Disability STudies, DRama & Performance, Literature

Research Profile

Below you can find a description of recent publications or public scholarship and a link to their venues. You can explore information about my book projects by following this link or clicking the appropriate tab above. For full publication information, as well as keynotes, invited talks, and conference proceedings, please see my CV or contact me using the “let’s talk” button. To find examples of my creative work as a dramaturg, click here.

"Cost of Living" at MTC at New York City Center - Stage I (131 West 55th Street) by Martyna Majok, directed by Jo Bonney. Pictured (L-R): Gregg Mozgala and Jolly Abraham. Photo: Joan Marcus (2017)

The Ethics of Care in Pedagogy and Performance: Intersections with Disability Justice, Intimacy Work, and Theatre of the Oppressed.

Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 37.1 (Fall 2022)

This article uses ethics of care and care work to explore the connective tissue between intimacy work, Theatre of the Oppressed (TO), and disability justice. Combining these three traditionally siloed theatrical practices offers a more holistic, processual understanding of care work in contemporary theatre studies and performance. Theatrical intimacy–the planned staging of intimate or sexually violent moments for performance–is borne from the need for care work in rehearsals and performance spaces. There are four categories of theatrical intimacy—physical intimacy, emotional intimacy, nudity, and sexual violence. TO similarly mobilizes care as a method and a methodology to use the stage as a space upon which communities can ask critical questions about the relationships between people, power, allyship, and solidarity. Finally, disability justice is a praxis rooted in advocacy for the representation, equity, and liberation of disabled people–especially the Black, Brown, Indigenous, and queer disabled persons who lead this movement–and its methodology of interdependency, open communication, and accommodation is generative for building artistic networks attentive to care. This article demonstrates how each is concerned with the social imperative to care for and with artist co-creators and our audiences, sharing similar tactics for care work. This essay articulates the commonalities between disability/crip-inflected models of care, intimacy work, and TO practices in the collegiate and professional production cycle.

Practicing Academic Grace: Pedagogical Experiments with Mr. Burns in Digital Play Analysis Classrooms

Teaching Performance Practices in Remote and Hybrid Spaces

Students and educators, under the duress of “pandemic time,” find themselves falling short: too much to do, overlapping deadlines, a surfeit of emails and notifications, and the stressors of life beyond the sandbox of a given course. In response, many have turned to social media to plea for accessibility, advice on requesting extensions, compassion, empathy, and goodwill–lest they fall from “academic grace.” In this essay, I develop the concept of “Academic Grace” beyond its traditional meaning of “good standing” within the academy to center academic grace as a practice of care work and accessibility in digital and remote learning spaces. As a noun, “grace” indicates favor or benevolence; as a verb, the primary definitions of grace coalesce around giving thanks or conferring permission. Distinguishing between the concept of academic grace as good standing earned by rigorous completion of coursework and academic grace as a transactional conferral of permission, I argue for academic grace as an open-ended pedagogical experiment that centers student-learning outcomes over rigid syllabus adherence. Academic grace is a mobilization of the disability-informed theories of crip time, academic ableism, and care work to reaffirm that the experience of working in digital space impacts the material bodies and wellness of both students and teachers. This essay uses Anne Washburn’s Mr. Burns, A Post-Electric Play to develop techniques for teaching play texts in digitally accessible ways. Washburn’s attention to storytelling offers us a strategy for working through pandemic time without compromising interpersonal care and courtesy in our classes. Through two examples that provide lesson plans, activities, and deliverables, I use academic grace as a pedagogical intervention for cultivating best practices on a class-by-class and learning platform-dependent basis.

Model by: Beatriz Chung. A lone figure regards a giant rubber ducky in a twisted black landscape.

