There’s a mock city–a construction of wood, cloth and mirrors–in the back exhibition space at Randolph Street Gallery. The church steeple is stunted, the bank floor is covered with pennies, and the schoolhouse’s chairs are nailed to the wall above a chalkboard floor. Everything’s just slightly off-scale, just a bit askew.
Tucked into a structure that resembles a small house, Liz Young plays with pieces of wedding cake and a pair of scissors. She’s wearing a wedding dress and, in a final gesture, takes the scissors to the material and cuts it from her body. She’s left exposed but not quite nude, sitting in a wooden chair. It’s then that her paraplegia registers: Her feet are dead weights on the floor and her body has begun to take on some of the curvature that comes from many years in a wheelchair.
“My work is about people’s relationship to the physical world,” says Young, the Los Angeles-based performance artist who created the installation and accompanying performance called “Mendacity.” (The installation will be up through April 13 at Randolph Street.)
“I think whether you’re blind or deaf or able-bodied or in a chair–you have a relationship with the physical world,” she explains. “I’m tweaking with the standards to get people to think. And I’m kind of resisting the disability part, because I want it to be about more than that, too.”
Young’s show is the most recent performance in Chicago by a disabled artist at a time when the city seems to be a locus for artists with disabilities. In the last year and a half, three other shows by and about disabled persons–Peter Cook’s “Your Eyes, My Hands,” Tekki Lomnicki’s “When Heck Was a Puppy” and Susan Nussbaum’s “Activities of Daily Living”–earned critical praise and long runs.
In addition, local theaters are increasingly casting actors with disabilities–such as Diana Jordan, who has cerebral palsy, and Robert Schleifer, who is deaf. Both played in Bailiwick Repertory’s 1995 production of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town,” in roles not originally written for persons with disabilities. Singer Teddy Pendergrass, paraplegic after an automobile accident in 1982, was featured last month at the Chicago Theatre in a touring production of Vinnette Carroll’s “Your Arms Too Short to Box With God.”
Perhaps most significantly for the local disabled community, when Remains Theater went into hiatus last June, its one continuing component was the Access Project, its expansive outreach program for and about persons with disabilities. Now housed at the Victory Gardens Theater, it’s still headed by Michael Ervin, its original coordinator.
All this is a long way from 1983, when Nussbaum, who is a quadraplegic, and Lawrence Perkins, who is not disabled, took the Second City stage with “Staring Back,” an unabashedly political series of vignettes examining the able-bodied world’s attitudes toward the disabled. “That was a real milestone for us,” says Linda Harrington, who is deaf and a program director at Thresholds, a social service agency that serves a large deaf population.
Prior to “Staring Back,” persons with disabilities were mostly invisible in local theater, as actors or patrons–a reflection of society in general, according to many persons with disabilities.
“I wasn’t conscious of seeing any positive role models or images of any disabled persons when I was growing up,” says Harrington. “There was nothing about disability thought to belong in public. I would say that was also the attitude of my family and what I picked up in school from teachers.”
Others saw a distinctly negative image. “I was very aware of other little people in TV and film and the way they were cast made me angry,” says Lomnicki, who is 41 inches tall. “They were cast as people to be made fun of–as elves or otherwise magical people.”
In fact, the entertainment world–which often prides itself on sensitivity–frequently has been complicit in creating and perpetuating distorted images of the disabled. Consider the real subjects of Diane Arbus’ photographs of “the grotesque” or more recent work by Joel-Peter Witkin; the popular film depictions of Frankenstein’s creature as mute and physically disabled (contrary to Mary Shelley’s articulate and athletic creation in the original text) or the fetishized amputee in the 1993 movie “Boxing Helena.”
When disabled persons aren’t cast as monsters, the entertainment world often frames them as naively superhuman or heroic, as evidenced by stage or film versions of the Helen Keller story, D.W. Griffith’s “Orphans of the Storm,” or the more recent “Rain Man” or “Forrest Gump.” On Monday, disabled actor Christopher Reeve got two standing ovations at the Academy Awards. While Reeve sat in his wheelchair on the stage, stars in the audience clapped wildly and shook their heads; many appeared on the verge of tears.
Neel Keller, artistic director of the now moribund Remains, says he was glad he missed the Oscar telecast for that very reason. “I kept hearing how it was the show’s most emotional moment and I kept asking myself `Why? What did he say?’ And then I realized it was just because he was in a wheelchair.”
