It should come as no surprise that the Americans With Disabilities Act is my favorite triumphant piece of legislation past. This weekend was the act's anniversary, and I was humbled to see that Howlround, the amazing online theatre commons, reposted a piece I wrote for the organization last year in regards to theatricality and accessibility, citing the blog as one of "our favorite articles." The piece can be found here, and please enjoy these other articles about neurodiversity and performance of disability by able-bodied actors.
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I was not able to journey to New York and travel back in time with the talented cast and crew of THIS ROUND'S ON US last weekend, but by all accounts, it was a smashing good time. I'd like to thank Nylon Fusion Theatre Company for producing my short "Batter Up: A Play About Baseball Or Baking" as part of the festivities, and I'd like to send a shout-out to my director Ivette Dumeng, along with my actors Molly Collier, Zack Mikio, and Toby MacDonald for creating what looks like a super fun performance! And a final hi-five to the Ohio University Playwriting Program and Catherine Weingarten for advertising the weekend of shows on the OU MFA News blog.
Photos from the production, by Al Foote III (from Nylon's Facebook page), can be seen below. I return with more information about the upcoming THIS ROUND'S ON US: Time Travel 30's-40's. This weekend of short plays will take place on June 27th and June 28th at 7 and 9 pm, and my short play "Batter Up: A Play About Baseball Or Baking" will be featured at the 7 pm showing, along with several other stellar works. The play is directed by Ivette Dumeng; the little girl will be played by Molly Collier; the baseball players will be played Toby MacDonald and Zach Miko.
Above you can find more information from Nylon Fusion's web presence (along with the evening line-ups), as well as beautiful shots of the actors and event poster. If you are looking for tickets, head to Brown Paper Tickets. I am excited to announce that I will have my New York debut as a playwright this June. My short script "Batter Up: A Play About Baseball Or Baking" will be presented as part of the Nylon Fusion Theatre Company's quarterly ten-minute play festival, THIS ROUND'S ON US. Four times a year, Nylon Fusion produces evenings of short plays revolving around a single theme, event, or time period. This summer's theme was the 1930's and 1940's, since the year's set of festivals is focused on time travel, or works set in specific decades. My five-minute drama concerns a tomboy named Candie; she yearns to play baseball professionally, but finds herself with only her baseball cards to talk to in the days before the Rockford Peaches showed that women were capable of hitting homers out of the park.
Nylon Fusion is a really cool new works company, with ties to a tight-knit writer's collective; it is supported by an advisory board of innovative and established playwrights, and each ten-minute festival the company produces also features the work of a board member. I am lucky to be included in a group of stellar writers for the festival, and I'm especially honored that THIS ROUND'S ON US will be anchored by playwright Don Nigro, who wrote one of my favorite plays, Seascape With Sharks And Dancer. If you are looking for a fun theatre experience in New York City this June, please check out THIS ROUND'S ON US! It's on June 27th and 28th at 7 and 9 pm, at The Gene Frankel. I will provide more details as they become available, but suffice it to say, I am pumped to be involved in this set of performances. As spring beckons, my schedule for the year becomes clearer. First, I am proud to say I will continue teaching theatre and writing at Benedictine University and Prairie State College next fall. These are great schools, and it is my honor to work with the students at each institution. I enjoy the life of a teaching artist, and I'm glad I get to continue discussing art at these colleges.
Next, I am happy to say I was nominated as a finalist for Western Michigan University's Activate: Midwest New Play Festival. Once again, The Magnificent Masked Hearing Aid gets a little love. The script wasn't chosen for inclusion in the festival, but it's always nice to see my work resonates with people. Speaking of work, I am knee-deep in writing what I think could make for a pretty exciting piece of theatre. The play revolves around recent questions of inclusion and disability and how and who gets to perform disability onstage. It's early stages yet, but I haven't been this exciting about a script in a long time. Also coming down the pipeline? A comics project that I will have more details on later, but suffice it to say, I am pumped. And a web-series with a long-time friend that may be the most meta thing I've ever created. Lots of cool things coming in 2015! It's been an exciting week for this humble playwright. I am happy to announce that I will be serving as an adjunct instructor for Prairie State College for its theatre programming in the 2014-2015 academic year. This summer, I will be teaching Introduction To Theatre, which involves script analysis, viewing theatre performance, a smattering of theatre history, and a heavy dose of dramatic structure -- and more courses will materialize in the fall. It's going to be a wild ride, and I'm excited to get back in the classroom next week!
