Cripping Broadway: Neoliberal Performances of Disability in the American Musical

Home , 2006 Live, 50th Tony Awards, Adam Pascal, Ali Stroker, Alone at Last, Bartlett Sher

by Samuel R. Yates

B.A. in Dramatic Arts and English, May 2011, Centre College M.Phil in Theatre and Performance Studies, June 2013, Trinity College Dublin

A Dissertation submitted to

The Faculty of The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

May 19, 2019

Dissertation directed by

David T. Mitchell Professor of English

The Columbian College of Arts and Science of The George Washington University certifies that Samuel R. Yates has passed the Final Examination for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy as of 9 April, 2019. This is the final and approved form of the dissertation.

Cripping Broadway: Neoliberal Performances of Disability in the American Musical

Samuel R. Yates

Dissertation Research Committee

David T. Mitchell, Professor of English, Dissertation Director

Robert McRuer, Professor of English, Committee Member

Ann M. Fox, Professor of English, Committee Member

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Chapters two and five of this dissertation contain reworked material previously published in the venues listed below. Additionally, Figure 5.1 is reprinted with permission from

Springer Nature. I have permission from publishers to use the work listed below in my dissertation:

Yates, Samuel. “Choreographing conjoinment: Side Show’s fleshly fixations and disability simulation.” Studies in Musical Theatre, vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 67–78, doi: 10.1386/smt.13.1.67_1

Yates, Samuel. “Spider-Man’s Designer Genes: Hyper-capacity and Transhumanism in a D.I.Y. World.” The Matter of Disability: Materiality, Biopolitics, Crip Affect. Susan Antebi et. al, eds. University of Michigan Press, 2019.

Copies of all other copyright permissions are in Appendix B of this document.

Dedication

To David and Janet, who let me venture into Oz.

There’s no place like home.

Acknowledgements

Just as a musical is the product of multiple artists, working in concert, so too is this dissertation the product of the rehearsal of thought, practice in implementation, and performance of scholarship of many individuals. Chief among the people I must thank are

David T. Mitchell, who understood my interests clearly before I could articulate them myself; Ayanna Thompson, for providing generous support and a critical eye that kept me from being too pollyanna; Robert McRuer, without whom my intervention into the form of the AIDS musical would not have appeared in this project; and Ann M. Fox, who has been a wonderful interlocutor in meetings and at conferences throughout this project.

I admire each of you greatly. Thank you for your support and mentorship.

So too, must I acknowledge the community who helped me rehearse these ideas, tirelessly, engaging, critiquing, and supporting the key changes, modulations, and wild choreography that occurred while building this project. Marshall Alcorn, Mary Buckley,

Holly Duggan, Evelyn Schreiber, and Tara G. Wallace provided invaluable guidance for concepts in this dissertation and navigating institutional bureaucracy, and Connie Kibler is an underappreciated stage manager of the English department. To Victoria Barnett-

Woods, Joshua Benson, Faedra C. Carpenter, Tyler Christensen, Daniel DeWispelare,

Frank DiMaiolo, Ramzi Fawaz, Leah Grisham-Webber, Andrew Harnish, Brian Heyburn,

Michael Horka, Jonathan Hsy, Nicholas Johnson, Emily Lathop, Keith Martinez, William

McCutchan, Patrick McKelvey, Jessica Moldovan, Liz Moser, Greg Reiner, Ryan St.

Pierre, Beth TeVault, Gayle Wald, Preston Whiteway: friends and colleagues, who have helped shape this work, thank you. Any mistakes in this dissertation are my own.

I am grateful for funding support from the American Society for Theatre Research through the Helen Krich Chinoy Dissertation Fellowship, and also the Dean’s

Dissertation Completion Fellowship at George Washington University. These eased my summer workloads and enabled me to visit the NYPL Billy Rose Theatre Collection to perform archival research critical to this project.

My thanks also go to the editors of Studies in Musical Theatre, and also the team at the University of Michigan Press, for allowing me to reprint reworked material that first appeared in Studies in Musical Theatre 13:1, and The Matter of Disability.

This dissertation would not have been possible without the loving support of my family. Jarrod, who has borne the brunt of my late nights, early morning ramblings, and concert showers as I worked through arguments, is a hero. My brothers, Ross and

Nicholas, are kindhearted examples of brotherly affection: “As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.” My grandfather Herman continued to support my book habit, even when I graduated to more expensive academic texts—though he would always tell me to purchase something “fun” instead. Finally, my parents Janet and David, quietly fostered a love of learning even when I began to explore topics beyond the scope of their interests and beliefs but offered unconditional love and support all the same. I can never repay you, but I hope this work is a small step in paying forward all that you taught me to be.

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Abstract of Dissertation

Cripping Broadway: Neoliberal Performances of Disability in the American Musical

Cripping Broadway is a body-oriented history of performance practices in five chapters. Chapter one, “Cripping Broadway,” historicizes the emergence of the triple- threat performer and surveys conventional uses of disability in the American musical.

The triple-threat is a useful heuristic for investigating our paradoxical disavowal and investment in the disabled body because it involves extraordinary able-bodiedness as its baseline performative requirement, and thus, ironically, might be identified as the last place any disabled actor might reasonably embody. In chapter two, “Disability

Simulation and the Able Imaginary,” I use productions of Side Show (1997, 2015) as a case study to propose that disability performance scholars use “disability simulation”—a term theorized in disability studies by scholars such as Tanya Titchkosky and Rod

Michalko—and consider its value as a theatrical practice through which able-bodied actors limit their physical capacities. My third chapter, “Everyone’s Got AIDS,” traces a pathway from Falsettos (1992) to Book of Mormon (2011) by contrasting the AIDS-as- tragedy narrative commonplace in productions during the 1980s and 90s against the

AIDS-as-comedy trope in musicals, and in Rent-lampooning satire. Mormon’s inability to resolve chronic illness through kill-or-cure narratives, as in Falsettos and Rent, forces the musical to frame HIV/AIDS as a pasquinade instead of as a personal tragedy. Chapter four, “Integrating Disability,” uses the dialectic between libretto and score in The Light in the Piazza (2005) to understand how musicals characterize cognitive disability in the integrated book musical. I argue Clara’s traumatic brain injury compels an antinormative, avant-garde transformation of the score’s “lyrical time” into a character-specific crip time

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to which neurotypical characters must keep tempo. In my final chapter, “Hypercapacity and the Freak,” I turn to the blockbuster musicals Wicked (2003) and Spider-Man: Turn

Off the Dark (2011). Here I question how and where boundary lines for constructions of the “normal” body form thus, this final chapter shows how Elphaba and Spider-man’s genetically “superior” bodies are indicative of the prosthetic relationship between commercial theatre’s embodiment of disabled characters and the “triple-threat” acting bodies employed to inhabit such nonnormative materialities.

As this study makes clear, the history of Broadway is a well-documented story of nondisabled performers highlighting their actorly virtuosity by performing disability; I identify how disability has always been at the heart of commercial theatrical performance and ask how a performer’s relationship to disability impacts a musical’s cultural work. I propose the term “hypercapacity” to describe the expectations upon triple-threat actors in the Broadway industry, and also the ways bodies are strategically marked in musical theatre to be maximally productive. This project demonstrates the critical need for a material embodiment of disability onstage that moves beyond the advent of the overcapacitated triple-threat actors performing disability, who signify overproductivity as the value of neoliberal economic and social orders. Within this domain of inquiry we also must query the propensity of theatrical designs that prostheticize the theatrical world on behalf of nondisabled actors rather than innovate on greater flexibility to achieve a wider goal of making disability integral rather than merely “integrated”; if a central purpose of theater is to entertain the conditions of human life, it needs to apprehend and organize around disability as a worthy aesthetic value, embodied experience, and desirable difference without qualification.

Table of Contents

Dedication v

Acknowledgements vi

Abstract of Dissertation viii

List of Figures xi

Prologue: “Stranger than you dreamt it”: Growing Up with Phantom 1

Chapter 1. Cripping Broadway: Disability and the American Musical 8

Chapter 2. Disability Simulations and the Able Imaginary: Choreographing Conjoinment in Side Show 55

Chapter 3. “Everyone’s Got AIDS”: Temporality, Race, and the Emergence of the Comedic AIDS Musical 112

Chapter 4. Integrating Disability: Neuroatypicality and Trauma in The Light in the Piazza 183

Chapter 5. Hypercapacity and the Freak: Flights of Fancy in the Blockbuster Musical 231

Conclusion. Equity Ten, or How to Crip Broadway 293

Bibliography 309

Appendix A 339

Appendix B 341

List of Figures

Figure 2-1 101

Figure 2-2 106

Figure 3-1 128

Figure 3-2 143

Figure 3-3 143

Figure 4-1 217

Figure 4-2 339

Figure 4-3 339

Figure 4-4 340

Figure 4-5 228

Figure 5-1 243

Figure 5-2 268

xi Prologue

“Stranger than you dreamt it”: Growing up with Phantom

Stranger than you dreamt it Can you even dare to look Or bear to think of me? This loathsome gargoyle, who burns in hell But secretly yearns for heaven Secretly... secretly… — The Phantom, The Phantom of the Opera

My first musical cast album was a gift from my grandmother. Sometime soon after the doctors discovered my neuromuscular disorder, and related deafness, music became my primary tool for learning to listen, verbal communication, proper vowel and consonant expression, and creative play. And so, my grandmother, Jacqueline, a secretary who volunteered during the summer at Music Theatre Louisville, introduced me to the original

1986 London cast recording of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera.

Turning over the cassette, the final lyrics of “I Remember/Stranger than you dreamt it” lingered. Side A dramatically ends with the revelation that the Phantom,

Christine’s seductive “Angel of Music” and secret voice instructor, is horribly disfigured.

Does Christine “dare to look,” let alone return his love? A cliffhanger, if there ever was one! Christine has no scored response following Phantom’s reveal, so her reaction is entirely the actor’s choice. During those first listens on my boom box I wondered whether she was actually horrified or more curious. The strange contours of the

Phantom’s mask and the melodramatic motifs signaling his stage entrances filled my imagination with a longing to see, to know, to touch, to play on stage. Sometimes I would fashion myself as the Phantom, misunderstood but powerful; sometimes as Christine,

with the voice the Phantom desires. The slow burn of their titular duet “The Phantom of the Opera” on cassette side A told a story of desiring proximity to the strange. And, despite the love triangle between the Phantom, Christine, and Raoul constituting the core of the musical’s drama, it never occurred to me—even then—that Christine might actually choose Raoul of her own volition. Everyone loves a “bad boy,” right?

The associations my grandmother must have seen between myself—a musical, but physically abnormal boy—and the Phantom did not occur to me until such a time when it was impossible to ask her about them. With hearing aids on both ears and shoe inserts to correct my gait, my childhood accessories were less flashy than the Phantom’s mask. I could hide my bodily differences when I wanted to. If I slipped my hearing aids into my pocket and sat quietly in a chair I could blend into the chaotic chorus of students in my classrooms. Alone, and with my grandmother and mother, too, I wore out those cassette tapes. We replaced them twice before I was gifted the more durable CD album.

The Phantom’s strange body, rhetorical prowess, and pleas for compassion, informed my six-year-old self’s notion of what made musical theatre good.

Apparently, I was not the only one. The Phantom of the Opera opened at Her

Majesty’s Theatre on London’s West End in 1986 to rave reviews, and later debuted in the United States at the Majestic Theatre on 26 January 1988 with a record-breaking sixteen million dollars in advance ticket sales (Hershberg). As of this writing, Phantom is a billion-dollar industry that has been in production for over thirty years, the longest- running Broadway musical in history (Cullwell-Block). Based on Gaston Leroux’s novel of the same name, the musical features a score by Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber, lyrics by

Charles Hart, and book co-written by Lloyd Webber and Charles Stilgoe.1 It is no small wonder that a musical predicated on deformity outpaces its closest competition (Chicago and The Lion King, respectively) by over eight years. The trick Lloyd Webber manages to achieve is letting the audience listen with the Phantom’s ears but participate as spectators with Christine’s eyes. When we see physically primed Phantoms like Norm Lewis,

Ramin Karimloo, or Gerard Butler interact with Christine, the visual seduction ruptures our expectation of disgust and remakes it as desire. This schism between the musical’s staging and score was an early lesson about what a disability aesthetic can achieve in the musical.

Disabled people are rarely seen as romantic subjects due to false assumption that

“like-attracts-like” in a predominantly able-bodied society; instead, disabled persons are objects of pity, benevolent figures of caregiving, fear, or revulsion. Even drama scholars often fall into the trap of dismissing disfigurement as a desirable trait. Jessica Sternfield opens her chapter on Phantom in The Megamusical (2006) by confidently asserting: “As much as critics enjoy describing the Phantom’s deformed face in colorful terms, people do not flock to see Andrew Lloyd Webber’s megamusical The Phantom of the Opera for this sight. They go, critics agree, to experience more pervasive qualities of the show: romance and lovely melodies” (225). In Sternfield’s earnestness to explore the lush score as a high-romance production, she too-quickly dismisses the role that the phantom’s colorfully “deformed face” plays in Christine’s (and the audience’s) attraction; arguing

1. Phantom is visually indebted to the 1925 silent film (Rupert Julian, dir.) featuring Lon Chaney as its deformed star. Chaney infamously created his own makeup for the role, a practice he perfected during his starring turn as Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923, dir. by Wallace Worsley). With deep- set and blackened eyes, severe cheekbones, creped skin, a misshapen nose, and crooked teeth, Chaney’s phantom has congenital deformities. Although different in tenor and style, Lloyd Webber’s Phantom also builds upon aspects from the 1945 musical film adaptation, directed by Arthur Lubin, and Ken Hill’s 1976 musical stage adaptation.

that the Phantom’s deformity has nothing to do with the more “pervasive qualities” of the show glosses over the complexity of the draw of disability in theatrical desiring equations of identification. Similar arguments can be found about Side Show and Wicked—the curious spectacle of physical abnormality is not actually about aesthetic difference, but love.

About this project

This dissertation project developed in the gap between my childhood fascination with the Phantom because of his physical differences and the chronicles describing the musical’s success as being in spite of the disfigurement onstage. Disability scholars in the freak show tradition such as Robert Bogden, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Michael

Chemers, and Robin Blyn have demonstrated (wo)man’s interest in the odd, the strange, the different, the abnormal; from daily social interactions and choreographed Freak

Shows to cabinets of curiosity and conventional museums, curious humans want to look, to stare, at that which is different. They also largely leave aside the question of identifications among disabled and/or intersexual/queer audience participants. In

Feminist, Queer, Crip (2013) Alison Kafer works against “[t]he assumption that disability cannot be a desirable location, and that it must always be accompanied by a nostalgia for the lost able mind/body” (43). Kafer demonstrates that the undesirably of disability often animates the “‘cure question” so familiar to disabled people: Wouldn’t you rather be cured?” (43).