Inversions: Three Approaches to Collaborating Through Theatrical Models

Prompt: A Journal of Theatre Theory, Practice, and Teaching, 2.3 (Spring 2022)

In this introduction to Prompt’s musicals issue of “Sets and Plays,” I challenge perceptions of unidirectional relationships between designer and playwright, wherein the playwright creates an exacting world in a script that scenic designers must translate to the stage through the director’s concept. In seven digital installations, Prompt challenged music theatre artists to write an original composition inspired by set models that scenic designers crafted for other productions. The results are a mixture of the haunting and campy–as in Samantha Roberts’ “Artificial Inspiration” and Melissa Yanchak’s “Lost at Sea,” both a response to Bea Chung’s set design featuring a giant rubber ducky amidst gray geometric shapes–to more conventional historical fiction, like Laura O’Connor & Cameron Fox’s Irish hornpipe-inspired “Raggy Boys Song,” responding to Richard Finkelstein’s stark industrial brick set. While the task is unusual, to be sure, it is not altogether foreign: designers hired to work in repertory are often constrained by set needs for a wholly dissimilar production. Challenging musicians to write for a given world is a more revolutionary process: decisions about a period, tone, character, or stage mechanics are no longer solely the librettist and composer’s choosing. While some may find such constraints limiting, the challenge allows educators and artists to reexamine and revalue the model as a tool. It prompts us to ask; how does the model change when it is not in service of a playwright or director’s vision? As a way of answering this question in our theatre classrooms, I offer three methodological avenues for consideration with students: Theatrical Models as Dramaturgical Invention, Models as Negotiated Readings, and Models as Ecological Performance.

Book cover for *Monsters in Performance: Essays on the Aesthetics of Disqualification*, edited by Michael Chemers and Analola Santana.

Monstrosity in a Pandemic: Hypercapacity, Debility, and Death in Repo! The Genetic Opera (2008)

Monsters in Performance: Essays on the Aesthetics of Social Disqualification

This chapter draws on music theater scholarship that figures the triple-threat actor as a hypercapable or hypercapacited body to argue that characters in Repo! The Genetic Opera with designer body modifications transform the spectator’s relationship to the body of the triple-threat actor herself. Biogenetically engineered prostheses like Blind Mag’s robotic eye situate the body in what Jackie Stacey calls the “genetic imaginary,” a fantasy landscape in which “concerns about the destabilization of traditional markers of difference… combine with those about the introduction of the unnatural and the inauthentic” (Stacey 2010, 8). In commercial musical theater, the actor’s body is a eugenic fantasy of the eradication of disability and disease: indefatigable, athletic, capable of producing reiterable performances for as many as eight shows a week. The film adaptation of Repo! perversely uses the same bodies to demonstrate the failures of the able imaginary: incapacitated, failing, mortal. Ultimately, this chapter projects the musical’s hypercapacitated bodies as a paradigm of our contemporary scientific inquiry: society seeks to understand the genetic underpinnings by scaling down from the already-formed body to the genome, and Repo! ’s biotechnologically modified bodies are a fantastic construct of bodily excess that profess mastery of genetic knowledge and the skill to manipulate it in determined ways.

Cover of Studies in Musical Theatre. White cover with black lettering above an image of the street signs marking the intersection of Broadway and 5th Avenue in New York City. — Cover of *Studies in Musical Theatre*. White cover with black lettering above an image of the street signs marking the intersection of Broadway and 5th Avenue in New York City.

Choreographing conjoinment: Side Show’s fleshly fixations and disability simulation

Studies in Musical Theatre (Volume 13, No. 1)

This article aims to amplify disability theory’s impact in performance studies by generating a framework for understanding disability representation in musical theatre. Taking the original and revival Broadway productions of Side Show (1997, 2014) as a case study, I articulate how the musical simulates disability through a ‘choreography of conjoinment’ that relies on the exceptional able-bodiedness of the actors playing conjoined twins Daisy and Violet Hilton. Using disability as a category of analysis reveals how disabled bodies are made to be maximally productive iterations of themselves in musicals. To support this claim, I track the shift from the 1997 production’s co-construction of disability by the actors and audience, which replicates the social model of disability, to the 2014 revival’s grounding in a diagnostic realism typical of disability’s medical model. Side Show’s trajectory generates possibilities for considering the musical as an archive for disability representation and knowledge, bioethical inquiry, and artistic innovation.