Still, more balanced images of the disabled are cropping up more often in popular culture. Recent films have featured characters such as the deaf brother in “Four Weddings and a Funeral” and the paraplegic soap-opera actress in “Passion Fish.” And in TV commercials, people in wheelchairs shop at Kmart and deaf kids sign the virtues of Aptiva computers.
Attempts at full integration
Many disabled activists attribute these changes to the Americans with Disabilities Act, signed into law in 1990 by President George Bush. The law made it illegal to discriminate against persons with disabilities and required public entities and private businesses to accommodate them. About 14 percent of the population is disabled in some way.
“The ADA has made a big difference; people have had to become more aware of disabilities,” says Lomnicki.
Aside from forcing an attitude shift, the law’s most significant impact has probably been in its architectural requirements for new construction and renovation of existing structures. Thus, when Steppenwolf built its $9 million theater in 1991, it included wheelchair access (ramps, elevators and seating accommodations). For the well-funded Steppenwolf, the ADA demands were not a burden, but smaller theaters have struggled with the costs of compliance.
Locally, the Access Project may have had as much impact as the ADA in the theater community. Begun in 1992 at Remains with a $450,000 grant from the Lila Wallace Readers Digest Fund, the project focuses on the disabled community as a target of audience development; it’s believed to be the only grant of its kind in the country.
The project provides consulting to theaters to make their buildings accessible. It also provides outreach and marketing to the disabled community, sign language interpreters and close-captioning for the deaf, Braille programs and audio descriptions for the blind, staff training and acting and writing workshops.
“We’re the only ones in the country providing integrated workshops of able and disabled persons,” says Ervin. “The workshops are important because we wanted to make theater accessible to disabled persons at every level–we didn’t want disabled people to just sit in the audience.”
“To me, that’s the real payoff of working with disabled actors,” says Cecilie Keenan, artistic director at Bailiwick. Her projects with deaf actors have helped them get work in productions at Blue Rider, Strawdog, Footsteps, Terrapin and the Chicago Dramatists Workshops, among other theaters. “More theaters need to include more people. We need to ask ourselves: How do we look at things? How do we look at people? Then we need to challenge that.”
The Access Project has spawned The Access Coalition, which includes Victory Gardens, the Goodman, Steppenwolf, Blue Rider, Center Theater, Lookingglass, Second City and Northlight. The coalition’s goals are to better integrate disabled persons into theater, as both patrons and artistic collaborators.
The Blue Rider has added Cook, who is deaf, Lomnicki and Nussbaum as artistic associates. “We didn’t do it because they were disabled; we didn’t set out to become a place for disabled artists necessarily,” says Tim Fiori, the theater’s artistic director. “But we’d worked with them and loved their work as artists, so we asked them, individually, to join us.”
Last year, the Chicago Dramatists Workshop began its Silent Word Project, a script development program that teams hearing playwrights and deaf actors. Earlier this year, Sign on Stage, a commercial service to provide artistic sign-language interpreters for theatrical productions, was founded. Its clients include Victory Gardens and Steppenwolf.
Room for improvement
Yet things are still far from perfect. Many theaters remain inaccessible. Some that are accessible, such as the Lunar Cabaret, don’t include that in their advertisements. Others claim to be accessible but don’t seem to quite understand what the term means.
For example, Cafe Voltaire, which considers itself accessible, will have employees carry patrons in wheelchairs down the stairs to the basement performance space. That’s not only unacceptable by ADA standards, it’s dangerous.
Most theaters still don’t have interpreters for the deaf and most of those that do offer the service only one or two nights during show run. In many cases, well-intentioned theaters hire interpreters with little experience in artistic interpreting; the results can be disastrous.
“When you get a bad interpreter, it immediately seems that the show is very badly written and produced,” Harrington says. “People seem to speak out of character. It’s very frustrating, and boring.”
And with the exception of Victory Gardens, no theater in town provides audio descriptions for the blind–using headsets to describe select visual information.
“There are still barriers,” says Keller. “Things like people saying, `Oh, isn’t she plucky and spunky?’ But that’s not particular to the theater, but to the issue of disability in general. The dream is that, over time, you do what you can, you educate, even if it’s just a small thing like getting somebody to say `disabled’ instead of `handicapped,’ ” Keller says.
It seems the education goes both ways.
“I notice growth in myself,” he explains. “I’m much more comfortable around Tekki and people in wheelchairs. Now it’s hard for me to imagine that I was ever not comfortable.”
