Cripping up (again)….

Those who know my work will be aware of my antipathy towards non-disabled actors ‘cripping up’ to play disabled characters. As I put it in my 2002 play ‘peeling’: ‘Cripping-up is the twenty-first century’s answer to blacking up.’

It’s a theme continued in my response to Lisa Hammond’s fantastic open letter to writers about putting crips in scripts for The Guardian last year http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/aug/30/theatre-disability-crips-in-scripts  and a long lament from many of us, recently so eloquently by Rosaleen McDonagh, and through her decades-long dedication and innovative practice by Jenny Sealey.

So hurrah hurrah, someone outside disability arts and culture has taken up the cause. This week the wonderful Lyn Gardner questions the casting of Martin McDonagh’s ‘The Cripple of Inishmaan’ in her blog:

‘We no longer accept white actors blacking up – yet the able-bodied Daniel Radcliffe is playing a physically disabled character in the West End. How come?’

It’s been a long time coming, but perhaps at last this issue will be placed firmly on the commercial theatre agenda. It’s frustrating that someone from the ‘mainstream’ needs to take it up for the question to be validated, but I’m grateful for allies with such public visibility. Hopefully together we can challenge this practice.

You can read Lyn’s post here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2013/jun/20/why-acceptable-daniel-radcliffe-disabled-character

‘Cripping up’ continued – Rosaleen McDonagh’s ‘Mainstream’.

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Rosaleen McDonagh.

Continuing exploring the issues of ‘cripping up’, here’s a review of Rosaleen McDonagh’s ‘Mainstream’ by Colin Cameron for DAO, published last month. http://www.disabilityartsonline.org.uk/?location_id=1936  I worked on the piece as dramaturg whilst Rosaleen was writing it last year. The script had  a reading by Fishamble Theatre last month.

Rosaleen McDonagh: Mainstream   

The Projects Arts Centre, Dublin. 13^th October 2012

Colin Cameron

In Kaite O’Reilly’s DAO blog posted on the 14^th March this year, reproduced from the Irish Theatre Magazine, https://kaiteoreilly.wordpress.com/2012/03/13/cripping-up-copping-on-rosaleen-mcdonagh-in-irish-theatre-magazine/  Rosaleen McDonagh discusses her concerns around issues of non-disabled actors ‘cripping up’. ‘People get so caught up in the physicality of our bodies. The emotional manipulation is what’s damaging… They can only do the outside but they can’t bring the emotional, historical resonance to a performance.’ Given the Irish context, in which trained disabled actors are few and far between, McDonagh wrestles with the dilemma a disabled playwright must face: hold back their work in the belief that there may be some emerging disabled performers who someday will bring their work to the stage, or to compromise and collude with ‘cripping up’ as a way of establishing their work.

As the event at The Projects Arts Centre, in front of a full theatre, took the form of a rehearsed reading rather than a performance, I think some of these issues may have been avoided. Three of the four readers from Fishamble Theatre Company and Arts and Disability Ireland – Debbie Crotty as Mary Anne Rooney, Don Wycherley as Jack and Liz Fitzgibbon as Eleanor – appeared to be non-disabled performers, while Donal Toolan, who read Eoin’s part, is a wheelchair-user.  What came across was the emotional, historical resonance McDonagh desired. I have seen performances at The Theatre Workshop in Edinburgh of plays written by non-disabled writers, about issues other than disability issues. It hasn’t been till about two-thirds of the way through these plays that I have noticed or remembered that I am watching disabled actors. This certainly hasn’t been anything about ‘in spite of impairment’, just that in being drawn into the play impairment hasn’t seemed important. Watching this reading in Dublin I found it easy to forget or to overlook the fact that these actors weren’t disabled. The lines they read were authentic.