Like Kafer, I understand disability as a productive and potentially desiring location. Culturally, disability indexes our responses to difference. These responses are

sometimes damaging; at other times, they are a source of innovation and praise. While the librettos (or “books”) of musicals like Phantom of the Opera mimic Kafer’s implication that the Phantom is desired “in spite of” his disfigurement, I would contend that Christine’s musical motifs, and their cyclical echoing of the Phantom’s own, betray her desire for the Phantom because of his nonnormative way of being in the world. In other words, Phantom (the musical) subverts romantic expectations of the disabled subject (Phantom, the man) and, as a result, reveals ways in which non-normative embodiment is coded as desirable by the able-bodied. Once I made this connection I began to discover similar incidents multiplying throughout the Broadway canon.

Shortly after beginning this dissertation project, I received news that my hearing capacity shifted. I was born with single-side sensorineural deafness, so I have always been deaf in my right ear. Over the past five years, however, sounds have grown muddled, music has flattened, and a new sense of—not quiet, but not quite noise, either— now fills the absence of clearly articulated sound. Between my second-year field examination and my dissertation prospectus defense, I discovered that the receptive capacities in my left ear have gradually, but surely, shifted from the “Mild” hearing level of 26–45 dB into the “Moderately Severe” category at 56–70 dB. I was fitted with a new cross-aid system, my fourth set of hearing-aid devices in thirty years. As a deaf disability scholar raised in a non-signing home, and someone who has subsequently worked to connect with the Deaf community and better-learn American Sign Language, I know that

I am in the process of what Dirksen Bauman and Joseph J. Murray term “Deaf Gain”: an inversion of “Hearing Loss” that instead values the biocultural diversity that deaf people offer society (Bauman and Murray). This will inevitably open new possibilities for my

life and research. As a musical theatre scholar, I am filled with an urgency to consume all of the musical theatre that I can, and write all that I am able, while I can participate in live musicals without interpreters and assistive caption technologies. A part of me was saddened, too, by a sense of preemptive loss from music I may one day not hear if my hearing continues to decline. The day when I graduate into a new sense of Deafness, leaving behind a way of being in the Hearing world that is held exclusively by those who can hear, may never come. If it does, I hope I embrace it with grace. But the realization that such a day may arrive sooner than I had previously thought possible has radically transformed my sense of what it means to be disabled in the world of the Broadway musical.

The majority of this project was written in nonlinear segments while on buses and trains between New York and Washington, D.C., reflections from hotel rooms and friends’ couches immediately following a performance, on tables at the New York Public

Library for the Performing Arts, and in the early hours of the morning, when the quiet of the city gave me a clarity of mind to listen to and not just hear musicals. Most days, I am listening to the scores for the musicals in this dissertation through my hearing aids, which add a subtle layer of noise over the recording, however crisp the track may be. It is like listening to music through a radio as you drive on the border of a station’s range: it gains a staticky veiled texture—you are close to the music, but not quite touching. I have, on more than one occasion, thought that this way of listening is my own daily act of cripping

Broadway, although I hope this project inspires many others.

Cripping Broadway is also the result of many conversations with writers, actors, directors, designers, and casting agents, with whom I have shared sections of this

dissertation for feedback in order to ascertain how to best create a useable text for producing theatremakers. As a result, it is clear to me that the shape of this project will necessarily change as it moves forward: eschewing longer multi-production chapters in favor of single-show essays that conclude with action items and suggestions for artists seeking guidance on how to produce accessible and inclusive stagings of these musicals. I hope, too, that Cripping Broadway will be of use to scholars working in the fields of disability studies, performance studies, theater, and literary studies, for these are the disciplines that have given me the tools for this dissertation. This project does not “clear the field” so much as ask how and why the relationship between the theatre industry’s most popular genre and disability has gone largely unaddressed in musical theatre and disability studies scholarship?

7 Chapter 1

Cripping Broadway: Disability and the American Musical

Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal. — Albert Camus

Performance is the art form which most fully understands the generative possibilities of disappearance. Poised forever at the threshold of the present, performance enacts the productive appeal of the nonreproductive. — Peggy Phelan, Unmarked

In this dissertation, I contend American musicals are a rich site for theorizing disability in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries because musical theatre is a genre that has, thus far, required the able body for its financial survival.1 By bringing musical theatre history into alignment with crip/queer theory, Cripping Broadway models an approach for musical theatre artists and scholars to contend with the implicit ableism that structures the genre and opens a rich archive for disability studies scholars who have, to this point, primarily focused on disability-as-performance rather than performances of disability. A facility with disability studies would benefit theatremakers’ understanding of troubling accessibility issues in our industry, revealing that inaccessibility for disabled persons is symptomatic of the more substantial issue: artists create musicals with the able-bodied performer in mind, which makes the fictional world of the play yet another inaccessibly built environment. Musical theatre artists can similarly aide disability studies

1 Theater versus Theatre? Unless I am citing a specific company, location, or academic field, I will use -er when referring to the physical structure a playing space or the commercial Broadway industry. I prefer -re when discussing the musical as an art form or as a genre. There is no standardized usage of one or the other. I am indebted to Marvin Carlson, who offered this distinction during a conversation at the 2017 American Society for Theatre Research annual conference.

scholars by opening their productions up as practice-as-research laboratories to facilitate the impoverished dialogue between theatre artists and members of the disability community who are eager to find representation and work in those spaces. More specifically, since musical theatre is a composite genre of other art forms—drama, song, dance, and visual arts—its practitioners actively seek ways to innovate the form. An alliance between musical theatre and disability studies can encourage theatremakers to take up disability experiences as compelling ways of being in the world, as drama that demands an audience.

Cripping Broadway’s argument is deceptively simple: disability changes how musicals work. Beneath this assertion, however, are a host of questions: How does disability alter the musical’s form—and if it does, why might disability impact the genre more than other categories of difference, such as gender, sexuality, and race? Must the musical change in response to disability, or can disability be accommodated without radical alterations to the content and structure of the genre? If a musical’s creators start with the disabled body rather than incorporate difference as an after-thought, would the musical look different? How does an attitude towards disability impact the development of the musical and the wider Broadway industry? Given that theatremakers often characterize musicals as “universal”-appeal projects, answers to these questions suggest there are limits to the bodies and identities imagined as universally desirable on stage.

Throughout this dissertation I make three key claims in support of my argument.

The first is that musical theatre proves an art form long-invested in the maintenance and perpetuation of able-bodied performances. Triple-threat performers, actors trained in drama, music, and dance, emerge as both the industry standard and ideal through the

combination of profit-oriented production models and aesthetic conformity to normative ideas of wholeness and beauty. Second, given the centrality of the able-bodied performer to the musical, the introduction of a disability aesthetic changes the functional expression of the genre. I propose that we should use disability simulation—a term already significantly theorized in disability studies and cultural debates about disability education—and consider its value in a performative context instead of invoking other performance traditions (such as blackface or drag) to understand representations of disability.2 Third, both the triple-threat actor and the disabled subject are framed by cultural expectations of a healthy body and its capacity for labor. Technological advancements in blockbuster musicals move disability aesthetics towards the disabled subject’s antipodal point: the hypercapable body, or bodies with abilities beyond the normal register of human capacity. New musicals featuring hypercapacited characters generate a stumbling block for disability simulations: through their performances of hypercapacity, actors evidence an extraordinary able-bodiedness that nevertheless falls short of their character’s abilities. The triple-threat actor becomes a “cripple-threat” actor, with hypercapacity functioning as a compensatory measure against disability in the musical. At all times, my work makes a critical intervention into what Ethan Mordden calls “the compassion musical,” an undertheorized term describing musical characters as objects of sympathy or pity. Adopting this framework, I conceptualize the embodied practice of the performers that participate in the productions Mordden describes.

2 Disability Simulation is not an original term. Although it has been widely used to describe “disability awareness” education practices, my use “disability simulation” specifically builds upon the work of Tanya Titchkosky, Devon Healy, and Rod Michalko. For more information, see Chapter 2, pp. 74–83.

In this introductory chapter, I lay out my argument’s terms and context, and address the two common deployments of disability in musicals. I will then present a chapter narrative that demonstrates how each successive section of this project works towards its conclusion, in which I present action items for practicing theatre artists. If

“genuine performance criticism,” as Philip E. Larson argues, “is unwilling to rest content with the evaluation of ephemera, [it] must attempt to describe a potential object, one that neither the dramatist, the critics, nor the reader has ever seen, or will see” (qtd. in Fuchs

5). Cripping Broadway marks the dearth of theatre criticism about disability in the musical theatre form and, in doing so, attempts to unveil how disability lies at the heart of the genre.

Disability and the American Musical

Broadway musicals are an art form and industry that rely on “triple-threat” performers with exceptional skills in acting, dance, and music—as well as stamina—to consistently execute as many as nine performances a week. An able body is at the center of musical theatre performance yet disabled characters are everywhere in the musical theatre genre: conjoined twins dancing on vaudeville stages, blind Seers, epileptic shut- ins, bedridden boys, and wheelchair-users longing to walk. These generic expectations pressuring the human body were recently underscored by theatre artists and critics when

Ali Stroker, the first wheelchair-using actor on Broadway, appeared in Deaf West’s revival of Spring Awakening (2015). Tellingly, in a production where the primary means of communication was the physical grammar of American Sign Language, it was the visual presence of Stroker’s chair that marked her as nonnormative—atypical, disabled—

and challenged prioritizations of the conventional dance and physical movement vocabularies musicals are built upon.3 Now, theater scholars and practitioners are beginning to debate the merits of diversifying casting with disabled performers and critiquing representations of disability by able-bodied actors.4

In the forward to Elinor Fuchs’ formative article “EF’s Visit to a Small Planet:

Some Questions to Ask a Play,” Fuchs offers what she calls a “template for the critical imagination” (5). Her goal is to forestall the spectator’s impetus to psychoanalyze a character by casting judgment or making assumptions about their motivations—actions that subtend normative psychology and character analysis. By focusing on the play as a future “world,” one can,

… make the assumption that in the world of the play there are no accidents. Nothing occurs “by chance,” not even chance. In that case, nothing in the play is without significance. Correspondingly, the play asks us to focus upon it a total awareness, to bring our attention and curiosity without the censorship of selective interpretation, “good taste,” or “correct form.” Before making judgments, we must ask questions. This is the deepest meaning of the idea, often-repeated but little understood, that the study of art shows us how to live. (6)

Broadway musicals rely on legibility, marketability, and iterability to succeed. The average Broadway musical now costs between ten and sixteen million dollars to produce,

3 I do not take this production up as a case study in this dissertation, although I will briefly turn to the 2019 Broadway revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! in my conclusion The Daniel Fish-directed production features Ali Stroker in the role of Ado Annie. 4 There is still much work to be done—particularly in theater and performance studies, which has historically been slow to address the materiality of disability or its cultural manifestations. For example: the theme of the 2017 American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR) annual conference took inspiration from Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s 1997 work Extraordinary Bodies, in which Garland presents disability as a social construction using literary texts and freak show performances. Apart from Garland-Thomson’s keynote address, however, the conference proceedings contained only one panel that specifically addressed disability. “Extraordinary Bodies,” was more often used to indicate raced, gendered, or sexualized bodies. In short, any body that was not white, male, heterosexual, and cisgender was “extraordinary.” ASTR’s citation of a disability studies model might have generated a capacious examination of disability’s intersections across all categories of difference, and this promise drew a variety of disability studies scholars to the meeting. Disability remained at the conversational margins despite its top-billing at the conference.

and tickets costs hover above one-hundred dollars (Fierberg and Fitzpatrick; “Average

Paid Admission”).5 Although Fuchs’ essay is a primer intended to help readers discern elements of a playscript, and therefore abstracted from specific performances, her attention to the careful curation of the world of the play is especially applicable for commercial musicals. With less than one in five Broadway shows breaking even, the market is too volatile to leave elements of craft to chance (Coleman 301). No aspect of a production develops in a vacuum; the playwright, director, designers, and lead producers all have a curatorial hand. When disability is present in the musical, Fuchs would argue that its presence and execution are tightly controlled—at least by the theatre artists. But by imploring that we “not rush to judgements,” Fuchs acknowledges theatregoers are unlikely to watch without importing their own biases and assumptions.

The average Broadway patron rarely considers the scripted pages or built design when they watch a show, yet these elements are as much a part of a production’s text as the holistic performance. Enquiring how a script might inform an actor’s choices onstage, why a director’s staging might contradict the playtext, or if the design elements alter the functional execution of the performance: these are questions we should ask a play. As a dramaturg, I work under the premise that theatregoers are intelligent and curious participants, but it is my job nonetheless to ensure the script and live performance are indicative of each other in a production. In this dissertation, I am thinking about musicals as both a subset of dramatic literature and as a live, material, encounter in a specific time and place. I move between formal analyses of the musical’s texts and performance with a

5 In-demand shows often have significantly higher prices. In April 2017 Hamilton’s average ticket price was $286 (Pressley and McGlone).

historicist’s attention to each original Broadway production’s relationship to the material conditions of labor and the contemporary critical response.

Carrie Sandahl and Philip Auslander contend a central problem of performance studies with relation to disability is that, despite taking the “performing body as one of its central interests,” performance studies “generally assum[es] the body it studies is a normative one” (7). Their edited collection Bodies in Commotion (2005) was the first multidisciplinary performance studies collection to seriously take up disability as a topic of inquiry as defined in contrast to theater studies, which Sandahl and Auslander rightly characterize as “divided into subfields along traditional geographic, national, and occasionally ethnic lines” (9). The volume has been influential for developing methodologies for disability performance and disability-as-performance within the comparatist mode of performance studies, which is now understood to be aligned with the social-construction and minority models in disability studies. A sustained inquiry that apprehends performances of disability as distinct from disability performance is left unaddressed in this model. By this, I do not mean disability performance in everyday life, qua Goffman, or only a script’s metaphoric invocations of disability, but a study of how disabled embodiment is produced on stage by non-disabled theatremakers. Before musical theatre can explicitly oppose ableism, its creators must first understand how the able body is encoded within the art form. Cripping Broadway shows how artists working in the musical theatre genre assume normative bodies in performance.

