Res(Crip)ting Feminist Theater Through Disability Theater:
Selections From The DisAbility Project

Ann M. Fox, Davidson College
Joan Lipkin, That Uppity Theater Company

MAN: Was I too healthy?  Was that it?  Did some secret-society deity decide I should be given a handicap to even up the race?

WOMAN: Well, that is an interesting conjecture.
-Myrna Lamb, “But What Have You Done For Me Lately?”

One of the pieces in Myrna Lamb’s 1969 classic, early feminist and episodic play Scyklon Z, “But What Have You Done for Me Lately?,” features a man who is impregnated in order that he might experience the dilemma of an unwanted pregnancy in an anti-choice culture. Here, disability by turns metaphorizes the female body within a patriarchal society as “handicapped” (as the above quote suggests), and looms as the potential punishment for women denied reproductive choice:

WOMAN: There is a woman who unwittingly took a fetus-deforming drug administered by her physician for routine nausea, and a woman who caught German measles at a crucial point in her pregnancy, both of whom were denied the right to abortion, but granted the privilege of rearing hopelessly defective children. (Lamb 1971, 164-5)

 As Lamb’s play suggests, feminist theater is in something of a curiously ambiguous position with regard to disability. For the conscious reader, it quickly becomes apparent that disability images are as ubiquitous in the literary and theater landscapes as their live counterparts are in a society more inclined either politely to overlook their presence or mark it in highly controlled ways. Indeed, as disability and theater scholar Victoria Ann Lewis has noted, “It is not that the nondisabled theater world knows nothing about disability and is waiting to be enlightened. To the contrary, the depiction of disability is over-represented in dramatic literature” (2000, 93). This is no less true for the American feminist playwrights who have been writing women into theater for the contemporary stage. Look to many of the plays that followed Lamb’s that are otherwise lauded for their feminist sensibilities, and you’ll discover that they emulate, rather than problematize, that early and essentialist icon of disability in classic theater, The Glass Menagerie’s Laura Wingfield.  Prominent figures of this kind, for example, include paraplegic Julia in Maria Irene Fornes’ Fefu and Her Friends (1977); the severely depressed MaGrath sisters in Beth Henley’s Crimes of the Heart (1981); and paraplegic Skoolie in Kia Corthron’s Come Down Burning (1993).  “Feminists today,” notes disability studies scholar Rosemarie Garland Thomson,  “even often invoke negative images of disability to describe the oppression of women,” and that theoretical use finds its artistic corollary with astonishing regularity in feminist playwriting (1997, 279). Lamb’s example, while an early one, merely continues the use of disability as metaphor for female oppression that we can see in characters as early as the neurasthenic Young Woman battered by gender expectations in Sophie Treadwell’s Machinal (1928), or as recent as brain-damaged Sara, literally beaten in a gay-bashing in Diana Son’s Stop Kiss (1998).    
It is certain that the use of physical difference as a metaphor, one which does not represent disability experience for its own sake, is deeply at play in theater.  Disability and literature scholars David T. Mitchell and Sharon Snyder have labeled this process as it occurs in literary fiction “narrative prosthesis.” That it is as pervasively present within feminist playwriting, which ostensibly rejects the socially-constructed value systems embraced by more canonical theater (more on this in a moment), seems at first something of a conundrum. Disability and theater scholar Carrie Sandahl points to several examples of this seemingly ironic state of affairs:

Consider the use of epilepsy as unbearable stigma in Marsha Norman’s ‘Night Mother; or paralysis as a perverse, grotesque burden in Maria Irene Fornes’s Mud.  Even “positive” metaphors (as in Jane Wagner and Lily Tomlin’s use of mental illness as inspiration in Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe) ignore the actual material conditions of the disabled people portrayed. ( 1999, 15)