In McDonagh’s words, the play ‘explores a love affair disintegrating while people are grappling with identity, age, sexuality, institutionalisation, fear’. Its structure involves Eleanor (Ellie), a young disabled researcher in her early twenties who has the same progressive impairment as Mary Anne but less advanced, looking to gather material for a half-hour television ‘lifestyle’ documentary, making contact with Eoin, Jack and Mary Anne to talk about their lives, their families, their jobs. Jack and Mary Anne are in their mid- to late thirties, Eoin is a few years younger. Mary Anne is a strong disabled woman, a woman of resilience and character. Jack is angry, a heavy drinker bent on his own destruction and the destruction of opportunities for closeness with other people. He was once a successful wheelchair basketball player, but that went wrong when he ‘signed a contract with Jack Daniel’. Eoin is a gay disabled man who had grown up being used for sex by the older guys in the institution and who had liked it and the privileges it bought. Eoin is the funny one. Mary Anne and Jack are trying a break from their relationship. Eoin is acting as a go-between. Ellie does not identify as disabled, she is mainstreamed. The others are wary about her motives, suspicious of intrusion and objectification, and worried about what might be revealed. As Eoin says:

You want people to talk about the past, you’ve no idea what they are going to come up with.

Their shared background, having grown up together shut away within the same institution, is the source of both their closeness and intense dependence on each other. Their shared knowledge is of the systemic cruelty and abuse experienced as normality within such institutions and of a dark secret that has involved them all. There is a strong sense, too, of shared guilt. For each other, now they are beyond the institution, they are family.

McDonagh draws on her own experience to entwine narratives which hold to the light not only the depths of hurt inflicted upon disabled people, but also the strength that disabled people gain from one another. At its heart, the play wrestles with a theme of identity central to the disabled people’s movement, both in Ireland and beyond. It is about the roots of the movement in disabled people’s oppression and about the future direction of the movement. Oppression breeds resistance and it is the shared experience of oppression which moved these characters, once they emerged from the institution, to struggle for social change. The younger Ellie can see no reason to want to be, nor any advantage in being, with other disabled people. She is too busy fitting in, in overcoming, in being what the mainstream expects and allows her to be. Mary Anne draws attention to the paradox that while her generation campaigned for an end to the segregation and exclusion of disabled people from the mainstream, ‘the mainstream thing hasn’t really worked’. It involves being mainstreamed on the terms of the non-disabled in a way which, to borrow a term from Rod Michalko, regards impairment as ‘useless difference’. There is a veneer of tolerance extended to disabled people, but this is conditional on the basis that they will do their best to cover up impairment. This is very different from the point of the struggle in which Mary Anne, Jack and Eoin were involved, which had been about embracing difference and making a claim for the right to be valued as equals on their own terms.

McDonagh interweaves her narratives to produce a play that is simultaneously challenging, distressing, intriguing and entertaining. At almost two hours without an interval it was a long play and yet, talking about it afterwards with other audience members, there was a consensus that we had all been shocked when it came to an end. No fidgeting or shifting our arses on the seats to get comfortable, this had been engrossing. ‘Mainstream’ concludes with the revelation and explanation of the dark secret.

In the preface to her story ‘A Dying Breed’ (posted on DAO) Ann Young has stated that:

When I was a child in the 60s and 70s it was common practice to send disabled children away to boarding schools to be ‘looked after’. Many children never went home again, going from one institution to another and some children died there. These are realities that we lived with throughout our childhood. However the most damaging aspect of these places was the bullying that went on at every level. These days we would call it abuse but back then we had no vocabulary to describe what went on and this made it easier to perpetuate.

In ‘Mainstream’, McDonagh has produced a work which gives an insight into the oppression experienced by many disabled children who experienced institutionalisation and the scars left on the souls of the adults they became. There is much that is disturbing here. Yet the play is not without ambiguity, for it affirms disabled identity and reminds us that there is a way of looking and being that is shared by disabled people which, for all their cleverness, the non-disabled will never begin to understand. It is not that we want to be like them, but that we want the right to be ourselves.

Someone, somewhere, some producer, some theatre group – preferably a theatre group of disabled people – needs to get in touch with Rosaleen McDonagh to get this play staged as a performance.

Directed by Jim Culleton                                                                                                                Produced by Marketa Dowling                                                                                                   Dramaturgy by Kaite O’Reilly                                                                                                          Stage Manager Kate Ferris                                                                                                              Captioner Ruth McCreery

The reading was both sign language interpreted and surtitled.

Cripping up – Copping on. Rosaleen McDonagh in Irish Theatre Magazine

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Rosaleen McDonagh

I was honoured to be included in the following article from Irish Theatre Magazine by the phenomenal playwright Rosaleen McDonagh. This is reproduced from the on-line version of the magazine and is available at: http://www.irishtheatremagazine.ie/Features/Current/Cripping-Up—Copping-on.aspx

IRISH THEATRE MAGAZINE

Cripping up – Copping on.

by Rosaleen McDonagh 10 March 2012

Rosaleen McDonagh discusses her new play Mainstream and the challenges of casting and performance: Should a disabled writer hold their work back in the belief that there may be some emerging disabled performers who someday will bring their work to the stage?