By making this process legible, I signpost ways to crip Broadway, to remake the industry in our collective image. Even if the world of the play is aspirational, or utopic, as

Rick Altman contends, a practice of cripping Broadway imagines a more capacious set of

bodies and ways of being in that imagined space. The subtitle of this dissertation project,

“Neoliberal Performances of Disability in the American Musical,” gestures to my anxieties about disability’s presence on Broadway thus far and offers a critique that disability is manifest only in its most abstract or maximally productive iterations.6

Describing the challenges of commercial minoritarian performance, Joshua Chambers-

Letson argues that, “In order to foster a world of boundless exchangeability, capitalism flattens difference into equivalence, making singularity into commensurability”

(Chambers-Letson xx). As we will see, musicals such as James Lapine and Stephen

Sondheim’s Passion (1994) use disability to drive the narrative but are unable to contend with its at-times messy, halting, or speedy materiality. Despite Donna Murphy’s urgent and nuanced performance as Fosca, the details of her illness are not simply lost on the audience—they are altogether absent from the libretto. We see this time and again on

Broadway, where the particularity of disabled, queer, black, and brown bodies are negated or else subsumed by a universalizing discourse: It’s a story for everyone. If we are making stories for everyone, why do we not allow everyone to tell the story? What are the ways that even the most well-intentioned of artists in our industry act as gatekeepers and how is it that theatre enacts exclusionary tactics under the guise of an art-for-all agenda? “In performance,” Chambers-Letson writes, “the body can be a resounding articulation of the negation of the negation” (4).

Disability studies scholars have transferred the logic of the disability rights rallying cry “Nothing about us without us!” to the field’s contact points with performance

6 Following Elizabeth Wollman (2017), I use “American Stage Musical” or the more general term “musical theatre” when referring to musical theatre as an art form and genre of musical theatre. “Broadway,” “Broadway musical,” and its variants are used to specifically refer to a musical’s commercial production.

studies by providing a disability-as-performance framework. This scholarship foregrounds the performances of everyday life disabled persons enact, art-framed work by disabled performers, and the disability metaphors organizing narrative and imagery in dramatic literature (Kuppers 2003 and 2017, Sandahl and Auslander 2005, Johnston

2016). Musical theatre scholars invested in identity-oriented approaches have argued embodied difference carries epistemological and material weight during encounters in live performance, but this material turn towards the body leaves disability’s relationship the genre itself unaddressed (Fox 2015, Knapp 2015, Sternfeld 2015, Wolf 2011). As a result, current scholarship foregrounds disability in musical theatre as either a “narrative prosthesis,” David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder’s formulation of the use of disability

“throughout history as a crutch upon which literary narratives lean for their representational power, disruptive potentiality, and analytical insight,” or it is a battleground for equitable industry and cultural representation (Narrative Prosthesis 50).

Such projects offer actionable solutions for diversifying individual theatrical productions but 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.

Disability Aesthetics

I must first address the concept of disability aesthetics as I understand it in relation to the musical theatre genre. Lauren Berlant describes aesthetics as a location where we process material information and, by contemplating our relationship to the material world, “habituate our sensorium,” while Tobin Siebers defines aesthetics as an

inquiry into “the way that some bodies make other bodies feel” (Cruel Optimism 12;

Disability Aesthetics 24, emphasis mine). Both theorists approach aesthetics not as a structural relationship to beauty as such, in the tradition of Alexander Baumgarten and

Thomas Reid, but as an affective relationship. This means that a disability aesthetic is never objective or neutral; it is always a process of relationality. This is typical of the social constructivist turn. Siebers avoids the auto/erotic in his historical lineage, which traces a non-materialist aesthetic of “disinterestedness” across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Under Siebers’ definition, aesthetic value also seems to rely on the ability to articulate a presumably involuntary response: “the emotional impact of one body on another is experienced as an assault on autonomy and a testament to the power of otherness” (25). Performance scholars might take this as an invitation to study audience responses in order to gauge post-performance affects, but the field of reception studies demonstrates the difficulty of such work.7

7 Although I am not engaging in explicit questions of audience reception in this dissertation, interested readers might look to Susan Bennett’s Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception (1997), and Ric Knowles (2004) Helen Freshwater (2009), PA Skantze (2013) and Willmar Sauter (2014) for trends that inform my understanding of reception studies. Throughout this dissertation research practicing theatre artists have shared anecdotal evidence about reactions to disability representation onstage, usually under the request of anonymity. Collectively, these assessments suggest disability is nearly always unpopular but Broadway artists and audiences are reluctant to name it as such due to a fear of seeming ableist. Given this silence (or the complementary “universalizing” discourse, as I discuss in chapter two), I take the purchasing power of theatregoers as evidence of how disability is received in the theatre. Ken Davenport’s study (2018) on the recoupment of new Broadway musicals from 1994–2014 revealed that seventy-nine percent of musicals failed to recoup their initial investment. Of the musicals considered in this dissertation, Falsettos, Rent, The Book of Mormon, and Wicked are the only productions to achieve recoupment. Davenport’s study roughly coincides with the era of compassion musicals but begins just after my own delineation of 1988–present. Falsettos famously recouped during its 1992 Broadway run in just twenty-seven weeks and had two national tours in 1993 and 1994, making HIV/AIDS and gay male narratives commercially viable (Wyckoff). Although the show was created as a series of one-acts over thirteen years (1979-1991), Falsettos’ successful repackaging of a non-traditional family structure, homosexuality, and an AIDS narrative into a conventional two-act musical laid the groundwork for Rent’s success.

If we experience an “emotional impact” that is tantamount to an “assault” on our autonomy, presumably yielded as we pass through an experience with-and-as the Other, as Siebers suggests, then a disability aesthetic also shapes theatrical scholarship about disability and performance. As scholars, we must question if we are reliable narrators of action and emotion, and also be suspicious of mistaking our own responses or discomfiture for that of the wider set of theatregoers. “In writing theater histories and performance analyses of musicals,” Stacy Wolf writes, “we need to acknowledge that, as with the writing of all theater histories, desire to have experienced the original event and the absence of that event significantly structure our research” (A Problem Like Maria 6).

Wolf describes how the minutiae of details from performances are lost to the archive when scholars perform the “imaginative labor of the theater scholar” of researching and reconstructing performances (6-7). For this reason, I have viewed every musical in this dissertation live, when possible; otherwise, I reconstruct live performances using official archive recordings and online fan videos. When I provide descriptions of scenes or actions, the action is a mixture of stage direction, blocking, and actor interpretations, when appropriate.

Commercial theatre is structurally organized around the dichotomy of being a singular, ephemeral event and a repeatable performance for the duration of a show’s run.

Derrida's notion of iterability helps us understand Broadway productions, in that the production model frames the theatrical experience as a singular event and one capable of machine-like repeatability. If the playwright gives us one iteration of a tale, as a spectator we must also consider the director and actor as additional relay points in the cultural transmission of drama:

But it would be necessary to analyze very closely the experience of having someone else read a text you have allegedly written or signed. All of a sudden someone puts a text right in front of you again in another context, with an intention that is both somewhat yours and simply not yours…. It can reconcile you with what you’ve done, make you love it or hate it. There are a thousand possibilities. Yet one thing is certain in all this diversity, and that is that it’s never the same. (Derrida 157-8)

It is not difficult to imagine Stephen Sondheim watching a performance of Passion

(1994) and disagreeing with an actor’s interpretation of the chronically ill Fosca. Or, for those of us who attend the theater regularly, seeing wildly different interpretations of precarious characters such as Carousel’s Billy Bigelow, Les Miserables’ Fantine, or Next to Normal’s Diana Goodman. Deviation is inevitable unless the playwrighting team is involved in every production. These changes can be productive, too, by offering new musical phrasing and emphases in the score and blocking that might alter the interpretation of a scene.

Marvin Carlson describes audiences as a “psychic polyphony” because individual spectators experience “an unique [sic] and individual ‘synchronic’ reading as the play moves forward diachronically” (Theatre Semiotics 99). Carlson’s reading of audience reception through semiotic theory helps us articulate why no two spectators’ encounters with a play are the same, even during a singular performance. Despite Broadway’s tendency towards nightly replicability, the theatrical event is inherently fractured. Gerald

Rabkin writes, “we have in theatre two sets of readers - the theatre artists who traditionally ‘read’, interpret, the written text, and the audience who read the new theatrical text created by the mediated reading” (157).

Herbert Marcuse argues art’s critical function is “its contribution to the struggle for liberation, [which] resides in the aesthetic form” (The Aesthetic Dimension 8). I

understand this formulation alongside Siebers’ articulation of disability aesthetics as a shared premise that aesthetics’ power is not merely in its formal play, but also its impact on theatregoers. Marcuse writes: “By virtue of its aesthetic form art is largely autonomous vis à vis the given social relations. In its autonomy art both protests these relations, and at the same time transcends them. Thereby art subverts the dominant consciousness, the ordinary experience” (ix). Like Siebers, Marcuse is not writing about live theatrical performance, although he supposes his findings may be extended to other arts mutatis mutandis. Chambers-Letson, reading Marcuse through Muñoz’s theory of disidentification, argues minoritarian performance subverts dominant culture by materializing generative, resistant, persistent, and hopeful worlds. I do not want to overstate the emancipatory capacities of commercial Broadway, or even argue that

Broadway musicals are presently a genre of minoritarian performance—if anything, their mass conformity suggests the opposite. When disability aesthetics shape the form and inform the content, however, the commercial musical may perform subversive work against majoritarian rule.

In Narrative Prosthesis Mitchell and Snyder theorize the literary as a kind of longing for direct access to embodiment which it cannot have: a lingering nostalgia for materiality informs its melancholic project and thus it spends time simulating access to an absent materiality. This, Mitchell and Snyder posit, suggests that disability performs a great amount of work to bridge the gap between embodiment and literary longing.

Visceral embodiment allows access to an absented materiality because it is not an over- weighted material load. But Petra Kuppers, in Disability and Contemporary

Performance: Bodies on Edge (2004) argues a narrative prosthesis cannot deal with the

meaty, embodied presence in performative arts, and Augusto Boal suggests that we cannot divorce idea and form because reason and sensory, embodied feeling “are a constant couple, even when at loggerheads, even when they come to blows” (87–88;

Aesthetics of the Oppressed 15).

Emily Russell similarly posits that, “the encounter between an anomalous physical body and the body politic requires narrative strategies that can make sense of the unfamiliar,” and offers a way of reading these crises of “daily citizenship” in each encounter (3). Her distinction of how physical bodies are understood as social bodies underscores the power narratives have in shaping our experience with disability.

Disability, Russell contends, “seems relentlessly material and subjectivity emerges only through indenture to the abnormal body” (8). Russell problematizes characterization and personhood being defined or limited by the “material bounds of physical condition,” but I would argue this form of “indenture” is potentially productive in that it refuses a disavowal of the abnormal body. To understand disability, in her framework, you must first reckon with non-normative embodiment. Although the disabled body is often hypervisible in public, disability subjectivity is emotionally invisible; cripping plays and musicals, re-centering dramas from a disabled vantage is one way of offering social commentary back to the public. In this way, we might think of theatrical works as a prosthesis. If the prosthesis always fails in its attempt to render the disabled body

“normal,” and therefore invisible, following Mitchell and Snyder, then using theatre as a prosthesis might leverage this hyper-visibility towards a greater understanding of disability subjectivity, which in turn normalizes different bodyminds. Broadway is a space that brings the physical body and the political body into alignment, but it also

demonstrates gaps, ruptures, and successes in this process too. I make no claims that all performances of disability in musicals operate as commentaries on belonging to the national body politic or citizenship, although individual productions may take up these questions. As we will see in chapter three, for example, AIDS musicals such as Rent

(1996) and The Book of Mormon (2011) capitalize on racialized bodies at the margins of political representation who the state exercises its power to let die.

Kuppers might contend the musical’s fixation with disability is due to the experimentality of disabled embodiment itself. “Performance is the medium of the body,” she writes, and “performance relies on the complexities of presence for its aesthetic drive” (Bodies on Edge 88). By articulating disability as social structure and embodied knowledge that is at the center and the margins of perception and discourse, she positions disability as a “phenomenologically normal experience, but one that is coded as

‘periphery’ rather than ‘center’, as ‘abnormal’ rather than ‘normal’, from the outside by the ascription of the term and social status of disabled” (Bodies on Edge 14). The perceptual “‘blind’ spot of the dominant” structures disability as a secondary, negative concern. But disability, Kuppers argues, is not a secondary concern for the disabled because it shapes their ways of engaging with the discursive field of normality, the kinesthetic experience of impairment and its associated stigmas, and the formation of unique cultural knowledge.

This dissertation seeks to advance contributions from the field of disability studies to musical theatre scholarship by focusing on the “way,” or how, “feeling” is produced rather than determine fixed readings of what is produced. I ask the question of how contemporary musical productions create a disability aesthetic onstage; what a disability

aesthetic might mean is a secondary concern. In doing so, I offer close readings of musicals by examining how the constitutive elements of the musical theatre genre function in both script and performance. I attend elements of choreography, plot, music, and stage technology in each chapter, although chapters two through five are organized around each of these singular elements respectively. As we will discover, “disability has a funny way of popping up everywhere” (Bérubé 1).

Audience or Spectator?

Theatre—particularly musical theatre—might have an investment in the terminology of the audience. Audience is rooted in the Latin audire, a verb meaning “to hear.” But as Helen Freshwater, Dennis Kennedy, and others argue, “theatre’” comes from a sight-oriented lineage. When we characterize theatregoers as “spectators” or

“audiences” we reveal how we anticipate that patron will experience performance, privileging sight (looking) and sound (listening or hearing) as primary modes of participation. How might the execution of a musical change if we smelled a narrative, tasted emotion, or felt the music? The latter has strong applications in productions with music, in which percussion might be felt by Deaf and Hearing theatregoers, offering discrete physical sensations that can augment the work onstage. I ask these questions provocatively. But if we reimagined how information is conveyed in the theater, we could create art that accommodates a wider set of theatergoers and their bodies.

Throughout this dissertation, I use audience, spectator, patron, and theatregoer to describe those in physical attendance at a live performance. Where possible, I match the stage element under consideration with the appropriate receptive term. For example; I will use

“spectator” when discussing blocking, choreography, or other visual elements such as scenic design and costume. I use audience when I want to call attention to lyrics, score or sound effects. By using theatregoer or patron otherwise, I am attempting to recognize the diverse bodies who have paid to be in the theater and use an otherwise inclusive descriptor.