Two other items: I rarely post about the outcomes of contests on this blog, and really, I should do that more often. I've been lucky enough to earn two distinctions of note in the last year or so. Last fall, I was listed as a semi-finalist in the Capital Repertory Next Act! New Play Summit, with my full-length play The Magnificent Masked Hearing Aid. Last March, that same script was listed as a semi-finalist in the Actor's Theatre of Charlotte's nuVoices Festival. It's fun to see this script in particular advance at least part-way in contests, as I work on newer material. The play means a lot to me, and the only reason it's getting this far is because of the many hard-working actors, designers, directors, and writers who helped me shape its story. So, thanks to all my collaborators! I'm hoping to get back in the rehearsal room sooner rather than later. BEWARE: Below be spoilers for the "How I Met Your Mother" series finale, which aired last night! I am a playwright by nature and training. Hence, the stories I tell are usually finite, and hopefully the fate of my work remains largely under my own control. The same cannot be said for television or film, where production companies or networks may have sway over a final product, whether or not that means editing a film into something different than its creators intended, or prolonging the life of a television show far past the twists and turns the show was intending to take are accomplished. I don't really understand the struggles it takes to get a TV show to air, nor how to plan potentially infinite seasons. The stories I tell tend to have endings that I work towards, and I achieve them (even if the endings end up changing; they often do). So while I can't understand what Carter Bays and Craig Thomas went through in crafting nine(-ish) years of stories for "How I Met Your Mother," I feel like I got a glimpse into their creative ambitions last night during the series finale. If I had my druthers, I would design an entire class around the narrative structure employed in "How I Met Your Mother." A random and numerous amount of episodes display strong storytelling technique. A random and numerous amount of episodes display great character work, stunning set pieces, or emotional moments. But I also think the show provides fantastic lessons about long-form storytelling that any writer could learn from -- starting with how endings function in a story intent on proving both the journey and the destination are of equal importance. Last night's final episode was dissatisfying for a lot of people, for a number of reasons. I know many people who are extremely angry about the show's ending. I know others who were moved to tears. I remain somewhere in between these two states. I have always enjoyed this show, I've shared it with some of my closest friends. In a way, this show's ending was a final goodbye to my twenties, which ended earlier in March. So I have investment in the story, for personal as well as entertainment reasons. That doesn't mean I am immune the writers' missteps. For example, I dropped out of the show once seasons six, seven, and eight began to drag their heels on dramatic developments between the characters. I couldn't help but feel the amount of story the writers had to tell didn't gibe with having forty-some more hours of TV time. More importantly, I began to feel the "why today" was outweighing the show's "present" events. The whole show serving as a flashback was fine, but fans were chomping at the bit to know why Future Ted was even telling the story of how he met his kids' mother. The series began with Ted declaring he'd tell his disinterested kids this story, and that was that. This simplicity is not sustainable over nine years. A couple seasons, sure, but if writers don't start answering questions that pop into viewers' heads, the audience will provide answers on their own. Most viewers I know figured the mother was dead in the future, which is exactly what we learned last night. We were told by Future Ted that the mother died, and he is telling his children their story as a look back at their meeting and life together. Except the story wasn't about the mother. The kids (from a section filmed allllllll the way back in 2006 or 2007) speak the truth when they inform Ted that the story had little to do with their mother and everything to do with his one-time girlfriend and best friend Robin. They spur him on to start dating her, as apparently she's still been in this family's life, and Ted's life in particular. (Mind you, we're told this; we've seen none of it in an hour raging from filling in the blanks on career prospects to Barney becoming a dad and finally evolving into a non-creeper.) Ted runs to Robin's place with blue french horn he stole for her in the first episode, back when they wanted different things, twenty years before. Again, a lot of people are mad that the "How I Met Your Mother" creative team chose to undermine its starting premise (the mother is NOT Robin, as stated at the end of the show's pilot, when Past Ted is convinced he'll marry her), only to have Robin be Ted's endgame after all. I didn't mind their winding up together as an ending, as the actors were great together, and the writers wrote some of their strongest material because of their relationship. Also, writing 101 -- if you keep telling us somebody ISN'T ENDGAME, after a while it's you protesting too much, and I know you'll prove your own point wrong after a certain amount of time. The original tagline for the show was "A