Deafness: Screening Signs in Contemporary Cinema

A cultural history of disability in the modern age

In this chapter, I consider Deafness performances in commercial film during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and how modern cinema frames d/Deaf-hearing relationships. In the absence of a visible Deaf community, many people (deaf, hearing or somewhere in between) first encounter d/Deafness onscreen. This chapter constructs a contemporary filmography of d/Deafness on screen to analyze how film, and commercial cinema in particular, is a technological development of the modern era unique in its impact on the d/Deaf community. I focus on cinematic engagements with d/Deafness to frame contemporary cinema as a d/Deaf-hearing contact zone with the potential to template “best practices” for filmic access technologies for the deaf/HOH, provide ethical representations of d/Deaf persons in popular entertainment, and facilitate cross-cultural conversations.

Casting Christopher: Disability Pedagogy in The Curious Incident of the Dog in theNight-Time

TEaching Critical performance Theory

In this chapter I take Mark Haddon’s novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, and its 2012 stage adaptation by Simon Stephens, as a departure point to discuss approaches to disability in theater and performance studies classrooms. Using the novel, Stephens’s playscript, webpages for the UK West End production and the New York Broadway production, and supplemental readings, students learn key disability studies concepts that prepare them to examine issues of disability representation in commercial theatre, such as: casting nondisabled actors to play disabled characters; marketing disability; audience education and engagement; and how disability impacts elements of stage design.

Cover of The Routledge Companion for Literature and Disability, edited by Alice Hall. Burnt orange cover with text in yellow and white. Beneath the title is a piece of art with black and yellow hand-drawn birds flying in all directions. An image of … — Cover of *The Routledge Companion for Literature and Disability*, edited by Alice Hall. Burnt orange cover with text in yellow and white. Beneath the title is a piece of art with black and yellow hand-drawn birds flying in all directions. An image of a woman’s head has been pasted where a bird’s head would normally be.

Disability and the American Stage Musical

The Routledge Companion to Literature and Disability

This chapter offers a brief history detailing the emergence of the able-bodied triple-threat performer and discusses two primary modes of disability representation in musical theatre: narrative prosthesis, or a dependency on metaphors of disability, and disabilities woven into the fabric of a character and plot that compel physical performance onstage—what I am calling diegetic disabilities. This chapter is intended to open conversations regarding the organization of musical theatre around the able body and begin to answer how and why disability is a significant concern of the American stage musical. While conversations scaffolding actionable solutions for diversifying individual theatrical productions are critical for equity and justice-centered approaches to the arts, without an adequate analysis of how musical theatre—as a genre and as an industry—is built around expectations of able-bodied performance, little headway can be made towards implementing change.

Spider-man’s Designer Genes: Hypercapacity and Transhumanism in a D.I.Y. World

The Matter of Disability: Materiality, Biopolitics, Crip Affect

This chapter complicates the Broadway musical Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark’s characterization of mutation by proposing its transhumanist performance as a step toward the posthuman, as a way of apprehending the genetically engineered subject—those peripheral embodiments that fall between delineated social categories of ability and disability, and therefore cannot be suitably registered within liberalism’s diversity model. The musical’s explicit rejection of a “normal” human body as an inadequate framework for existing in the modern world begs inquiry into the alternatives suggested by the characters onstage, particularly scientist-turned-villain Norman Osborn. Singing that “DNA is the way, now that evolution’s had its day,” Osborn argues that we now are in a “DIY world” in which humans must take control of their own genetic development to avoid extinction. For these reasons, the effort of this chapter is to work through how Turn Off the Dark frames the mutant body as an imperative next step for the human race.

Although the musical generated frequent media coverage, relatively little critical work has been written about Turn Off the Dark—which is surprising not only because of the combined star power of its creative team and the capital behind the Spider-Man franchise, but also because of the musical’s brazen intersection of eugenics, freak discourse, and disability. I argue that despite the lyric’s rhetorical invocation of a posthuman condition, genetic mutation is still deeply invested in the human body; this inability to decenter the human necessitates that we view the musical’s mutants as transhuman rather than posthuman. This is crucial for understanding the material impact of Turn Off the Dark’s ideological work on the production itself; the pursuit of performing a fictional hypercapacity that, ironically, disabled multiple actors during the production’s run.