The Compassion Musical

In Anything Goes (2013), musical theater historian Ethan Mordden describes the late twentieth and early twenty-first century as an age of “compassion musicals”— musicals featuring protagonists with various “undesirable” characteristics that nonetheless gain audience sympathy (265). Mordden explains this movement without a clear definition of what compassion musicals include, but he cites The Phantom of the

Opera, Rent, Side Show (1997), A New Brain (1997), and Next to Normal (2009) as examples.8 The central characters in each of the musicals Mordden names are disabled in a pronounced way. He does not explicitly make this observation himself, but his coupling of “compassion” with the undesirability of disability organizes a structure of sympathy for seemingly faulty embodiments that result in individual and social deterioration. His frustratingly vague invocation of compassion in proximity to devalued and precarious bodies is an apt example of what Katherine Ibbett explores Compassion’s Edge (2017).

Ibbett, writing how the verb “to compassionate” describes “a base-level putting up with another’s difference, a dealing with difference that might be understood on a national or a domestic scale,” asks if compassion’s limits are an “indicator of the limits of tolerance”

8 Next to Normal is often styled as next to normal (following its media materials) but there is no standardized capitalization in Broadway scholarship.

(6–7). Are Broadway’s disability narratives, produced by nondisabled artists, compassionate artistic practices yielding faithful representations? Most often, no. As will become clear throughout this dissertation, the Broadway industry requires a maximum productivity from every body with little-to-no differentiation or accommodation for disabled actors and characters. As Ibbett says, “Living together does not always mean to let live” (7).

Rather than dismiss or shy away from Mordden’s classification, this project builds an archive around the compassion musical with hopes of understanding, explaining, problematizing, and expanding this subgenre. In this project I see Broadway compassion musicals as commercial responses to nonnormative bodies circulating in the social imaginary. Accordingly, what Mordden identifies as compassion musicals articulate a historical trajectory of what kinds of bodies capture attention and enthrall audiences as our society rapidly shifts from the legal acknowledgement of disability and a campaign for equitable access in the Americans With Disabilities Act (1990) towards contemporary biological enhancements that threateningly promise to eradicate all forms of disability through genetic modifications and mutations. While this trajectory repeats the early twentieth-century eugenics impulse to predict a world without disabled bodies, its recycling in late liberalism takes on its own specific historical hues. Taken together, the multi-city development process for each musical, the eventual realization of the libretto and score into a full-scale production, the location New York City holds in American and global fantasies as “the center of the universe,” and the alignment of offstage body politics with onstage embodiments, construct Broadway compassion musicals as a repository of cultural tools for ciphering a liberal imagination.

Mordden marks Jonathan Larson’s breakout hit Rent as the “most successful” of the modern compassion musical form, which reveals how physical difference and illness shape the category: “Rent focused young people of diverse backgrounds, races, and sexuality struggling to survive—literally, as some of them have AIDS” (Anything Goes

266). If we are to consider crip/queer bodies struggling to survive as central to the genre, as Mordden suggests, then we must create new methods for apprehending disability’s impact on the American musical. How did the disabled bodies Mordden describes end up onstage, at the center of expensive Broadway productions when they are otherwise hidden from society’s view? Is the compassion musical a sudden trend towards dramatizing disability or has disability always been woven into the fabric of American musical theatre?

In their proposition of a literary disability studies, Snyder and Mitchell contend that “Disability has not been absent from the attention of previous eras—far from it.

Rather, readers, teachers, and critics have lacked the critical capacity for evaluating the significance of its presence” (“Disability Haunting in American Poetics” 4). As this project demonstrates, non-normative, queer, bodies have long trod the boards of New

York City stages and disability is at the heart of the musical theatre genre. For the first time, the dominant culture is having to reflexively assess its own privilege, learn from disability culture, and work as equal partners towards equity. Broadway seasons in the compassion musical era, which I define as Phantom’s debut in 1988 to the present, are marked by a critical mass of musicals in which alternatively-abled/disabled characters explore the dramatic possibilities of human biology as a productive dimension of difference. These musicals have proven themselves to be successful at luring patrons

through fantastic performances of incapacity, which in turn has ignited industry conversations about the ethics of disability representation and increasing accessibility in commercial theatre productions.

Martha Nussbaum reasons that “Compassion will be a valuable social motive only if it is equipped with an adequate theory of the worth of basic goods, only if it is equipped with an understanding of agency and fault, and only if it is equipped with a reasonably broad account of the people who should be the object of an agent’s concern, distant as well as close” (399). Cripping Broadway pressures the motive of compassion musicals by asking; what is the “basic good” being valued? Is it disabled embodiment?

Able-bodied performance? Both? Neither? In doing so, I draw from a wide cast of actors—theatre artists, music theatre historians, disability theorists, clinicians, and audiences—because these questions implicate nearly everyone in the industry’s ecosystem. The physical and mental impairments simulated onstage necessitate a consideration of how Broadway musicals perpetuate or critique disability studies’ medical and social models; they also require a genre-specific framework that enables education and debate so that artists might build a new and better system.

To date, most existing monographs concerning musical theatre fall into one of two categories: long-form histories and composer biographies or industry “tell-all” works. Notable historical surveys that have informed this project include Ethan

Mordden’s Anything Goes (2016) and Broadway Babies: The People Who Made the

American Musical (1983), Geoffrey Block’s Enchanted Evenings: The Broadway

Musical from Show Boat to Sondheim (1997), Peter Filichia’s Broadway Musicals

(2010), Cecil Smith’s Musical Comedy in America (1981), and Ken Mandelbaum’s Not

Since Carrie (1992). Texts about the business of Broadway itself, usually from producers-cum-authors, include Myrna and Harvey Frommer’s It Happened on

Broadway: An Oral History of The Great White Way (2015), Michael Riedel’s Razzle

Dazzle: The Battle for Broadway (2015) and Jack Viertel’s The Secret Life of the

American Musical: How Broadway Shows are Built (2016). In the former category, authors give closely-related historical trajectories of the book musical that highlight (or devalue) various writing teams and usually offer commentary on the critical reception and cultural impact of specific musicals; the latter category promises to take readers behind the curtain of the commercial musical by sharing “secrets” and stories of rehearsals, performances, and production meetings. The Frommers’ It Happened on

Broadway is significant for its generous inclusion of interviews with on and off-stage theater artists, while Viertel’s represents a pivot towards academia while offering the benefits of a contemporary twenty-first century-producer’s vantage.

A third category of musical theatre criticism is beginning to gain traction, in which scholars combine musicological and cultural theory with theater history to address the musical’s form or critique its content. It is this third category of musical theatre scholarship to which this project contributes. Lehman Engel’s The American Musical

Theatre: A Consideration (1967), Joseph P. Swain’s The Broadway Musical: A Critical and Musical Survey (1990; Revised and Expanded Second Edition, 2002), and Scott

McMillin’s The Musical as Drama (2006), present structural analyses of the musical’s score, chiefly addressing music as a dramatic element. Cripping Broadway is neither a comprehensive history of musicals nor a musicological study, but I deploy a musical analysis when appropriate. Jessica Sternfield’s The Megamusical (2006),and Stacy

Wolf’s A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical (2002) and For Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical (2011) attend to specific bodies-in-performance in ways that guide this project. Sternfield’s analyses of the actors’ body against the large-scale mise-en-scène queries how form and function changed after

Broadway’s “British invasion” in the 1980s, while Wolf unpacks relationships between female characters to demonstrate queer forms of sociality and desire.

Nearly every work in all three categories is subtended by the argument that the vast majority of American musicals are successful because two things: the integrated book musical and the triple-threat performer. Integrated book musicals, modeled on

Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II’s 1943 smash hit, Oklahoma!, use song, spoken word, and dance to advance the plot simultaneously. In doing so, they tend to be anchored by a single character’s experience even when she is offstage. As will become clear in the following section, the multiply-talented triple-threat performer was not always the Broadway standard; she emerges as an athlete-performer capable of keeping pace with industry growth throughout the twentieth century. I will not explicitly address the integrated musical theory until chapter four, but I take my cue from other musical theatre scholars and use it as a working foundation throughout this project.

Although this dissertation is primarily bound by the compassion musical era, inaugurated in 1988 with the arrival of Phantom, elements of my Broadway archive extend back to other shows produced during and after Broadway’s “Golden Age.”9 Dates for the beginning of the Golden Age of American musical theater flexibly move between the 1940s and 1960s, chiefly marked by a score-incorporated and narrative-oriented

9 In musical theatre scholarship “Golden Age” and “Golden Era” are used interchangeably, although I tend towards the former to maintain taxonomic congruity with Broadway’s “Third Age.”

storytelling (alongside the big-musical spectacle) of Rodgers and Hammerstein. Mordden stretches this classification as early as 1925, from Rodgers’ early collaborations with

Lorenz Hart in The Garrick Gaieties, after which “the fresh-sounding score was now one of the musical’s essentials,” to Michael Gore and Dean Pitchford’s 1988 flop Carrie

(Anything Goes 112, emphasis original). This categorization is useful for understanding broad commercial movements within the industry but it does not account for key shifts in the performance culture: the emergence of the triple-threat actor. Mordden is not alone—

Broadway historians such as Geoffrey Block, Peter Filichia, and Stacy Wolf use similar timelines.

For my purposes, I see Third Age musicals as specifically post-1967, when James

Rado, Gerome Ragni, and Galt MacDermot’s Hair redefined conventions of American musical theater by its corporation of the popular rock genre, its political action as an anti-

Vietnam War peace movement art, and its eschewing of the separate acting, singing and dancing corps common during Broadway’s Golden Age. The United States, ensnared in a long and costly conflict in Vietnam, had neither the artistic bodies nor the commercial appetite to support big-tent productions. The transatlantic success of megamusicals by

Andrew Llyod Webber and writing team Alain Boubil and Claude-Michel Schönberg in the late 1970s and 1980s revived an aesthetic of large-scale spectacle and corps-specific casting, but by then industry standards were immutable. The expectation was that every cast member—from leading lady to chorus girl—be a triple-threat.

The triple-threat performer

Book writers, librettists, composers, choreographers, directors, critics, and fans imagine actors in musical theatre to be exceptionally able-bodied: a performer must have a keen memory for lines of dialogue, an intuitive skill for conveying social relationships with affective nuance, a good ear for music and voice trained to withstand the rigors of singing scores for multiple hours each day, the coordination and muscle memory to participate in complex stage blocking and choreography, and the intellectual stability to complexly realize the life of a character and still maintain her own social life outside of the theater. This constellation of excellence in acting, dancing, and music in a single virtuosic performer is commonly referred to as a “triple-threat.” As a creative baseline for contemporary musicals, the triple-threat performer is the result of practices that emerged from the multiple-genre vaudeville variety shows in the early twentieth century. Today, musicals are predicated on expectations of the performer’s bodily congruity with a kind of able-bodied exceptionalism or hypercapacity.

Why do we not expect to find disabilities on the Broadway stage? Assumptions that all disabled people are chronically “unwell” and if a disabled performer is capable of offering a high-octane, enjoyable performance she must somehow be “faking it” undergirds the logic of many producers, artists, and spectators. One reason for this is the anticipation of bodies functioning only as described by a medical diagnosis (one element of what is, in disability studies, is called the medical model of disability); another is the government-perpetuated trope of the “welfare queen” who fraudulently collects disability payments without being “really disabled.” Both stigmatize disability and police its public expression. However, disability and questions regarding the proper limits of human

capability have been addressed onstage since what is considered to be the American stage musical’s earliest moment: the 1866 production of The Black Crook.

Produced at Niblo’s Garden, the five-hour spectacle was a combination of ballet, music, and other entertainments organized around a traditional melodramatic plot written by Charles M. Barras. In The Black Crook, Amina and Rodolphe are lovers but the jealous Count Wolfenstein wants Amina for himself, so he devises a plan with Hertzog— a crookbacked wizard who provides the devil with new souls in exchange for eternal life—to sacrifice Rodolphe to the demon Zamiel. This mutually beneficial deal would remove Rodolphe as Wolfenstein’s competition for Amina’s affections and provide

Herzog with his annual sacrifice. Through a series of (mis)adventures Rodolphe escapes with the help of a fairy queen to be reunited with his love, while Wolfenstein is defeated, and Herzog is condemned to hell since he cannot fulfill his Faustian bond. Although The

Black Crook “wasn’t the first anything and wasn’t even a musical,” as Ethan Mordden argues (2013), Mordden and others agree the production is nonetheless a functional benchmark due to its box office success while combining melodramatic plot, music, and spectacle (15). 10 As such, its depiction of Hertzog marks a starting point for our understanding of disability in the American stage musical.

A production note in The Black Crook’s 1866 prompt book notes that as the titular

“Black Crook” of the spectacular, “Hertzog is a hideous deformity, with leaden complexion, humped-back, knotted limbs, crooked body and lame” (Barras 3). Made

10 The Black Crook is not a stage musical in how we now understand the genre, with an integrated book and score, but instead an extravaganza that mashed various genres into one evening spectacular. Its reputation as “the first musical” persists partly through its reputation as such and a lack of an obvious replacement. See Mast (1987), Lewis (2003), Stempel (2010), and Wollman (2017) for additional discussions of The Black Crook in context of musical theatre history.

“lame” by his “crooked body,” Hertzog is apparently unwell. His disability marks his turpitude—an iteration of the trope of the villain’s distorted nature manifesting itself in his outward appearance. Hertzog’s “black” hue and “leaden complexion” would have been classically regarded as an indicator of a melancholic temperament, first classified by the Greek physician-philosopher Hippocrates as a component of humourism and still referenced throughout the nineteenth century. Today, melancholia adds an additional layer of mental health as it is considered a depressive mode. It would similarly be difficult to not read this note as offering racial markers although no evidence suggests

C.H. Morton, who originated Hertzog, was a non-white actor or performed in traditional minstrel archetypes (although his face was blackened) (“Playbill for The Black Crook”).

As a melodramatic villain, then, his blackened coloring quickly distinguishes him amid the spectacular’s colorful surroundings. Significantly, the phrasing of the note does not say Hertzog has a deformity; Hertzog himself is the deformity. The descriptor “hideous” is as much a design specification for the costumer as it is an aspect that should inform the director’s blocking and other actors’ responses in order to elicit a desired aesthetic judgement from the audience.

Together, Hertzog’s nonnormative coloring, awkward physical movements, and

“crooked” silhouette create a hideously disabled man, which collectively makes his quest for immortality all the more audacious. His body is not only figured as disabled, it is important that Hertzog also transgresses human nature in his quest for an unnaturally long life; the latter action presumably forecloses compassion for, or sympathy with, the aging wizard. This strategic management will be significant to my discussion of diegetic disabilities later in this chapter; for now, however, we must remember Morton’s portrayal

of Hertzog’s deformity would be received as heroically virtuosic—a predecessor of contemporary expectations on the triple-threat performer.