love story in reverse," which I never understood until now. That being said ... the audience is right to be upset. I respect a lot of what Bays and Thomas and the whole directing, writing, and production team have brought to the table with their series (Robin Sparkles, y'all!). And doing a finale where you kill the mother, divorce a couple who just got married last episode, and show how another couple struggles to get their careers on track is pretty courageous, for a sitcom. But winding us back to the start of the series wasn't satisfying to me, and it should have been. Because Bays and Thomas were attempting an audacious perception shift; they were trying to change the entire meaning of the story Future Ted's been telling in the last five minutes of the show. But attempting is the key word here. It wasn't a successful shift for me. Dramatic conflict is generated by presenting the audience with two images and then bouncing them against each other, until one wins out. Perception shifts replace one way viewing of the final image with another. The point of a good perception shift is to reveal that what we learn post-shift makes more sense than what we'd been presented with before the shift. Think Oedipus learning he murdered his father and married his mother; it's surprising, but the clues tell the tale. The reason people feel robbed by Ted choosing Robin at the end of "How I Met Your Mother" is that the writers didn't give us enough information to put the pieces together ourselves. If we could track back that the reason Future Ted's spent so much time chatting with his kids about Robin is because he's trying to move on with his life after his wife's death, then we'd all be satisfied. But we only for sure learn the mother was ill in the finale, and we've never been shown the twenty years of friendship Robin and Ted fostered, so she could still be seen as a viable candidate for his heart. An entire season could have been dedicated to the Mother's relationship with Ted, rather than just Robin and Barney's wedding weekend. We could have seen twenty years in twenty-two episodes -- not in flashes and glimpses -- but in goal-driven stories that show us grief and recovery and hope. If the show was about time, and being at the right time and place to make a choice, then the creative team needed to show us that time, and give us the chance to watch action unfold. This would only support the ambition that the story the show's been telling is not the one you think it's been telling. Good narrative structure is like a magic act. Most times it involves misdirection, a "Look over here while I stick a rabbit in this hat to wow you with at the end of the show!" But you need to do more than make us look in the other direction. You need to thread through information that will let us accept the shift, that the rabbit has been in the hat the entire act. By spending an entire season on Barney and Robin's wedding, by giving so much weight to every single hour, it became difficult to focus on what mattered and what didn't in the show. The mother was clearly of importance, but so was Ted letting go of Robin in order to pursue the mother after the wedding. The two issues were never put into direct conflict, however, so the trajectory didn't see to accommodate where we landed. That may have been the point, to watch how small moments lead to big choices, and life gets in the way and changes your plans sometimes. I guess I just wish we'd seen it all happen. Still, I can't argue with the ambition driving the final moments of this episode. I applaud it, even if the execution was lacking for me. For what it's worth, I still felt it. And again, working out a satisfying end for a show where one of the stars wanted minimal screen time, where the show's network wanted to extend the show by a season, and where the end was filmed back in the mid-2000s ... well, that's gotta be hard. If anything, at least now I know what the writers intended the show to be. What I cherish more is the lessons I can glean from the ambition driving this whole enterprise. "How I Met Your Mother" photo: CBS website. I often wish I had been a better student when it came to studying science. Discovering how the world works or building a new world, to the best of one's ability, is thrilling and to the benefit all. Had my talents pointed me in another direction, I would have loved to be a marine biologist or an astronomer or a paleontologist. Sadly, my mind doesn't work the way a scientist's does; I like to think I possess the same sort of curiosity, but I am better at weaving together words than revealing or refining the building blocks of life. I am fortunate to know a bunch of amazing scientists, however -- many in my own family, and many of them chums. Thanks to my time as an undergraduate at Beloit College, I gained close friends who are biologists and geologists, and their continuing knowledge keeps me clued into the world. Case in point: while studying theatre in Wisconsin, I played the role of an aspiring scientist in a feminist revision of Cinderella called The Ash Girl; I was actually one of the ugly step-sisters, and the tragedy of my life was that my mother cared more about me marrying for money than gaining professional fulfillment. I got swept up in the greed and received a toe amputation in return for my gold-digging. Mostly, I was playing a buffoon, but my most telling line in the play amounted to something like, "I don't want [balls and gowns and carriages, etc.]; I only want a microscope." It was easily my