Sandahl’s list can easily be extended; the plays I mention above are themselves also works in which “the use of disability as a dramaturgical device tends to erase the particularities of lived disability experiences” (1999, 15). Paraplegia, for example, operates as a metaphor for the punitive nature of patriarchal structures in Fefu. Each of the MaGrath sisters’ depressive episodes contributes to the larger image of Southern eccentricity and repression Henley creates. And in Corthron’s play, the poverty that circumscribes the women throughout is embodied in Skoolie, as she wheels herself about in a crudely-fashioned cart.
All this is not meant to negate the power and worth of these plays and the importance of their roles in challenging assumptions about class, race, gender, and sexuality. It is also not meant to imply that only feminist playwrights have invoked images of disability in this way; for example, American multicultural plays ranging from Hanay Geiogamah’s Body Indian (1972) to August Wilson’s Fences (1987) also use disability to embody the experience of racial and economic oppression. Furthermore, the move from the page to the stage, informed by a feminist sensibility, does not always of necessity follows old patterns; indeed, “when feminism and disability politics are taken into consideration together, they can productively inform and complicate one another” (Sandahl 1999, 12). Metaphor, which is at the heart of theatrical language, need not be rejected completely, but might likewise be problematized in just this fashion. Cherríe Moraga’s Heroes and Saints, for example, is a feminist work that powerfully interweaves metaphor and the lived experience of disability. The play’s main character, Cerezita, born without a body as a result of her mother’s drinking from the pesticide-ridden community water supply, embodies the outcome of the environmental racism leveled against her Latino community. But Moraga also creates Cerezita as a desiring, desirable human being whose disability is very much part of her identity, and not merely a personal tragedy. Cerezita resists her mother’s attempts to hide her from the stares of strangers, insisting on her own visibility; indeed, her disability later makes it possible for her to actively lead her community, not just passively inspire them. Still, there is no avoiding the fact that in much of feminist theater, we see reflected the tensions and questions that have already emerged from the movement to place disability studies and feminist thought in conversation with one another. Given feminist theater’s relative inattention to the presence of disability beyond its more troublesome metaphorical uses, to what end might the feminist practitioner of theater come to concern herself with disability culture? What in feminist practice lends itself to creating theater centered on disability, and to reclaiming the power of metaphor in representation? And what, in turn, does a “disability aesthetic” have to offer by way of expanding and interrogating feminist theater?
But before engaging these questions, I want to define what I mean when I speak of feminist theater and disability theater, respectively. For the purposes of this essay, I will define feminist theater as that which also seeks to effect social change through questioning the traditional apparatus of theatrical representation, and by extension, calling attention to the social construction of identities upon which privilege is based. In other words, as feminist performance theorist Jill Dolan points out, it is a theater whose theoretical perspective

is concerned with more than just the artifact of representation—the play, film, painting, or dance. It considers the entire apparatus that frames and creates these images and their connection not just to social roles but also to the structure of culture and its divisions of power. (1993, 47)