“Triple-threat” is now a staple theatre term signifying excellence in singing, acting, and dancing, but its origins come from another discipline that prizes able-bodied prowess:

American football. The Oxford English Dictionary attributes its first use to W.H.

Baumer’s 1939 text Sports as Taught & Played at West Point (“triple, adj. and adv.”).

Baumer uses “triple-threat” to indicate an individual player’s skill in running, passing, and punting; the phrase was clearly already in common parlance, as I have found it in newspapers sports columns as early as 1916 (“Football,” Oklahoma City Times). By the late 1930s the phrase crossed over into the performing arts, although it still connoted being multiply-skilled. A November 1937 review of the Victor Schertzinger-directed musical comedy Something To Sing About describes Evelyn Daw as a “triple-threat leading lady who sings, dances and acts” (“Cagney”), and the phrase was deployed less than a year later as a pun in George Ross’ article “In New York”: “Overheard at a local nightspot: ‘She’s a triple-threat entertainer. She can’t sing, she can’t dance, she can’t act.’” (Ross). Ross’ joke plays more on the idea of the entertainer being a “threat” due to the unnamed actresses’ multiple deficiencies. Though set in opposition; their wordplay on

“triple-threat” realizes an expectation of the exceptionally able-bodied, skilled performer.

In 1941 the term was nationally concretized in Life magazine. The now-iconic 11 August- edition showcased Rita Hayworth on the cover, relaxing on a beach while wearing a two- piece bathing suit, and inside, a nearly-full page photograph of Hayworth in a form- fitting negligee, kneeling “on her own bed in her own home” (33). These images, styled to highlight Hayworth’s physical fitness, aesthetic beauty, and presumed sexual

availability, are accompanied by the headline “Rita Hayworth Rises from Bit Parts Into a

Triple-Threat Song and Dance Star.” Such proclamations of Daw and Hayworth’s skill, accompanied by photographic evidence of their fit bodies, underscore the connection between audience optics and able-bodied performance burgeoning at the beginning the

1940s—Broadway’s Golden Age. Now, telegraphing personal health and physical ability are calling cards for contemporary Broadway performers.

The economic consolidation of roles that would, in earlier decades, have been filled by many actors instead of one is predicated on the physical ability of the single, virtuosic performer. This shift in casting practices is predicated on two principles: smaller casts (and therefore lower production costs) and physical fitness. Producers and directors frown upon actors, singers, and dancers who openly acknowledge their work is physically taxing. Complaint goes against the performance subculture’s embracing injury, pain, and tolerance in deference to the appearance of physical prowess; it puts an individual at danger of losing her job; and potentially results in an actors’ physiological “disruption of self” when she is unable to perform the triple-threat ideal (Mainwaring, Krasnow, and

Kerr). The athletic coding of the triple-threat is not limited to the theater; ESPN Sports

Science, for example, recently collaborated on a series of biometric studies with cast members in Disney’s The Lion King. The results measured actors against top professional athletes and found their power and agility to be comparable or better: dancer Lamar

Baylor spins 35-percent faster than the Dallas Cowboy running back Ezekiel Elliot, while

India Bolds covers an average distance of 2.68 miles per show—more than NBA all-star

Steph Curry’s game average in the 2015–16 season (Cingari).

The rhetoric of athleticism is not arbitrarily imposed: it is deeply ingrained in artistic subcultures, where Broadway actors position themselves closer to the football player of the phrase’s origins than the artist we might expect. In a November 2016 episode of the popular musical theatre podcast The Ensemblist, actor Pearl Sun describes the taxing work of performing the leading role of bipolar Diana Goodman in next to normal: “It becomes a marathon—you really have to pace yourself in a different way, to make sure that you’re taking care of yourself when you’re not onstage, so that you can pull that out eight times a week” (Brady and Lanzarone). Given the training, repetition, pacing, and stamina it takes to perfect and perform onstage for three hours eight times a week, the metaphor of running a marathon is not a particularly surprising one. For

Cynthia Erivo, Celie in the 2015 revival of The Color Purple, the actor “should stay fit for the job, not let the job make [her] fit.” She explains: “If your body is working correctly and then you get a cold or something, that cold probably won't knock you out as hard as it would have if you weren't healthy. Keep yourself fit and you'll be able to do the job” (Moseley). Of course, Erivo may be an exception—the actor ran the 2016 Brooklyn half-marathon in 1 hour, 48 minutes, and then performed Saturday’s matinee and evening performances (Stewart).

Why should a discussion of disability in musical theatre first grapple with able-bodied triple-threats? The ableism structuring commercial theatre practices must be included in our analysis of how disability operates in Broadway musicals because the able body is the illusory norm dictating how roles are written, performed, and received. Ableism sets the stage for tropes of dis-ease with disease, institutionalization, inspiration-porn, and disposability to be unchecked, exploited and reiterated. In theorizing the triple-threat as a

hypercable performer, a performer with abilities beyond the normal range of human capacity, one stumbling block I must acknowledge is that individual actors may in fact have various nonvisible disabilities and/or chronic illnesses shaping their performance.

What to make of the exceedingly capable triple-threat actor who has a nonvisible disability related to information processing, hearing, sight, or any number of other vectors? How do disability aesthetics work in and against the economic unit of the triple- threat?

The disabled body is the shadowy counterpart to musical theatre’s triple-threat performer and the industry relies on the elision of disability’s material conditions, even in productions predicated on the presence of disability onstage. Ellen Samuels characterizes this dilemma in Fantasies of Identification, suggesting that “it is difficult to talk about disability without talking about the disability con, as one cannot exist without the shadowy form of the other” (71). I favor the term “disability simulation” over “disability con,” for reasons I explain in chapter two, but Samuels’ observation strikes the heart of this project. Drawing attention to the paradox the triple-threat performers enacting disability highlights the potential for disability aesthetics to undo and rebuild the “world of the play,” generating new dramatic texts and theatrical performances with nuanced, inclusive, disability representations, dreams, politics, and language. It is more difficult, but realistic, to view access to alternative bodyminds as the musical’s radical cripistemological move: breaking material and affective barriers by live performances that generate shared experiences in specific geographic and sociopolitical contexts: “This reiteration builds worlds. It proliferates ‘reals,’ or what I call worlds, and establishes the groundwork for potential oppositional counterpublics” (Muñoz 196).

Disability as a metaphor

The most common example of disability in musical theatre is a rhetorical invocation in musicals in which there are otherwise no disabled characters present. We can easily find examples of ableist language in everyday speech: a movie may be “lame,” a highway can be “crippled” by a snowstorm, the complaint about a “psycho” neighbor or co-worker, and many more besides. It is not surprising, therefore, to hear characters in musicals using similar language; the stage is a refraction of our cultural norms. Such examples are usually intentionally benign, which is to say that we are so desensitized to the use of disability as a referent point that disablement is frequently not an intended insult but, instead, reveals some aspect of an able-bodied character’s nature or action. The problem with such references is that they linguistically reinforce and disseminate a hierarchical preference for able bodies and normative cognition over disabled and neurodiverse persons.

Librettos commonly use disability metaphors as a shorthand for understanding love. Musicals with ostensibly healthy, able-bodied characters like April, Cathy, and

Marta in Company (1970) and Bobby in Crazy For You (1992) sing familiar invocations of the love-as-madness or “lovesick” tropes in “You Could Drive A Person Crazy” and

“K-ra-zy For You,” respectively. Even in productions with visibly disabled characters, such as the 2014 revival of Side Show, characters use disability to describe the recognition of love: conjoined twins Daisy and Violet cite other forms of physical disablement to articulate their affections for Terry and Buddy after receiving their first kiss. Daisy sings how “nothing they’re saying/ is catching my ear” while Violet proclaims, “And I’m virtually blind/ No more room in my mind”—all because “He kissed

me” (Russell et. al 62). The ableism entrenched in these metaphors is arguably easier to find when disabled characters sing them. In the original 1997 Side Show script The Boss sings “Crazy, Deaf, and Blind,” before the Hiltons’ incorporate these words into their own vocabularies. His invocations of “crazy, deaf, and blind” use mental illness and sensory disabilities to explicitly privilege his own sense of being able-bodied and normal; it rings even more discordant when other disabled characters reiterate his logic, creating a hierarchy of disablement where some forms of disability are privileged as desirable over others.

Similar citations of disability can be found in Stephen Schwartz and Joseph

Stein’s The Baker’s Wife (1989) by its protagonist Geneviève, the young and flighty wife of the much-older baker Aimable Castagnet, Although the musical never ran on

Broadway, despite a strong West End run, Geneviève’s Act I song “Meadowlark” is popular in Broadway audition rooms, concert circuits, and cabarets. At a pivotal point in the first act when Geneviève considers leaving Aimable for the younger, handsome chauffeur Dominique, she recalls a tale from her childhood:

WHEN I WAS A GIRL, I HAD A FAVORITE STORY OF THE MEADOWLARK WHO LIVED WHERE THE RIVERS WIND HER VOICE COULD MATCH THE ANGELS' IN ITS GLORY BUT SHE WAS BLIND, THE LARK WAS BLIND (Schwartz and Stein 53)

Geneviève sees herself as the blinded meadowlark, applying the fate of the bird and its death to her own life. Mitchell and Snyder have framed invocations of disability like the kind Geneviève’s sings as a narrative prosthesis. The performing arts are not forms

Mitchell and Snyder address at length in Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the

Dependencies of Discourse (2000), but the musical does similar work through the libretto

and score. Integrated book musicals use song to advance the plot. In The Baker’s Wife

“Meadowlark” is a not simply a reflexive expression of Geneviève’s inner life: she contemplates the fate of the blind meadowlark and uses the song to arrive at the decision to leave Amiable for Dominique when the number builds towards to its final, triumphant crescendo.

Geneviève, recalling the lark’s death after refusing the sun god’s offer, sees herself as the meadowlark and rescripts the story at the critical moment of decision- making. The lark feels a sense of duty to stay with the old king, but Geneviève decides to

“fly away” with her “beautiful young man” Dominique. While her decision demonstrates how blindness functions as a representational shorthand for the audience and an analytic tool for Geneviève, it also demonstrates the “disruptive potentiality” Mitchell and Snyder describe (49). Geneviève, perhaps willfully, misunderstands the meadowlark’s death:

BUT THE MEADOWLARK SAID NO FOR THE OLD KING LOVED HER SO SHE COULDN'T BEAR TO WOUND HIS PRIDE SO THE SUN GOD FLEW AWAY AND WHEN THE KING CAME DOWN THAT DAY HE FOUND HIS MEADOWLARK HAD DIED EVERY TIME I HEARD THAT PART I CRIED ... (Schwartz and Stein 54)

In context of her decision to leave Amiable for Dominique, Geneviève’s interpretation of the childhood fable makes it seem as though the lark dies of a broken heart after refusing the sun god. Her tears are not for the old king, who mourns the beloved lark upon his discovery of her death, but for the lark herself who has sacrificed a presumed happiness in duty to the king. The lyrics themselves, however, suggest that the covetous sun god kills the meadowlark for her refusal of his advances to “dance on the coral beaches, [and]

make a feast of the plums and peaches.” Given that the thought of wounding the king’s pride is the only thing the meadowlark “couldn’t bear” we can logically assume she could bear living without the sensuous pleasures the sun god offers. This means she does not die of a broken heart, as Geneviève interprets, which opens the possibility of the god’s jealous rage. Thus, blindness is not only a “crutch” the audience relies upon to understand the baker’s wife inner life or an analytic tool for Geneviève to work through her own given circumstance—her misreading of the meadowlark’s story is, paradoxically, a kind of “blindness” as Geneviève attempts to rewrite her own tale towards the curative, sighted, ending.

This doubling in Geneviève’s loss of control of the blindness metaphor is one example of a narrative prosthesis’ “disruptive potentiality”: just as the disabled body cannot be standardized, for no two disability experiences are the same, so too a metaphorical disability cannot be narrowly controlled in the diegetic world. As

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson reminds us, disability “demands a reckoning with the messiness of bodily variety, with literal individuation run amok,” whereby it “signals that the body cannot be universalized” (1997, 24-25). Lyricist Stephen Schwartz’s blind meadowlark, while an effective storytelling tool, highlights how disability cannot be simply inscribed in traditional curative arcs without a disruptive “messiness” that runs alongside, or counter to, the character’s objectives. In other words, Geneviève is the blind meadowlark of the story but not for the reasons she thinks. Her attempts to “cure” herself of her blindness by running away with Dominique calls attention to her own inability to see the truth in the story and her own situation. Mitchell and Snyder’s narrative prosthesis

“evolves out of this specific recognition: a narrative issue to resolve or correct — to

‘prostheticize’ in David Wills’ sense of the term — a deviance marked as improper to a social context” (53). Geneviève’s contemplation of leaving her husband would certainly be scandalous in the context of her small French town during the 1930s; her invocation of blindness is a reason and a corrective, although both fail under scrutiny.

More broadly, this example of how blindness is deployed in one song of The

Baker’s Wife demonstrates common issues of cultural representations of disability on

Broadway. The blind meadowlark is coded as passive and feminine against the masculine, able powers of the king and the sun god. Significantly, the meadowlark is also set into the traditional kill-or-cure narrative. This common plot “will often seem to

‘redeem’ a protagonist—the death will be sacrificial or the cure will be credited to the hero” (Dolmage 39). While the lark is praised for her virtuosic musical ability— apparently so great that it calls the sun god down to Earth from his celestial flight. His restoration of the lark’s sight is conditional on accepting his invitation, which is a different kind of prison. Her death, figured as a sacrificial marker of love for the old king, obscures the seeming expendability of the meadowlark herself. This is but one of many disability metaphors used throughout musical theatre; each, purposefully or not, transmits a set of images, language, practices, and assumptions about the disablement that skews wider than the line of dialogue or musical number can control.

Crip characters with diegetic disabilities

Narrative prostheses are fundamentally different than disabilities woven into the musical’s diegesis, the plot as represented in the libretto and score. However ableist they may be, disability metaphors are effective tools for conveying sentiment precisely

because they are commonly used in everyday speech. In actuality, of course, they perpetuate harmful stereotypes that not only co-opt disablement in service of the able- bodied speaker, but this cooptation also obscures the condition(s) of the disability itself.

Uttered by an able-bodied character performed by an able-bodied actor, the disabled body never makes an appearance onstage.