biggest laugh line, but I found it showcased my character at her most honest. All she wanted was discovery and study; all she got was pain (though she received a sort of happy ending, in which Cinderella's fairy godmother sent her to the woods to collect rocks and never see anyone ever again). As an amateur scientist in the play, I made reference to things I didn't understand, particularly pertaining to geology. I took some of my dialogue to my friends, who were more than happy to explain pronunciations and provide photographs of chalcedony (the word I butchered best) and topaz and jasmine. And when I proclaimed those rocks by name the night they attended the performance, I was never prouder of representing knowledge; honestly, it was a way to pay forward their helping me understand the world better. I don't imagine anybody went home that night and Googled chalcedony. But a girl can dream, can't she? So what was the point of all me blathering on about my teeny tiny not real contribution to science education? I suppose I've been thinking a lot about science in relationship to narrative lately. You could say it's because I finally got around to seeing "Gravity," or because "Cosmos" has been on (and it's amazing), but I'm betting it's because I finally started reading Lazarus by Greg Rucka and Michael Lark. Lazarus is set in the near-future in a United States divided between wealthy corporate families. Science has excelled to the point that each family has a "Lazarus" protecting them. A Lazarus is a genetically engineered human being who essentially cannot be killed, and commands each family's military. The series centers around Forever, the Lazarus for the Carlyle family. She doesn't realize she is not related to her father, brothers, or sisters, and her struggle to defend the family -- which has enslaved a large chunk of the country -- while feeling remorse for her actions provides the main conflict for the book. It's a great read. one that Rucka doesn't clutter with a lot of world-building. Those interested in world-building can find a timeline at the end of many issues, but you get the gist of the secrets being kept from Forever just from the art and the script alone. What I find most interesting is Rucka's inclusion of scientific advances after the letters column; by doing so, he is able to draw a line between his concerns and the way our world is advancing towards the nightmare scenario he's depicting. It's pretty heady stuff, and I enjoy it quite a bit. Rucka seems to have found a balance I struggle with in writing about technology and science (as I often do when it comes to disability). By centering his discussion of scientific abuses and advances in the protagonist, he makes Forever into a symbol of where we could go if we twist knowledge to selfish ends. Her condition is also the lynchpin for the stakes of the series; once she discovers she is not one of the family, imagine the havoc she will wreak. He doesn't manipulate science (as is done in some moments of "Gravity") to bring about problems; he uses what we're attempting and learning to force characters to make choices. Of course, the Lazarus world is further along than we are, but by acknowledging that at the back of the book, Rucka -- to my mind -- avoids accusations of misusing science to tell a good story. Of course, as an artist, I want to be responsible when I write about hearing implants or ADD medication. I don't want to draw false conclusions about science in practice. But I don't want to spend too much stage time explaining every single facet of a part of technology. Whatever I use needs to be valuable to the characters, as it was to that poor ugly stepsister in The Ash Girl, as it was to my geologist friends. If science is valuable to the characters, it becomes valuable to audience, and everyone's world might be expanded in the process. Lazarus cover art: Michael Lark, artist. I am honored to announce that I have had a piece published on Howlround this afternoon. For those who don't know, Howlround is an online meeting place where artists can interact and discuss theatre and teaching practices, along with a host of others subjects. Entitled "A Place In The Conversation: Portraying Disability Onstage," my post was adapted from a thought-piece I wrote earlier in January on this very blog, and it was a blast to work with Howlround to bring questions about putting disability onstage to a wider audience. So, give my Howlround essay a read, and get involved in the discussion! I'd love to read your thoughts!
It wasn't until graduate school that I really examined my disability. Obviously, I've made allowances for my inability to hear certain things at certain times throughout my life; I've always accepted that as part of my daily routine. And I was educated on the technicalities of my hearing loss by numerous doctors and counselors, to better explain my needs to other people; that was no biggie, either -- just part of making sure I lived life to its fullest. But it wasn't until I got a new hearing aid in 2011 that I truly caught how little I was hearing in classes up to that winter quarter. Not having to crane forward to listen or do so much guesswork with lip-reading gave me the luxury to relax and truly think about my hearing loss. About my essential need for devices to help me hear. About how my coping skills went noticed or unnoticed by those around me. About how I felt about what I could and couldn't hear. About how reluctant I was to think about my feelings about what I could and couldn't hear.