This is a category of feminist theater typically defined as materialist.  Engaging psychoanalytic, poststructuralist, and Marxist theories, it seeks not only to challenge traditional forms of spectatorship, but all elements of theatrical creation and presentation (Dolan 1993, 47-9). The playwright is not assumed to be literally or figuratively the solitary producer of meaning (and presumably male); the theatrical space is not presumed to be a proscenium arch; the representational style is not presumed to be mimetic or that of theatrical realism. Dolan also allies materialist feminism with “a postmodernist performance style that breaks with realist narrative strategies, heralds the death of unified characters, decenters the subject, and foregrounds the conventions of perception” (Dolan 1996, 97). This theater tradition challenges conventional uses of representation, history, and language that, conversely, place women either at the periphery or in the center as objectified and gazed-upon entity.
Because a definition of disability theater has not been as extensively theorized as that of feminist theater, to speak of disability theater is instantly to raise questions that point to the elusiveness of defining the thing itself and that have yet to be fully explored by critics. Does any work by a disabled playwright automatically count, regardless of subject matter?  Should such a category include images of disability in canonical theater? Should it include long-established theatrical traditions within communities where the label of “disabled” is met with much more contention, such as Deaf theater or signed poetry? Should it include art made with disabled populations that primarily emphasizes the therapeutic or cathartic effects on those involved as performers?
 It is no more accurate to assume that all work by a disabled playwright or performer is of necessity “disability theater” than to surmise that all work by women playwrights is feminist. The most innovative and productive disability theater, for the purposes of this essay, does not include disability’s more traditional theatrical manifestation, i.e., the tokenized presence of the disabled character in isolation, as metaphor for insidiousness or innocence, or as overcomer. This does not mean that we should not look at the historical representation of disability in theater and ask questions about the kinds of cultural dialogues it alternately reflects and invokes around deviations from bodily normalcy. Because this kind of representation of disability experience is more widespread in popular literature and the mass media, to analyze these characterizations is no less monumental or important a task awaiting disability studies scholars.  
To speak of “disability theater” as an entity is to speak of a self-conscious artistic movement of roughly the last three decades, during which time writers and performers within disability culture have moved to create art as multifaceted as the community from which it emerges. Victoria Ann Lewis’s article, “The Dramaturgy of Disability,” has been crucial in the process of not only identifying who some of the important writers of disability theater have been for an academic audience, but also initially delineating the dramaturgical strategies that underpin disability writing for the stage. Lewis points to artists whose approaches to theater run the gamut from writing plays (Mike Ervin, John Belluso, Susan Nussbaum) to conducting performance workshops (Lewis’s own OTHER VOICES Project, a disability performance workshop based at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles) to creating solo performance work (Cheryl Marie Wade). To her lists we can add significant other forays into the performance of disability, including playwrights such as Katinka Neuhof; community-based theater workshops like The DisAbility Project (based in St. Louis, Missouri) and Actual Lives (based in Austin, Texas); and solo performers like Lynn Manning, Terry Galloway, Julia Trahan, and David Roche.
In her study, Lewis locates two prominent directions in disability theater: one focuses on exposing disability as a social construction, and one “celebrates the difference of the disability experience, what is called ‘disability culture’ or ‘disability cool’ in the disability community” (2000, 102). The former emphasis might produce theater that advocates for disability rights, works to contravene familiar stereotypes, questions definitions of bodily normalcy, resists essentializing disability into one kind of physical experience, and foregrounds the ways in which disability intersects with other identity categories. The latter direction emphasizes representing the experience of disability and disability culture. In the April 2001 issue of American Theatre magazine, author Kathleen Tolan locates the work of disabled theater artists along slightly different lines: “There are artists and groups whose main interest is social/political, who perceive their main work as critiquing society, changing perceptions, forging communities….there are others whose greatest interest is in artistic and aesthetic exploration and expression” (2001, 17). 
Useful as Lewis’s and Tolan’s work is, it suggests polarized categories of creation, a construction that we might begin to think beyond.  How might we begin to imagine a definition of disability theater that negotiates these divisions between art and activism in a more synthesized fashion, producing something we might label a “disability aesthetic”? In the process of doing so, disability theater can not only expand its own artistry in dialogue with feminist theater, but can in turn problematize feminist theater’s potential reification of the metaphorical use of disability as a sort of “dramaturgical prosthesis.” Through the interrelationship of these theaters, we might in turn contribute to the call Thomson has made for feminism and disability studies to productively inform one another. The DisAbility Project is a useful company through which to investigate the question of a “disability aesthetic.” As artistic director Joan Lipkin points out, “I always say to my ensemble…that we are equal parts art and advocacy.  And the minute we fail to delight, surprise, move or mystify in how we say things as well as what we say, we’ve lost our focus” (Tolan 2001, 19). The Project is thus at a conscientious intersection of both the artistic and activist strains of disability theater. 