What I am calling “diegetic disabilities” are disabilities explicitly scripted into the book of a musical to be performed onstage. Even if the disability works as a narrative prosthesis (such as A Christmas Carol’s sickly, disabled Tiny Tim), there is still a materially present body. This is a significant departure in a few key ways. First, it means that a diegetic disability is not a vehicle glossing an able-bodied character’s experience, as I argue Geneviève’s meadowlark is scripted in The Baker’s Wife, but a lived condition that a character herself experiences. While the portrayal may be (and most commonly is) played by an able-bodied actor, diegetic disabilities disallow any easy negation of disabled embodiment because once a disability is physically enacted onstage it becomes central to the vocabulary of the musical production. It is not a simple referent point for what a character is “actually” feeling because the disability itself is an apparent source of sensation. Second, diegetic disabilities open space for nonnormative embodiments to be considered as having equal if not greater value to the conveyance of a story and characters’ experience. Much like how a book musical integrates music and plot to advance characters—one requires the other—diegetic disabilities are central to the constellation of an individual character’s expression, plot arc, and identity. Third, and most significantly, diegetic disabilities in musicals offer valuable alternatives to the professionalization of the actors’ body. Given that musical theatre all but expects

extraordinary abilities from its triple-threat actors, the maximally productive model is thwarted by the disabled body. Encountering disabilities onstage challenge able-bodied notions of what bodies are livable, marketable, healthy or well, capable, and desirable.

A diegetic disability is preferential precisely because its discoverability. If a disability is central to a character’s onstage presence it cannot be covered over, ignored, or translated into a shorthand for an able-bodied character’s experience. Nessarose navigates the social experience of being a wheel-chair user during a school dance; hunchedback Archibald Craven worries his son Colin has inherited his condition; Diana

Goodman fights for medical autonomy, the right to refuse psychotropic drugs; Clara is not good at “Statues and Stories” after her traumatic brain injury, no matter how hard she tries. Regardless of whether the disability is considered incidental or central to the development of the musical’s plot, the disabled body ruptures expectations of how a body moves through the world of an American stage musical. What might it mean, then, to cast disabled actors as disabled characters? Or to reimagine conventionally able-bodied characters as disabled?

Philosophy and theater scholar Paul Woodruff suggests, “[t]heater is the art by which human beings make or find human action worth watching, in a measured time and place” (18). Woodruff’s definition of worth hinges on “capturing people’s attention” and

“making it actually good for them to watch”—value-oriented assessments. What happens when you place disability at the center of this process? How does disability call, and hold, an audience’s attention in the theatre? Is it through staring and the apprehension of extraordinary difference? Or perhaps by creating space for disability, we can find productive points of alienation and alignment with identities-in-difference? Seeing

attitudes towards disability as central to performance in the American stage musical challenges capitalist ideologies of identity production and offers a framework for investigating these questions. By understanding our cultural investment in performing illnesses and disability onstage in ways that please presumably non-disabled audiences, we learn more about the bodily anxieties we hold as individuals and as a species, too.

Hypercapacity

The tension between crip characters with diegetic disabilities and the exceptionally able-bodied triple-threat actor generates what I am calling hypercapacity: a paradoxical state of maximally productive bodily capacity that nevertheless relies on disability for its discoverability. In other words, the triple-threat actor, through her performance of disability, evidences an extraordinary able-bodiedness: the triple-threat actor becomes the

“cripple-threat” actor. As this dissertation clarifies, hypercapacity is known in three ways: disability simulations that reinforce the physical prowess of the nondisabled actor; diegetic characters who themselves are spectacularly able-bodied, and therefore require physical prostheses to realize the body onstage; and injuries resulting from the gap between the physical capabilities of the idealized triple-threat actor and the hypercapacitated character she plays.

Cripping Broadway’s Structure

My central objects of analysis in this project are production scripts and orchestrations, still images, and design renderings—materials that explicitly indicate or script the actions to be performed onstage—and performance itself. I have seen all but

two of the productions in this dissertation live during their original Broadway run, although with replacement casts in many instances. When possible, I use the official video recordings from the Theatre on Film and Tape Archive at the New York Public

Library for the Performing Arts Billy Rose Theatre Collection to describe original casts’ disability simulations and performances of hypercapacity. In a few instances, I turn to fan-uploaded videos on Youtube and Broadway message boards to re-view a scene from different perspectives in the theatre. These video archives help me consider the commercial theater industry’s relationship with disability through realized production elements and reveal what elements of production were unsuccessful in the adaptation from page to stage. Where available, archived fan mail and critical reviews helps gauge reception, although this dissertation does not make a critical intervention in the field of audience studies. Cumulatively, these materials address both the planning that went into the finalized public production of bodies onstage and the resulting cultural product. Thus, the aesthetic politics envisioned and executed by the theatre artists will be a departure point for considering musicals and their relationship to disability simulation. My goal here is not to only begin piecing together a performance history of disability in musical theatre plots, but to also discover the ways in which ableism accrues aesthetic value on

Broadway.

One constraint of this dissertation is having to presume readerly familiarity with each show’s plot lines. In each case study I have given contextual information as necessary, but my larger project seeks to address how musicals manage the “affliction” of disabled embodiment as opposed to impairment itself. We might turn to Kafer’s “no futurity” thesis here because she connects disability to a social belief in the static state of

suffering nested in impairment. Culturally, we have few vehicles to imagine a disabled adulthood with which to guide ourselves; however, multiple Broadway musicals feature disabled adults who experience disability as a form of social punishment and, therefore, the triple-threat actor’s bodily ability is central to a “utopian” promise of the musical form. In the choreographed world of the musical, you lose the disability basis of a plot’s premise because it would undermine Kafer’s theory of “no future” in disability (33).

Tracing alternative embodiments in compassion musicals from the United States’ 1980s

AIDS crisis-forward, Cripping Broadway explores performances of disability to generate a theory of hypercapacity: bodily compensation in commercial theatre through stage technology and the genetic imaginary.

I use “Broadway” and “the American musical” interchangeably in this project although they have, as Raymond Knapp observes, become increasingly less synonymous given how many successful musicals are grounded in specifically American experiences or places (Personal Identity 351). Jessica Sternfeld (2006) details Broadway’s shift towards the megamusical as an aesthetic imported from Britain following the successful transfers of musicals written by Andrew Lloyd Webber and the Boublil and Schönberg team during the 1980s. Paul Prece and William A. Everett trace the megamusical to continental Europe, arguing a megamusical “constitutes a written reinvigoration of nineteenth-century French grand opera” (264). With the exception of Sweeney Todd,

Phantom of the Opera, Passion, and The Secret Garden, which are considered in passing, this dissertation uses musicals that are distinctly American in topic, production location, and sensibility. Side Show’s Hilton twins were born in England but raised on the

American vaudeville circuit; AIDS musicals imagine New York City as a cultural

epicenter for the epidemic; The Light in the Piazza uses Venice to throw Margaret and

Clara’s Americaness into sharp relief; even Wicked’s otherworldly location, Oz, is constructed as a conceptual opposite to the gray Kansas plains in L. Frank Baum’s original book and its 1939 MGM adaptation. Thus, while not all Broadway musicals are

American, this study is limited to Broadway as an American industry and cultural space. I will explicitly name other theater quarters, such as London’s West End or the East End in

Berlin, when I reference productions outside of the United States.

Emulating the combinative creative work of musicals themselves, in each chapter

I engage with interlocuters from fields such as disability studies, critical race studies, queer and feminist theory, theater history, and performance studies. By doing so, I hope to model a methodological promiscuity for theatremakers who have told me they “don’t do theory,” and generate readings of musicals that reveal shared political investments, aesthetic attachments, and individual desires. For those of us working in academia, I hope this practice makes it easier to see the ways musical theatre is a rich site for theorizing crip/queer embodiment. By this I do not mean the reiterative, banal “representations of disability/sexuality/race in theater,” or what Nirmala Everelles calls the “add-and-stir” approach to disability and diversity, but rather that the production of theater from these standpoints changes the content/form of the production itself (93). Disabilities are not predetermined, immutable, static; they are knowable only through the system of relationships within the performance itself. This categorical defamiliarization is central to what Ato Quayson calls Aesthetic Nervousness; totality as a mode of apperception stymies the productive slippages that come from trying to think of intersectional categories together. As Samuels writes in Fantasies of Identification, “disability, like

race, has historically been viewed as a fixed bodily condition; it is not so easily removed as a bandage” (34). Yet, as she powerfully demonstrates, while “it seems at first that the performative, constructed nature of both disability and gender contrast with the seeming inherency of race,” all modes of biocertification are essentially performative categories constituted through their reliance upon each other (34).

Understanding each musical to be historically situated, I apply a two-pronged strategy across four subsequent chapters to demonstrate how the compassion musical evolves and commodifies crip/queer forms of materiality, sociality, and desire. The first takes up an artistic issue with regard to the disability being staged. The following chapters address staging, plot, score, and stage technologies, respectively, although each references aspects of these elements in relation to the script and score. Staging practices anchor the dialectic of late liberal able-bodied responses to the portrayal of crip/queer lives within a sociopolitical context and offers new nodal points in representational disability history. The second is a formal close reading of musicals themselves. The two central elements of a musical, the libretto and score, illuminate the interior life of a musical protagonist by conveying his or her character’s “natural” subject and musical key; this dissertation uses close readings of both to uncover internal attitudes about physical difference, self-perception, and what desires a character dares to voice when she thinks no one is listening. This project is also about what happens when a musical gains material life, and so I also analyze the actor’s body against the set’s mise-en-scène to query how a stage design’s form and function help convey disability. Finally, I unpack relationships between characters who share categorical markers of disability to demonstrate crip/queer forms of sociality. “Formal analysis,” Caroline Levine writes,

“turns out to be as valuable to understanding sociopolitical institutions as it is to reading literature”—or seeing a Broadway musical (2). This set of reading practices help us learn which bodies have not been, or cannot be, embraced within the architecture and attitude of commercial theatre.

In the next chapter, I argue the common terms “disability drag,” “cripface,” and

“cripping up,” are inadequate for describing the process of an able body playacting a disability in the performing arts. I propose that instead of invoking other performance traditions to understand representations of disability, we should use a term already found in disability studies and cultural debates and consider its value as a performative. To this end, I use the term disability simulations. Disability simulations and theatrical performance are concerned with mimesis and its relationship to authenticity and the Real.

Moreover, disability simulations more accurately express the bodily work of the laboring actor. I contend these simulations in a theatrical context prove a breaking point in what I call the able imaginary, a variation of Fiona Kumari Campbell’s heuristic for sociocultural expectations of bodily function in which liberal subjects unknowingly facilitate and participate. When disability is placed onstage spectators are forced to consider how their expectations of the able body structure their intellectual and affective engagement with a performance. As I demonstrate through a case study of Side Show

(Broadway 1997, Revival 2014), this reflexive process co-constructs disability onstage as audiences project disablement onto actors they know are able-bodied, a process that is simultaneously an extension of our willful suspension of disbelief and an explicit acknowledgement of how the able imaginary functions at an individual level. Both productions achieved this by deploying freak show contexts as a method of “sensitizing”

audiences to the plight of disabled lives while suppressing its investment in the prurient embodied spectacle its presumably seeks to critique.

In my third chapter I consider “AIDS musicals,” a sub-category of the compassion musical that emerged in response to HIV/AIDS film and theatre during the early 1990s but has elided formal definition in theater scholarship. Using a trio of musicals—Falsettos (1992), Rent (1996) and The Book of Mormon (2011)—I investigate how their intersections between sexuality, disability, chronic illness, and fear of contagion typifies Broadway’s crisis of how to produce work featuring gay and lesbian experiences with AIDS while still appealing to the—mostly heterosexual—mass tourist market that keeps the theatre industry afloat. I contend AIDS musicals use the logic of crip time to historicize the global AIDS pandemic and simultaneously de-center gay and lesbian experiences in favor of a heterosexual coupling offering reproductive futurity.

This becomes a problem because HIV/AIDS as a chronic illness, unlike many physical disabilities, has no universally consistent physical markers to simulate for dramatic or parodic effect onstage. The resulting effect is that AIDS is conflated with other identity markers such as race, sexuality, gender, or nationality. The HIV/AIDS patients in

Mormon’s fictional Ugandan village are the actual debilitated, disenfranchised subjects who cannot be recuperated by Broadway audiences. Mormon’s inability to resolve chronic illness through kill-or-cure narratives, as in Falsettos and Rent, forces the musical to frame one’s diagnosis of HIV/AIDS as a pasquinade instead of as a personal tragedy.

Chapter four uses a dialectic between libretto and score to explore how cognitive disabilities are characterized in musical theater production. In The Light in the Piazza

(2005), Clara Johnson is a young woman whose intellectual development stalled after

receiving a kick in head by a horse. As Clara visits Florence, Italy, with her mother

Margaret, she becomes aware of her developing body and eagerly wishes for motherhood—even if she does not understand all it entails. Taking Clara’s articulation of

“What the Beauty Is” as my departure point, I argue disability aesthetics invert traditional components of storytelling in the musical theatre genre to render crip/queer bodyminds more accessible. To demonstrate how Piazza's disability aesthetics reveals an unexpectedly progressive orientation to neurodiversity, I first build upon Scott

McMillin’s practice of reading difference in the integrated musical, and then combine

Jaclyn Pryor’s “time slips” with Michael Bérubé’s theory of the disability chronotrope to demonstrate how the show’s book and score diverge from conventional musicals because they are split between Margaret and Clara, respectively. This schism offers radically different arguments for how to experience The Light in the Piazza—one is an investment in linear narrative and time, the other is a privileging of emotional experience as a kind of valuable situated knowledge. Having established this, I argue Piazza models a new cripistemology for understanding the interiority of neuroatypical characters in musical theatre.

In my fifth and final chapter, I turn to the megamusicals Wicked (2003) and

Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark (2011). By doing so, I will move able imaginary—which traditionally attends to politics mediating medical diagnosis and social recognition— towards the disabled subject’s antipodal point: the hypercapable body. Wicked positions the witch Elphaba as a green-skinned “child of two worlds” with an extraordinary gift for sorcery, while Turn Off the Dark propagates a proactive “D.I.Y.” approach towards genetic enhancement, rendering the normate body disabled in comparison to genetically

engineered alternatives. These musicals use new stage technologies to push the boundaries of human capabilities in live performance in industry-changing ways: the triple-threat performer relies on various prosthetic devices, such as fly lifts, harnesses, magnetic tracks, and trampolines, to perform the hypercapable bodies of fantasy.