‘In Peeling I wanted to create women who were witty, sexy, complex human beings who made difficult decisions about their fertility and potential offspring; women whose lives didn’t necessarily differ so much from non-disabled, hearing women’s lives.’  Kaite O’Reilly, playwright.

Peeling was written by a woman who identifies as disabled. Directed by Jenny Sealey, a deaf woman, and performed by three female actors, two disabled and one deaf. Being exposed to Kaite’s work, the politics of identity and representation became much more vivid and important. Such exposure brings with it an emotional resonance that says this is theatre at its best. Not just for someone like me who can identify with all the parts of the three actors but, as O’Reilly says, it was the universality of the women’s lives that made it work. When using ‘cripping up’, it’s part of a cultural and political mode of language that encompasses self determination. Again O’Reilly said, ‘Cripping up is the twenty first century’s way of blacking up’.

The term ‘cripping up’ in Ireland is not used because it’s understood as being insulting to ‘trained’ actors. The way in which white men once painted themselves black to get a gig is now understood as being racist, exploitative, voyeuristic and dangerous. For me ‘cripping up’ carries similar dangers. In the disability artistic community, the joke says, if an able-bodied actor wants an award and a director wants lots of accolades, be it in theatre or film, cripping up is the easiest, most unethical way of doing it. Others say ethics in any art form blocks creativity. Either way, whether it’s local, national or indeed even international, the infrastructure for artists with disabilities in any discipline is always an afterthought, an appendix, sometimes we’re told appendix take up too much time and room—they’re not needed. The explanation of the plot is evident in the performance regardless of who or what body that performance comes from, they tell us.

Mainstream, my new piece explores a love affair disintegrating while people are grappling with identity, age, sexuality, institutionalisation memory, friendship and fear.  All the characters from Mainstream have significant impairments. Their impairments are part of how the piece is presented. Their journey as characters is very much tied up with their disability identity. When writing the play Mainstream, my politics were compromised due to the standard theatre praxis here in Ireland. What’s ideal is unfortunately limited by what’s possible at the present moment.

Opportunities for training and development in theatre for disabled performers and actors are not de rigueur.  This creates a difficulty in getting disabled Irish actors that can play these parts. More affirmative action policies please. The Arts Council and the Arts Disability Forum do have a specific bursary for disabled artists which is €5,000. Arts & Disability Ireland do provide supports to organisations to make their venue and services more accessible to people with disabilities. Access in the form of audio description and touch is also part of ADI’s remit. There are venues, such as the Project Arts Centre who deliver and provide good practice at all levels of their organisation. The Dublin Theatre Festival 2011, when supporting site-specific work, ensured that access to most of the venues was possible, in particular Mark O’Halloran’s Trade in a Dublin bedsit. The Festival ensured that this work was open to all audiences regardless of the venue type. For me, the ultimate sanction and marker of good access would be that companies are not funded by the Arts Council if their work is not accessible to all the public. That public includes people with disabilities. We’re an audience too.

An example of a positive affirmative action was Turning Point in 2010, an opportunity for artists with disabilities to develop a short play. This project, which was supported by ADI and VSA, meant that I and the three other writers travelled to Washington with Fishamble. Our work was performed in a rehearsed reading. At the reading of my play Rings the sign interpreter for the main actor didn’t turn up.  Vulnerability, fear and embarrassment were shared by me and the actor.  Jim Culleton, director of Fishamble Theatre Company, managed the situation in an empowering and professional manner. Our work as disabled artists is underrepresented and therefore affirmative action initiatives should have a two-pronged approach. This approach would be a specific targeted approach for disabled artists by way of funding and other resources. While at the same time, mainstream theatre, whether it be companies or venues, need to be resourced and supported to be inclusive of disabled artists, practitioners and disabled audiences. This work can’t be done if theatre companies and venues aren’t supported and resourced to do this.