The scripts that follow, “Facts and Figures,” “Employment,” and “Go Figure,” exemplify how we might begin to answer the questions raised above, and further the exploration of the ways in which feminist and disability theaters can inform and enhance one another. They are three of an expansive and growing repertoire of theater pieces created by feminist playwright and director Joan Lipkin and the members of The DisAbility Project, a grassroots St. Louis theater ensemble that creates and performs work centered around disability culture. Founded in 1997, the Project is made up actors with and without disabilities, embodying a diverse (although by no means complete) representation of acting experience, age, race, class, sexuality, and disability. The disabilities that have been represented at varying times within the group include paraplegia, quadriplegia, AIDS, multiple sclerosis, cerebral palsy, stroke, blindness, bipolar disorder, cancer, spina bifida, muscular dystrophy, spinal cord injury, asthma, polio, epilepsy, amputation, depression, cognitive disability, and alcoholism. Under Lipkin’s direction, the members of this community-based theater meet weekly in workshop sessions to share experiences, create, and rehearse work. Originally, the Project was conceived to build toward a single theater event in the fall of 2000. The Project has evolved, however, into an ongoing ensemble which both continues to create theatrical work and to take their award-winning performances out into the greater St. Louis area, in venues from ballrooms to boardrooms to classrooms. At any given performance, the company draws from a repertoire of approximately twenty pieces to assemble a performance tailored to the individual audience. The pieces cover a range of disability experiences, including disability history, parking, pain, employment, attendant care, sexuality, hospitalization, social interaction, and access. In addition to depicting some realistic situations, there are also several pieces that are primarily visual in nature, in which the innovative movement and stage images that can be created by disabled bodies are the primary focus. 
The creative process from which these scripts emerged begins to suggest how feminist theater practice and disability theater might engage one another. While the weekly workshops take place under Lipkin’s direction, the resulting work resists privileging a single view; instead, it is collaborative, multiperspectival, constructed in concert with Lipkin, the performers, guest artists, and the audience (whose feedback has given rise to new pieces). Because the ensemble cast contains a range of performers with and without disabilities, no one kind of bodily experience is reified as the disabled or non-disabled norm. Likewise, the presence of disabled actors emphasizes the importance of their performing their own stories. And while there are significant and material differences in the lived identities of the non-disabled and the disabled, integrating this company underscores that there are concerns relevant to the disabled community that have real implications for the non-disabled as well. One can become disabled at any time, and we are all on our way to becoming disabled by virtue of the aging process; certainly our body-phobic culture is permeated with a wide range of physical shapes, sizes, and capabilities for which we have little tolerance.
A playwright whose own principles of feminist playwriting and directing embody poststructuralist and materialist thought, Lipkin has always interrogated those socially constructed categories of race, class, gender, and sexuality typically regarded as cohesive and natural. She has informed her work on the Project with similar innovations in theme and style, confounding traditional audience expectations and viewing habits. Each of the following three scripts links to concerns and methodologies advanced by feminist theater, but likewise, infuses those ideas and dramaturgical strategies with a disability perspective. 
 For example, “Facts and Figures” extends a feminist critique of history and language; both are systems of meaning from which disability has been erased, except as a disembodied expression of derision (“You are so ADD”). In a personal interview, Lipkin emphasized that the company, in performing this piece, wants to “awaken the audience to attend to language differently and have their experience of the performance to be grounded in a sense of history.” It at once presents an audience with the realities of the disability experience, while simultaneously exposing how that experience is co-opted and portrayed negatively within everyday language. This piece foregrounds the lived experience of those with disabilities, past (“Freak shows exhibiting the bodies of disabled men and women were common entertainment in the Victorian period”) and present  (“People with disabilities are the largest minority in the United States”). Through the revelation of these facts, disability is moved out of the world of the “private, generally hidden, and often neglected” (Wendell 1997, 266). The facts included link the experience of female and disabled bodies (“During witch trials, many of the women who were tried for witchcraft had disabilities”), foregrounding for an audience how female and disabled bodies have simultaneously occupied sites of marginalization. 
But these facts also remind us that there is a specific disability experience to be articulated. Disability studies scholar Susan Wendell, in calling for a feminist theory of disability, confirms this necessity and suggests the opportunity arising from it:

Emphasizing differences from the able-bodied demands that those differences be acknowledged and respected and fosters solidarity among the disabled.  It challenges the able-bodied paradigm of humanity and creates the possibility of a deeper challenge to the idealization of the body and the demand for its control.  (Wendell 1997, 272)

The reconsideration of social history that feminist theater seeks to re-create is therefore deepened by acknowledging other categories by which communities are “othered,” including disability. The “figures of speech” interwoven with the piece’s facts are a confirmation of this. Using disability negatively (“He gave me such a lame excuse!” “That is so retarded”), they at once appropriate and reconfigure physical difference solely as lack.. By questioning the dismissive assumptions behind our use of disability language (“She is so psycho”), the piece invites each audience member to become aware of and thus accountable for her or his own use of metaphor and language. Incorporating such a consciousness of language that appropriates disability experience into feminist theater can only help practitioners of feminist theater choose their own use of disability with as much care as they would language marking race, class, sexuality, and gender, for example.
One of the facts with which “Facts and Figures” presents an audience member concerns the disabled and work: “People with disabilities are the most under-employed population in the country, mostly because our transportation systems make it difficult for them to get jobs, or employers won’t hire them.”  More specifically, as Heather Gain and Lisa Bennett point out in the Spring 2002 NOW Times, the disabled have “the highest unemployment rate of any group--somewhere between 72 and 90 percent” (Gain and Bennett 2002, 16). The piece entitled “Employment” comically and pointedly expands on this fact by performing the assumptions about ability that underlie employer willingness, or rather, unwillingness, to hire the disabled. The characters in “Employment” move to challenge the seeming impasse that results when a disabled person applies for a job but is quickly turned down on the grounds that she might “turn off the customers,” not be up to the rigors of “a pretty demanding job,” and is only suited for “the sheltered workshop.” “Can this situation be saved?” asks the job seeker, turning to the audience for resolution. In some settings, the audience is given the opportunity to create potential solutions to the dilemma, imagining how the workplace and workers’ roles could be reimagined to include the disabled. Members of the Project have also constructed alternate endings that can be presented if an audience is less inclined to participate, endings in which they, along with the manager, are invited to open their minds. Lipkin and ensemble tweak the social assumptions about what the disabled can and cannot do, and offer a further pointed comment: in an age where the disabled are unemployed by in such large numbers, and employers are in need of employable workers, ableist attitudes serve no one. Linking gender to economic inequity is not new in feminist theater, but the attention paid to the particular link between disability and unemployment enhances that critique of economic privation based on social identity.
 “Go Figure,” the story of Katie Banister’s reimagining of her sexual identity after becoming disabled, both allies constructions of gender and disability, as well as speaks importantly to the unquestioned assumption in our society that the disabled person is asexual, undesirable, and undesiring. What is immediately striking about this piece is that even as Banister revels in remembering her sexuality before her accident (“You may not be able to tell, but I used to be quite the Barbie girl”), that memory is tinged with the recollection of “worry about what people would think of [her].” We, as audience members, are reminded that Banister’s change in experience underscores that the female body, in both its non-disabled and its disabled identity, is policed as the site of potential transgressions away from normalcy, whether the standard be one of assumptions about beauty, sexual propriety, or physical wholeness. Banister’s life transition from non-disabled to disabled is therefore not a shift from normalcy to abnormalcy so much as a movement from being the object of one kind of spectatorial look to another, for as Thomson reminds us, “If the male gaze informs the normative female self as a sexual spectacle, then the stare sculpts the disabled subject as a grotesque spectacle” (1997, 285). In our society, both female bodies and disabled bodies find themselves literally and figuratively marginalized because of their supposed deviation from an idealized norm, whether that model is a particular standard of femininity, heterosexuality, or some illusory construction of wholeness.  Thomson specifically points out the parallels:

Both the female and the disabled body are cast within cultural discourse as deviant and inferior; both are excluded from full participation in public as well as economic life; both are defined in opposition to a valued norm which is assumed to possess natural corporeal superiority. (1997, 279)