Both Wicked and Turn Off the Dark rhetorically manage their protagonists’ mutations and extraordinary abilities as disabilities, although the excess embodiment here is structured through kinds of hyper-productivity instead of lack. The normative body becomes a measure of insufficiency, which further exacerbates concerns about disability as an undesirable mutation while seeming to reference disabled persons as an expansion of neoliberal diversity initiatives. Questioning how and where boundary lines between hypercapable bodies and the constructed "normal body" are formed, this final chapter seeks to “diagnose” the ways in which Elphaba and Spider-man’s genetically “superior” bodies are prophylactic constructs against the flagging consumptive capacities of normative embodiment. Articulating the yet-to-be disabled-subject who is not-yet-but- always-possible, I demonstrate how the perpetually disabled future subject becomes both the basis and counterpoint to hypercapacity’s spectacle of extraordinary embodiment.

Having considered ways in which disability aesthetics transgress presumptions of able-bodied performance—opening individual characters as agents of change and plotlines as sites of exposure different bodymind compositions—in my previous chapters, my conclusion, “Equity Ten,” looks beyond the prostheticized disability inclusion in commercial musical theater by identifying existing barriers in the field, mapping potential strategies to reshape theatrical spaces as inclusive for actors with various disabilities, and designating conditions of growth for both ability-aware casting and audience

development. These reflect the critical need for a material embodiment of disability onstage that moves beyond triple-threat actors performing disability or theatrical designs prostheticizing the able-bodied actor: if theater is to entertain the conditions of human life, it needs to apprehend and organize around disability as a worthy aesthetic value without qualification.

Cripping Broadway does not provide a comprehensive history of all disabilities informing the American stage musical. Such a project is impossible without knowledge of individual writers and performers’ personal relationship to disability, which would require either compelled medical disclosures or inaccurate armchair diagnoses. Both pathologize difference and reify the able body in harmful, damaging ways. This project’s story is about the professionalization of the triple-threat performer, the varying bodies she is asked to inhabit or enliven, and the ways in which disability simulations are rehearsed, performed, and received. It is about bodies deemed socially undesirable transforming into sites of passion, belonging, empathy, and association when they enter stage right or the spotlight shines on the them for a rousing eleven o’clock number. Using disabled embodiment as a form of inquiry, I challenge artists and scholars to reimagine how our bodily differences can be shared, explored, felt, and known. This leaves significant issues unaddressed, including the reductive conflation of disparate disabilities, a dearth of artistic training for disabled actors, and the dire state of disability access in professional theatres. Acknowledging these gaps, this dissertation 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.

54 Chapter 2

Disability Simulations and the Able Imaginary: Choreographing Conjoinment in Side Show

Disability simulation fails to capture the nuance and complexity of living in a disabled body. And it certainly fails to give a deep understanding of systemic discrimination and abuse faced by disabled people. — Stella Young

Audience members in mimetic theatre are complicit in the mimesis … They know, in their complicity, that the action belongs on the stage, separated from them by an indelible but invisible line, and they are not, and cannot, be part of that action. — Paul Woodruff, The Necessity of Theater

There is no shortage of terms describing the portrayal of disabled persons by nondisabled actors. “Disability drag,” “cripface” (also styled as “crip face” or “crip-face”), “cripping up,” and “disability mimicry” are the most commonly used phrases connoting such performances. I suspect this is, in no small degree, because of their reliance on histories of other forms of performance involving bodily transformation and citations of

Otherness. Instead of finding new vocabularies specific to the experiences of physical impairment, debility, chronic pain or illness, or social disability, it has been more comfortable to lean on language already circulating in theatre history and performance studies. These heuristics are impressionistic at best. They quickly impart the notion of performing a biologically dissimilar body but, like the painterly style, they lack focus on the granular details. If we are to take up intersectionality as an ethical concern of contemporary theatrical work, performance studies, and crip/queer theory, there is some danger to losing attention to the line and contours of the subjects theatre artists perform.

To foreground disability in performance requires bringing disability to the fore in the

language we use to examine its presence or lack thereof. Put another way; we cannot hold disability, race, gender, sexuality, and other identity categories together without effacing or privileging specific markers of diversity if we use the language of one category as the referent for the other.

The seemingly interchangeable way theatre-makers and scholars use these terms reveals the difficulty of tracking exactly what happens when an able-bodied actor plays a disabled character, and exchanging one for another obscures the differences each term implies. Drag and minstrelsy, for example, have different lineages, impacts, and audiences: one is not a substitute for the other’s intent, mechanics, or artfulness of a performance. Their differences should not be flattened by ‘cripping’ their genre names to describe the performance of disability (drag becoming disability drag and blackface becoming cripface, respectively). If anything, we might think of these affixations as rendering the original art form more complex. What might it mean to have disability central to actual drag performance? To trouble the able cisgendered male body through the direct applications of prosthetics, foregrounding a notion of male physical lack and its relation to feminine beauty? Or to understand the disabled black body as central to the tom shows of minstrel traditions? Such “crip” affixations might be a kind of impasto, richly texturing the impressionistic engagements with drag or blackface these vocabularies rely upon, but these are not the questions most contemporary users intend to answer. To address the disability community’s concerns about performances of disability in commercial theater, we must use language specific to disability culture.

In this chapter, I propose a shift to the term “disability simulations,” and turn to two productions of a cult favorite in the American stage musical canon to make my case.

As will become clear, Side Show (1997 Original Broadway; 2014 Broadway Revival) simulates disability while explicitly acknowledging their use of able-bodied actors who could, in any other musical, play the conventional ingénue. This notion of simulation is helpful for considering the work of the spectator and more accurately characterizes the work onstage performed by the actors playing Violet and Daisy Hilton and their respective supporting casts. Performers playacting disability cannot “project” disability onto themselves in any faithful or complete rendering: for who can see oneself in totality?

Moreover, without the situated knowledge of living with a disability—an inhabiting disablement and experiencing the ways a disabled body can move and feel and be—the work of the actor is neither a faithful replication of disablement nor is it an exact copy.

Their feigning disablement is predicated on imprecise assumptions or second-hand information about what a disabled body is, does, or can be. “Disability simulation,” then, is a more accurate description of the embodied work of the actor and its effect on the audience.

The Able Imaginary

Theatrical simulations prove a breaking point in our able imaginary. In analyzing the relationship of disability studies scholarship to the able body, Fiona Kumari Campbell

(2009) describes an “Abled Imaginary” that “relies upon the existence of a hitherto unacknowledged imagined shared community of able-boded/minded people held together by a common ableist homosocial world view that asserts the preferability and compulsoriness of the norms of ableism” (4). Demonstrating how cultural productions of disability tell us as much about ableism as they do about the perspectives of the Other,

Campbell’s imaginary requires a compulsive internalization of ableist norms. Toggling between “abled” imaginary and “ableist” imaginary as analogs in Contours of Ableism,

Campbell builds upon her earlier (2001) definition of ableism as a “network of beliefs, processes and practices that produces a particular kind of self and body (the corporeal standard) that is projected as the perfect, species-typical and therefore essential and fully human” (44). Campbell could well be describing commercial theater, in which the production of “a particular kind of self and body” is organized by plot, direction, and design. The triple-threat performs to audience expectations as the “species norm,” which then casts disability as a subordinate “diminished state of being human” (44).

“Imaginary” takes on a principally social definition here, but we experience it at an individual level. Manfred Steger and Paul James describe “imaginaries [as] patterned convocations of the social whole. These deep-seated modes of understanding provide pre- reflexive parameters within which people imagine their social existence—expressed, for example, in conceptions of ‘the global,’ ‘the national,’ ‘the moral order of our time’”

(23). As “pre-reflexive patterns,” imaginaries are autonomic; we only become aware of them when they falter, or our attention is otherwise drawn to their construction. To Steger and James’ examples of the “global” and the “national” we can easily add “religious imaginaries,” “racial imaginaries,” and “gendered imaginaries.” The assumption of social existence predicates the supposition of an able body. Without it, one is quite literally not imagined to be in the social sphere. Thus, the able imaginary is a useful heuristic for sociocultural expectations of bodily function in which liberal subjects unknowingly facilitate and participate. Spectators are forced to consider how their expectations of the able body structure their intellectual and affective engagement with performance when

disability is staged. As I will demonstrate through Side Show, this reflexive process co- constructs disability onstage as audiences project disablement onto actors they know are able-bodied.

Following Campbell, the able imaginary shares similarities with McRuer’s theory of compulsory able-bodiedness and Tobin Siebers’ ideology of ability. McRuer, building upon Adrienne Rich’s “compulsory heterosexuality,” demonstrates how able-bodiedness is assumed in every social and cultural interaction. This parallel helps McRuer explain why ideal able-bodiedness and ideal heterosexuality are unachievable: “Able-bodied identity and heterosexual identity are linked in their mutual impossibility and in their mutual incomprehensibility…each is an identity that is simultaneously the ground on which all identities supposedly rest and an impressive achievement that is always deferred and thus never really guaranteed” (“Compulsory Able-bodiedness” 372). Indeed, for McRuer, compulsory able-bodiedness creates disability because it relies on the estranged Other to shore up its boundaries—what he playfully calls “ability trouble”

(373). Siebers’ ideology of ability complimentarily reveals how, at every turn, we replicate a “performed” able-bodiedness as a baseline for identity formation, social organization, and humanness. As he puts it, “The ideology of ability is at its simplest the preference for able-bodiedness. At its most radical, it defines the baseline by which humanness is determined, setting the measure of body and mind that gives or denies human status to individual persons” (8). The ideology of ability polices disablement, demanding that the visibly disabled body “maintain the maximum standard of physical performance at every moment” (31). These demands for a maximally productive body are easy to spot in musical theatre performance, where actors deliver even simple chores such

as cleaning one’s bedroom or taking medicine with a song and dance; any actor’s subpar physical performances are made evident by comparison to her peers, and she is likely to be replaced.

But what happens in the moment of violation during a musical, when an actor fails to physically perform the exacting triple-threat standards or purposefully performs a disability in an industry structured by compulsory able-bodiedness? The spectator-as- participant is compelled to either judge the actor for their failure to exact an able-bodied standard or disidentify with the nondisabled performer and celebrate the performer’s iteration of disability. A performance of disability in a musical makes the spectator aware of her assumptions about the presence of able-bodied characters onstage; the ideology of ability is “framed,” as Bertolt Brecht might say, for consideration. As we will see in reactions to Side Show, the spectator becomes aware that they are participants in the construction of an able imaginary, an unspoken expectation of able-bodiedness, of which compulsory able-bodiedness and the ideology of ability are a part.

In some ways, the able imaginary is less useful than the theories proposed by

McRuer and Siebers because it is not operative on a smaller scale or individual level. We can use compulsory able-bodiedness to deconstruct the concept of ability and the ideology of ability to describe concrete challenges disabled persons face, but the able imaginary is more of an attitude or byproduct of these processes. Its use, therefore, lies in its imprecise borders. At its most conservative, the able imaginary is the social fiction of able-bodiedness, the regimes of health and wellness we knowingly participate in; at its most radical, the able imaginary makes possible a future in which alternative physical capacities are desirable. Just as disability is “an elastic social category both subject to

social control and capable of effecting social change,” ability is a plastic category too

(Disability Theory 4). The able imaginary, rather than exacting a preference for able- bodiedness as such, is a sociocultural space in which one can realize she is complicit in or marginalized by the systemic expectation of a particular body, however that body might be. In this way, the able imaginary’s work in drama has utility for disability justice movements because commercial theater invites its spectators to purchase a cultural valuation, if not outright desire, for disability.

Staged disability simulations rupture the able imaginary in the moment of execution: a spectator must knowingly project disablement onto the actor, who consciously simulates a disability by limiting her bodily capacities. Both require the successful suspension of disbelief that the able-bodied actor is disabled. The actor and her spectators are aware they are constructing an idea or impression of disability derived not from the presence of disability itself but a limiting of able-bodiedness. In this way, the approximation of disability is ever-incomplete, and it is this lack that calls attention to the able imaginary. To being thinking “from the critical, social, and personal position of disability,” what Lisa Merri Johnson and Robert McRuer call a “cripistemology,” reveals how the current language that we use in the industry to characterize performances of disability reinforces able-bodiedness in its categorical evasion of disability (Johnson and

McRuer 134).1 To understand why we should see performances of disability as disability simulations, we must ask why the vocabulary currently used to describe able-bodied

1 Taking a cue from the debate between person-first and identity-first language, I use the phrase “performances of disability” to delineate performances of disability by able-bodied actors from instances of a disabled person onstage. This configuration echoes how a virtuosic performance by the able-bodied actor relegates disability as a secondary marker, whereas a crip or disability performance might embrace disability as a constitutive aspect of an actors’ embodiment during a performance.

actors portraying disabled characters is inadequate, and what alternative might best adopt a cripistemological purpose?

Disability Simulations

In this section, I pressure the four most common terms: disability masquerade, disability drag, cripface, and cripping up, and propose “disability simulation” as a productive alternative. Disability rights advocates such as Sally French, Emily Ladau and Mark

Riccobono, have argued disability simulations are a set of performances designed to generate empathy and compassion but are based on restrictive, harmful understandings of disability. Undertaking this shift in language (re)orients us to how ability undergirds our notions of performance even when we desire to excavate the experience of disability on stage. By using disability simulation, I return to a theatrical orientation to crip subjectivities in theatrical performance.

Disability masquerade and disability drag

Tobin Siebers presents a theory of “Disability as Masquerade,” which has proven influential for the subsequent use of “disability drag” as a coinage used to characterize performances of disability by nondisabled actors. Disability masquerades occur when disabled persons, particularly those with nonvisible disabilities, perform the crip characteristics of obvious physical disabilities or aggrandize their own to visibly “pass” as disabled for the skeptical able-bodied observer (Disability Theory 96–7). Disability masquerades are a political tool a disabled person can wield to express views about disability in public, communicate community needs, flout oppressive systems, and

operationalize misguided prejudices about disability (106–11). A disabled person might do this to secure their government support during a home assessment, to claim access needs, to be taken seriously by a physician, among other reasons. When an able-bodied person deploys a masquerade, it either generates an “inspirational” narrative structure

(not unlike the “supercripple,” or “supercrip”) or reinforces the ideology of ability through dehumanizing performances (111).2 Theatrical performances of disability seem similar, given his formulation that the masquerade “shows that disability exists at the same time that it, as masquerade, does not exist” (103). A staged disability by an able- bodied performer exists in the moment of creation in the world of the play, but as a masquerade, what exists is a stunted imitation, not the disability itself.