That last bit surprised me. As a writer, I spend a lot of time dredging my own (and sometimes others') experience for answers to life's big questions, but giving myself time to examine my feelings about my disability, from age eight onward, seemed daunting. I was happy to accept I could hear better now, but when asked what I thought of my disability, or why I didn't write about it, I often passed my hearing loss off as part of my life, a piece of the puzzle, but not the whole essence of my identity. Sure, I had memories of rough times adjusting to wearing a hearing aid, and the stress of being the constant classroom expert on hearing loss took a little getting used to; but no great shakes, these memories. But when asked to plumb my experience of disability for narrative conflict by my advisers, why was my response immediate and dismissive? "Not being able to hear is intrinsic for me, that's all," I'd think. "Nobody on the outside will be interested enough to know about it." First off, I was wrong about that. Plenty of people were interested, and plenty of people could find parallels between a hard of hearing person's struggles and their own (without either party being reductive about it). Second, though I may never know the why of my immediate response, I now find it telling nonetheless. I assumed sole-ness or alone-ness in my condition. As far back as I can remember, I was the only kid in my class with hearing loss. This made it extra-imperative for my parents to motivate me to see my disability as a positive, as something that contributed to my work ethic and personality, as opposed to detracted from those elements of my identity. (So, of course, I took their encouragement and turned it into a superhero. More about that here.) They also worked hard to make sure I never felt different from my classmates, but the honest fact of the matter is that I still was. That's neither a positive or a negative; it's also not something I ruminated on until I began research for a play centered on family and disability and identity. As part of my research, I educated myself on the Deaf community's relationship to technology, some of which I've used in the past -- shake-awake alarms, closed captioning systems, basic stuff. I took the 2000 documentary "Sound And Fury" out of the Ohio University library and watched it. I'd highly recommend tracking this movie down (as well as its sequel!), because it deftly explores the pro and con sides to using a cochlear implant, while documenting one family's debate over whether or not its Deaf members should adopt the technology. At one point in the first "Sound and Fury," a Deaf father laments that if his daughter gets a cochlear implant, she will be neither Deaf nor hearing; she will be a third thing, with no specific culture to bind her to her family, to him. I paused the film. I rewound it. I played his comments again. I rewound the film. I played the comments again. I paused the film. I began to cry. Because I was that third thing he was talking about. And I'd never recognized that before. Obviously, I don't feel disconnected from my life or from my family and friends. I relate to them as any fully hearing person would; my disability is not severe to the point of separating me from anything, but it still calls for a lot of explanation. And I see myself in parts of the Deaf community (in the emphasis on visuals and body language), though I have no clue if I have a place there. I am that third thing that has no prescribed place. When describing this reaction to an adviser, he pointed out that straddling two worlds afforded me a unique perspective as an artist. I agreed, but my epiphany also made me lonely in a weird way. The more research I did, the more singular I felt; the more singular I felt, the more I latched on to reflections of myself in media. (This is why I so love shows like "Switched At Birth" or books like Wonderstruck; they show me myself, and I devour their tales selfishly -- less for the ideas they impart, more for the "Yup, I've been there" feelings of relief they evoke in me.) Two years and some change away from that fateful watching of "Sound and Fury," I still wrestle. Examination of disability has claimed a larger and larger part of my own writing, and I find myself attracted to discourse on the subject, which further challenges me as an artist. Take, for example, Jacqueline Lawton's recent great interview with Gift Theater co-founder and artistic director Michael Patrick Thornton, as part of the Theatre Communication Group's Diversity & Inclusion blog salon. Seriously, read the whole interview and then come back. It is a smart, thought-provoking discussion about the types of inclusion needed within Chicago storefront theatre. Of particular interest to me was Michael Patrick Thorton's thoughts about casting actors with disabilities: "Maybe in addition to seeking out disablist playwrights, we should also be strongly encouraging our national playwrights to encourage casting directors to see disabled actors for non-disabled-identified roles and advocate for them to producers. To me, that’s really a critical step toward the endgame of perceptive normalcy." In another part of the interview, Thornton talks about the foregrounding of disability in ableist storytelling, which reduces a person to simply what they lack, or what happened to them to create that lack. There's a ton of truth to what he's saying, and writing for disabled actors without making their disability the focus of their plots is one way to create balance between character and actor. But I wonder if there's another way to do that, too. And it involves such a personal way of looking at things for me that I don't know if my perspective has any merit in the larger goings-on of producing theatre. But here we have it anyway -- perhaps another necessary thing for disablist playwrights to do is to draw the audience, disabled or not, into the perspective of characters who have disabilities, and to do that in as many different ways as possible, to reach someone and communicate experience clearly and intelligently (through touch, taste, sound, or any possible sense). For me, I find freedom in my everyday problems being examined; the actor's vocals changing as his hearing aid blinks on and off provides some of my favorite material in Tribes. So I wonder ... Is there a way to make disability a part of the world of one's play, without reducing it to stereotype or "triumph-over-adversity" tales? Is there a way to make it business as usual while sharing it with someone unaware of its pitfalls and daily accommodations? Or can it be the driving examination of the play without seeming wholly negative? (I am trying to walk this tight-rope with a play about Joe Shuster and his diminishing sight; it's no easy task, I'm finding.) These questions always leap to my mind in discussions about how disability is portrayed or invited onto a stage. Because there are so many possible answers, the questions kind of haunt me. The one thing I do know is that an individual artist's perspective (whether it be writer, director, designer, or actor) will always come into play somewhere along the line, and a choice about portraying disability will have to be made. For me, if I could offer someone the opportunity to recognize their own experience far sooner than their late twenties (when I did), I'll be a happier playwright for it. |
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