Without that kind of framing, the scholarly part of the collection works best as an idea book, with some essays much more useful than others.

I will begin with the brightest spots. Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren's "Between Two Worlds: The Emerging Aesthetic of the National Theater of the Deaf" is a historically rich, often beautifully written discussion of the history and performance modes of the National Theater of the Deaf (NTD). The sources Kochhar-Lindgren quotes are as memorable as her own invoking of theory to explore NTD's production of "a multisensory, synaesthesiac engagement with performance" in which "understanding unfolds through a type of body-to-body listening" (p. 4). Although this essay does not address dramas that are frequently taught, [End Page 312] it will inspire readers to attend NTD performances and to bring their students along. Four other useful essays address works that often show up on college syllabi, placing them in new contexts. Sarah Reuning's "Depression—the Undiagnosed Disability in Marsha Norman's 'night, Mother" offers a welcome critique of celebrations of this and other literary suicides as examples of feminist triumph taken out of the clinical context of depression. The questions Reuning asks could be extended to the realm of physician-assisted suicide and its assumption that certain kinds of suffering can be relieved only through death, without considering the contributions of pain management and social support systems. Johanna Shapiro's "Young Doctors Come to See the Elephant Man" gives a clear and readable look at the stages of identification and awareness a group of doctors-to-be experience as they read Bernard Pomerance's play based on the lives of "Elephant Man" Joseph Merrick and Dr. Frederick Treves, Merrick's "rescuer." It is not set up as a lesson plan, but Shapiro's account of the various questions she and the students asked, the texts she used, and the responses generated give any teacher a useful set of starting places for classroom work with this narrative. Thomas Fahy's "'Some Unheard-of Thing': Freaks, Families, and Coming of Age in The Member of the Wedding" frames his discussion...

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