For me the question of cripping up is an exercise purely for the non-disabled ego: the illusion that you can control, modify and contain, if not your own body, then somebody else’s. The dilemma is: what do you do in a country that prides itself on a legacy of being part of the universal canon of theatre but pays no real dividends to disabled artists or performers? ‘Dividends’ in this context is used as a metaphor for cultural inclusion. In short, the authentic disabled aesthetic is erased out of Irish theatre and performances. Brian Friel’s plays Molly Sweeney and Translations were both restaged in Dublin in 2011. The character of Molly Sweeney and Sarah, the non-verbal woman in Translations, had potential to be innovative performances;  instead they objectify and infantilise our bodies, to be received by an unquestioning audience.

They say an actor should be able to perform any part, borrow an aesthetic. There are some parts that actors can’t play. Characters are built, shaped, pulled and stretched to envelop an outside reality and bring it inside themselves. Yet, Irish theatre audiences, or at least the majority of them, seem to enjoy the cosiness of knowing these are not real people—they’re acting out. How we know and where we think people with disabilities belong in our society. Our narrative as disabled people must be funnelled through a non-disabled form. From the director to the actor and then it’s bounced back to the audience, people get so caught up in the physicality of our bodies. The emotive manipulation is what’s damaging. That’s the bit that hurts. They can only do the outside but they can’t bring the emotional, historical resonance to a performance.

These representations are reductive and damaging. Another example of this type of false representation is that of Carmel Winters’ B for Baby. There’s been much chatter about breaking the ‘taboo’ because this piece attempts to explore sexuality in the context of people with learning or intellectual disability. For me, this piece had nothing new to offer other than the usual stereotypes. The most disappointing element of the piece was whatever groundbreaking crescendo that we were all hoping to reach, the end of the piece reverted and resisted going to the edge where the premise of the play was attempting to go by not allowing the two characters to kiss. They share a bag of sweets instead of a kiss. If that’s not infantalisation, well then what is? However, I bought a ticket which means I colluded with something that I’d hoped would be radical; instead, it was pretty mundane. Although these pieces were written by a non-disabled man and woman the very fact that they create disabled characters could be a really positive opportunity to reinvigorate the disabled aesthetic in Irish theatre. The reinvigoration would only come with the call for actors who are disabled for these particular parts. The presumption that non-disabled actors can play our parts so much better is outdated.  We Irish can be very unsophisticated and not confident when it comes to taking risks in theatre making. The politics of representation is often outweighed by the so called importance of the narrative – but the narrative comes from a place of representation even if it is almost invisible.

Should a disabled writer hold their work back in the belief that there may be some emerging disabled performers who someday will bring their work to the stage? Or has a writer to compromise and collude with ‘cripping up’ as a way of establishing their work? My Traveller ethnicity, like my disability, cerebral palsy, is an integral part of who I am. It’s how I understand my place in the world. My history, it means I have a shared knowledge and experience with other Travellers and disabled people. This said, the Traveller community or the disability community, are not a homogenous group. We share a common narrative but at the same time, our individual experiences lend themselves to diverse views on art and other matters. ‘Cripping up’, for some disabled people, is fine. For others, like me, ‘cripping up’ or ‘putting it on’ for Travellers, there’s an innate sour taste of a collective, pejorative projection that is not a representation of who and what we are. As a writer, I can illustrate shame but I refuse to carry it, regardless of how and where it’s projected onto me.

Having been exposed to disability arts in the context of mainstream theatre, the spark was lit. Kaite O’Reilly has been a role model and a mentor in many ways for me. I deliberately use the capital D when describing myself as a Disabled artist. This cultural phenomenon gives me reference points to work from, rules, not just for writing but rules for life. Our lives, our experiences and the veins of knowledge that we have as performers, writers and visual artists, need to be nurtured. My ambition for my work goes beyond any special category. While my work is grounded in a particular experience, the writing carries with it a calling for other disabled writers and performers to be part of the Irish theatre community. Being known as the only crip in the community is isolating. This also means often my voice isn’t loud enough to keep making demands on all areas of access for other disabled artists.

Rosaleen McDonagh is a Traveller woman with a significant disability, a playwright and human rights activist. Her short play Beat Him Like a Badger is part of Fishamble’s Tiny Plays for Ireland at Project Arts Centre 15th-21st March, 2012.

With thanks for the reproduction of this article. http://www.irishtheatremagazine.ie/Features/Current/Cripping-Up—Copping-on.aspx