This is comically, but pointedly, illustrated when Banister remembers, “I placed a personal ad in the paper: ‘Petite, professional, independent woman on wheels seeks male,’” and “one man,” unable to conceive of a disabled woman placing a personal ad, “thought I drove around a lot.” But Banister’s experiences, while distinct, are perhaps not as removed from those of non-disabled women as might be imagined, since “female bodies, like bodies of color, homosexual bodies, and disabled bodies, are positioned culturally so as not to forget their embodiment” (Miner 1997, 293).    
Banister powerfully reclaims her own particular sexuality, breaking down the illusion that the “temporarily able-bodied” watching her performance are somehow removed from these body issues. Equally important is her assertion that she is having “the best sex of my life”; hers becomes not an overcoming narrative on how to learn to do without, but a invitation to the audience to learn to do with differently. “Go figure!” she exclaims, but that expression of surprise can simultaneously be read as an invocation to us, in the audience, disabled and non-disabled, to figure out how to move beyond the narrow confines of how society defines sexual roles. For this reason, it is particularly fitting that Banister trades off the telling her story with Rich Scharf, an openly gay male participant in the company. This both destabilizes the expectation that it is only her story, and one grounded only in a presumption of heterosexuality.
As Nancy Mairs explains in Waist–High in the World: A Life Among the Nondisabled, “Most people, in fact, deal with the discomfort and even distaste that a misshapen body arouses by disassociating that body from sexuality in reverie and practice” (1996, 51). “It was like I was a virgin again!” Banister exclaims about her sexual identity after becoming disabled, and in a sense, she is “like a virgin.” She, and the audience, have to re-imagine her sexuality and desirability as manifested in ways beyond what society deems normal or acceptable. In this way, Banister is one of those paraplegics who, as Wendell asserts, “have revolutionary things to teach about the possibilities of sexuality” (1997, 274). The materiality of Banister’s life as sexual being is acknowledged, celebrated, and also the means by which a re-imagination of sexuality can occur through disability.  
Dramaturgically, the pieces discussed here all sustain aesthetic challenges to traditional theater practice familiar to those historically adapted by feminist playwrights. The episodic nature of the performance, juxtaposing, for example, monologic pieces with more non-representational ones, makes for a nonlinear viewing experience, echoing the movement within feminist theater to resist conventionally realistic representation and progressive plots. A resistance to the linear and the progressive can likewise inform a disability aesthetic that resists physical constructions of evolution, progress, and normalcy through resisting dramaturgical convention.  In form and content, these pieces invite the nondisabled members of the audience to consider new ways to perceive space, time, and the body, while not denying the materiality of those same bodily experiences as lived by the disabled.  
More specifically, both “Go Figure” and “Employment” rely on Brechtian interventions into the theatrical viewing experience, including direct address to the audience and disrupting conventionally realistic representation. In “Go Figure,” for example, two actors become a split subject to pass the single story back and forth; while it is Banister’s experience, Scharf’s presence suggests its connection to others. Scharf’s readable physical and gender difference from Banister at once prevents us from universalizing Banister’s experience and simultaneously compels us to consider how Scharf might have felt his own body similarly circumscribed by ideals of male beauty and masculinity. “Employment”’s rolling back the scenes to invite audience members to “replay” them in a different, more activist manner, works to create a similar alienation of the audience from a passive viewing experience. This referencing of fast-forward  and rewind is a product of the age of television and video, pointing to the manner in which the Project also uses references to popular culture. Deconstructing the assumption that theater is “high culture,” these references, like the comedy of the pieces, invite audience members to link their own experience and vernacular with those used by the disabled characters, thus further establishing a connection. 
One final note about the performance context for these scripts. The scripts are typically performed in concert with other pieces created by members of the Project; in a typical performance, anywhere from eight to twelve pieces get performed, depending on the audience, size of the ensemble, venue, and amount of time available. While other pieces might be performed in between them, when all three are part of a performance, the scripts included here are generally presented in the following order: “Facts and Figures,” “Employment,” and “Go Figure.” The order is purposeful; as Lipkin observes, “the experience of any performance is an emotional, spiritual, intellectual, and visceral journey.  The arc of that journey is crafted carefully.” As a result, “Facts and Figures” and “Employment” both come early in the performance. “Facts and Figures” foregrounds a history audience members may be unfamiliar with, while “Employment” simultaneously embodies the concrete reality of job discrimination while engaging an audience’s support through humor. “Go Figure,” as one of the most intimate and emotionally challenging pieces, comes later in the performance.
Rosemarie Garland Thomson has called for disability to become a “universalizing discourse,” invested in

asserting the body as a cultural text that is interpreted, inscribed with meaning, indeed made, within social relations of power. Such a perspective advocates political equality by denaturalizing disability’s assumed inferiority, casting its configurations and functions as difference rather than lack. (1997, 282)

Toward that end, and as these pieces demonstrate, an emergent disability theater can simultaneously build upon and complicate the thematic and aesthetic interrogations feminist theater initiates with regard to other kinds of social identities. This can help feminist theater avoid the subtle re-inscriptions of normalcy encoded in a too-commonly well-intentioned superficial use of disability in theater. Go figure: crip culture can rescript feminist theater in ways that contribute to establishing disability and feminism as powerful allies in imagining a more expansive view of reality, onstage and off.