Extending the performative masquerade, Siebers (2008) observes, “Disability may be performed as drag, wherein an able-bodied person masquerades disability for the benefit (and entertainment) of the able” (114). “Disability drag” is a rhetorical flourish that neatly plays off Siebers’ framing of “disability masquerade,” as stylized movements, aggrandized physical transformations and opulent spectacle characterize both drag and masquerades. Even so, Siebers’ comparison that, “when we view an able-bodied actor playing disabled, it is the same experience of exaggeration and performance as when we view a woman playing a man,” is inaccurate (115). Drag is an art in which a performer consciously blurs gender boundaries by ostentatiously exploring and stretching the concept of the feminine and queer; disability drag might do the work of humanizing disability by recasting disablement in a positive light for nondisabled spectators but the disability itself is not celebrated in disability drag as gender is in conventional drag

2 I address the supercrip in comparison to hypercapacitated bodies in chapter five, pages 237–9.

performance.3 “In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself—as well as its contingency,” Judith Butler claims; “part of the pleasure, the giddiness of the performance is in the recognition of a radical contingency in the relation between sex and gender” (Gender Theory 137–8, original emphasis). Popular drag queen

RuPaul Charles’ catchphrase, “We’re all born naked, and the rest is just drag,” separates the body from the performativity of gender in a lay reworking of Butler’s assertion “that the gendered body is performative suggests that it has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality” (Winfrey; Gender Trouble 136). Both Charles and Butler rhetorically frame the body as neutral, allowing for its “reality” to be socially constructed by what Butler describes as “a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time” to naturalize the material body (Gender Trouble

43–44). A respect for—and reveling in—femininity is central to drag performance, while the actor in disability drag is not reveling in the crip or queer body so much as performing a limiting of their own body.

Drag performance encourages gender play, but it also serves a regulatory function concerning passing. Passing is central to Siebers’ link between disability masquerade to disability drag, and also why drag gained traction as an analogous art for performances of disability. Caitlin Graef articulates how gender passing creates anxious tension and judgment through a queen or king’s refusal of the male/female binary. Heteronormative assumptions about body-performance alignment result in anxieties about drag because,

“we see someone who looks and acts like a woman, we assume it is a woman” (Devor

3 Siebers acknowledges as much in a footnote, when he acknowledges that disability drag does not inspire or provoke public imitation because of an absence of camp; instead, it further stigmatizes and objectifies disabled persons (Disability Theory 207n11).

253). In this mindset, the violation has as much to do with one’s inability to trust the visual representation a “real” as it does with the upending sedimented gender/sex roles.

Reading in the context of race and gender, Robin Maltz suggests passing is a misreading of the real: “To pass effectively, a subject is (mis)read as ‘real’” (Maltz 277). In a disability context, passing often relies on a process of affirmation, which Ellen Samuels calls biocertification. Biocertification engages a cultural model of disability that understands disability as a social construct but requires medical proof to claim disability’s symbolic status. Physical appearance must be augmented by a performance of disability to gain biocertification, which in turn reinforces the perception of physical appearance and performance as a mere reduction of a capacitated norm. This visual demand enables the commodification of the body, rendering some bodies unseeable and others spectacularly visible. Biocertification appears to “fulfill the fantasy of identification in that it offers a simple, verifiable, and concrete solution to questions of identity” (Samuels Fantasies of Identification 174-5).4

Artistically, then, the processes are nearly inverted: gender drag breaks down stereotypes of conventional bodies; disability drag perpetuates them. Most significantly, drag is a highly networked art form with specific kinship communities and support structures. Queens have “Drag Mothers” and “Sisters” with whom they network and share their artistic lineage; a performance style that accrues weight and nuance as each new generation of queen is “born.” By contrast, the disability drag Siebers describes is often a singular performance by an actor. Rather than a sustained artistic practice or

4 Samuels uses “Disability Con” to describe the “fantasies of fakery” that underpin Siebers’ disability masquerade and disability drag. I briefly discuss my reasons for not using this phrase in the next section. Readers interested in her full argument should see Fantasies of Identification, pp. 66–79.

cultural critique, these roles are taken up as an opportunity to show the physical skill (or

“bravery”) of the performer—and usually understood as a sure path for garnering accolades and awards as spectators marvel at the transformation of the able-bodied actor into the ungainly disabled character. Siebers cites Dustin Hoffman’s work in Rain Man

(1988) and Sean Penn’s Academy Awards-nominated performance as a father with an intellectual disability in I Am Sam (2001) as two examples (Disability Theory 115). Drag may be received as a path towards upward mobility in the United States vis-a-vis gay integration and self-fashioning, as Matthew Goldmark (2015) argues in context of the hit television reality show Ru Paul’s Drag Race, but disability drag neither integrates real disabled persons nor are excluded disabled persons self-fashioning their representation.

“Cripping Up”

“Cripping up” is easily the most common phrase used to describe performances of disability by nondisabled actors. Playwright Katie O’Reilly first coined the phrase in peeling (2002, published in 2016), a play about three disabled women performing as the chorus in a post-modern production of The Trojan Women. peeling was commissioned by

Graeae theatre company to experiment with multimedia elements for disability access; the play’s dramaturgy integrates spoken English, British Sign Language (BSL), and audio-description to advance plot and character development with equal measure. In the darkened upstage, presumably just outside of the playing space, peeling’s Beaty, Coral, and Alfa discuss their dream roles, squabble over longstanding disagreements, and consider eugenics and genocide in relation to their presence in a wartime play. peeling's

enduring contribution was a quick exchange about disability inclusion in theatre as the women prepare to enter a new scene:

BEATY It’s a tough business. CORAL Even when it’s a disabled character, they give it to a walkie-talkie. BEATY No one said it would be easy. ALFA Cripping up. The twenty-first century’s answer to blacking up. (O’Reilly 331)

Coral’s use of “walkie-talkie” is a playful jest to Hearing actors who can move without the use of assistive devices. Coral herself is a wheelchair user and translator for Alfa, who is Deaf. Kristie Davis’ production design open-captions spoken and signed language throughout the performance, so when Alfa delivers the phrase “cripping up” in BSL non- signing spectators are forced to use an accessibility tool to understand her meaning.

O’Reilly’s juxtaposition of Coral’s joke with Alfa’s complaint undercuts the “walkie- talkie” reasoning about the anti-theatricality of disability that might lend to casting an able-bodied actor. A spectator could hardly formulate this hypothesis before needing to rely on the disability access a dramatic element. Lyn Gardner notably misquotes the language in her four-star review in The Guardian, citing Alfa as saying, “Crippling up” instead of “Cripping up” (Gardner). While Gardner’s unintentional misreading may reveal the faulty work of recalling live performance or an unfamiliarity with the practice of having to hold captions and the action onstage in her visual field, it also reveals a shift from the normative use of “cripple” towards the disabled community’s reclamation of

“crip.”5

Olga Kekis argues peeling uses disability to foreground the “ethics and aesthetics of appearance,” thereby producing a “female writ of habeas corpus […] drawn up and

5 See Lewis, “Crip,” in Keywords for Disability Studies (2015), pp. 46–47, for a well-executed entry historicizing of this shift and the move in disability studies towards crip theory.

made public by the women themselves who demand and seize control of their own bodies and by extension, their own fate,” while Kuppers describes peeling’s disability integration as a “seductive aesthetic of difference” in her primer Theatre & Disability

(2017) (Kekis 204 and 196, Kuppers 31). Both demonstrate how O’Reilly uses kinesthetic and cultural knowledge of disability to theatricalize a “disability aesthetic” well before Siebers offered the phrase in 2010, but neither mentions O’Reilly’s neologism “cripping up” and its afterlife in the arts community. Kuppers’ lack of investment in this terminology is unsurprising, given her focus on disability theatre (as opposed to theatre with disability) but it indicates a gap in how performance studies scholarship has not addressed disability casting in mainstream theatre, television, and film. This issue is taken up by artist-activists such as Maysoon Zayid, Mickey Rowe,

Jamie Brewer, and Ali Stroker more than performance studies scholars.6 In disability studies, Ann M. Fox and Carrie Sandahl call us to move “Beyond ‘Cripping Up’” in their introduction to a special issue of The Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies about disability in drama (121–27). I share Fox and Sandahl’s concerns that using casting as a primary access point or barrier to the presence of disabled artists “risks reinscribing disabled/nondisabled binaries” and focuses primarily on the nondisabled in drama (122).

As I hope this study makes clear, however, the history of Broadway is already a history of nondisabled actors “[assuming] disabled identities for fun, profit, or as an example of

6 In 2017 these performers, and more, established the National Disability Theatre (NDT), which describes itself as a “Professional theatre employing only processionals with disabilities to create fully accessible, live, world-class theatre and storytelling; changing social policy and the nation’s narrative about what people with disabilities can do; and providing a guiding model in audience accessibility for the arts and culture sector” (“Our Mission”). NDT is not the first disability-centric company in the U.S.; other notable companies include are Phamaly (Denver, CO), Deaf West (Los Angeles, CA), and Open Circle Theatre (Rockville, MD). The company will be modeled as a company-in-residence for single productions at regional theatres across the U.S. NDT’s first production will be a Fall 2019 run of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream at a to-be-announced venue.

their supposed actorly virtuosity” (122). We are not experiencing a new surge of disability representation onstage that is being co-opted by nondisabled artists; instead, we are identifying how disability has always been at the heart of commercial theatrical performance and asking how a performer’s relationship to disability impacts a musical’s cultural work.

Much like Siebers’ building upon gender play with “disability drag” and

“disability masquerade,” O’Reilly’s “cripping up” extends the logic of blackface minstrelsy. Minstrel performance, in which white actors darken their skin using burnt cork and greasepaints to sing and dance as exaggerated depictions of plantation slaves and free Black persons, was the foundation of American commercial entertainment for much of the nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries.7 Jacqui Malone notes, “By the early

1800s, not long after the colonies declared their independence from England, white men were carrying their versions of slave dances to the American Minstrel Stage (Singin’ The

Blues 50). Compared to the late 1866 production of The Black Crook at Niblo Gardens mentioned in chapter one, we can see that minority characterization and imitation using burnt cork was a well-worn stage technology for white imitation by the time Charles H.

Morton took the stage as the deformed alchemist Herzog. Malone observes that “from the

7 Readers interested in accessible, comprehensive studies of minstrelsy should see Lott, Love and Theft (1995); Inside the Minstrel Mask (1996), edited by Bean, Hatch, and McNamara; Cockrell, Demons of Disorder (1997); and Burnt Cork: Traditions and Legacies of Blackface Minstrelsy (2012), edited by Johnson. The authors in Burnt Cork ask why blackface practices have persisted into the twenty-first century, especially following the burst of scholarship in the late 90s that documented minstrel performance practices and addressed their relationship to black visibility, segregation, and belonging. One answer Robin Bernstein presents in Racial Innocence (2011) is that children are still acculturated with “scriptive things,” material vestiges of the racist ideology behind blackface that promote associative connections between blackness and poor moral character, physical degradation, and low intelligence. Without changing how children are indoctrinated into mainstream society, Bernstein argues, we will see new iterations of these old tropes. This is borne out in more recent controversies about white college students posting photos of themselves in blackface on social media and television personality Megyn Kelly’s statements encouraging blackface Halloween costumes during her morning talk show in October 2018.

1840s through the 1890s, minstrel shows - wherein white men portrayed caricatures of black Americans and of black African American song and dance styles - were the most widespread form of American entertainment” (51). Peter Stanfield, in an article about blackface minstrelsy in Showboat, demonstrates how other minority actors, specifically

Jewish and Italian performers, complicate blackface by their use of the medium to parody black culture and seem whiter by comparison:

In nineteenth-century minstrelsy the disguise of burnt cork permitted European immigrant cultures to find a common language in their shred whiteness formed out of the negative construction of blackness. Blackface had acted as a syncretic form where ethnic markers such as Irish dance, Alpine yodeling, Shakespeare, Polish polkas and Italian opera would be performed through the Americanising mask of burnt cork. (148)

Susan Smith positions this racial citation as a strategy of “exclusion and containment,” but also as art that subversively proliferated elements of black American culture, such as song and dance (5–6, 24).

Given minstrelsy’s history, it is significant that Alfa articulates cripping up as the contemporary “answer” to blackface rather than as an associative relationship. As an answer, cripping up emerges from blackface minstrelsy rather than replaces blackface.

Cripping up, then, is a new branch of what Eric Lott describes as a “theft and love” of blackness; it similarly trades on middle-class escapist desires (signified by the performers

“playing”) and a feeling of superiority over the disabled bodies presented onstage (40).8

Lott’s thesis helps us understand how theft—cultural appropriations of blackness—are acts of “love” in the sense that blackness as Other is perceived as valuable, therefore

8 Jonathan Freedman makes a similar argument in “What’s Love Got To Do With It?: Love and Theft in the 21st Century” for LA Review of Books. Freedman uses popular music from artists such as Katy Perry, Ira Gershwin, and Wu Tang Clan to elucidate how the “process of love and theft can’t be separated from the making and remaking of racial identities, the establishing and breaking down of boundaries, of the cathexes and counter-cathexes that shape intra- as well as interracial structures of feeling” (Freedman).

commodifiable and able to be purchased. Samuels draws similar conclusions from her etymological reading of “fake,” arguing thievery and violent acts of bodily intervention are bound to contemporary uses of “fakery” and “faking” (Fantasies of identification 68–

9). Fakery appropriates from a body to appear as the “real” version, thereby eliding the original body altogether: this is, Samuels argues, the violence of a “disability con” (71–

75).9 Lott presents the white American working class’s interest in blackness as a performance space in which to reify itself: “the consciousness of black commodification

[…] works all the more to make blackness into a marketable object of white interest”

(Lott 62). His “commodification is attraction” argument with relation to blackness is useful for analyzing how disability is appropriated by able-bodied actors then sold to nondisabled audiences.

In an era when the stage was segregated, performances of blackness relied on an

“aura of ‘blackness’” that constituted an indefinite sense of contact with the Other (Lott

113). Lott describes spectators as consenting to minstrel performances when they “seem” to approximate the real, but when [they] “failed to ‘seem,’ when the fakery evaporated, could […] result in acts of unsettling authenticity, even if a white man were inside”

(113). Despite the passage of the American With Disabilities Act in 1990, social spaces in the United States are still, largely, segregated for disabled people. Disability’s stage

9 I do not take up Samuels’ term “Disability Con” because it seems not as readily applicable to Broadway as it is to film. Samuels adapts the phrase from conservative fears of people manipulating the public welfare system and the films with “twist” endings that reveal a disabled character to be able-bodied after all. Musicals make no promise of objective realism and its spectators are “in” on the “con” the entire performance. Moreover, the affect of “con” characterizes the spectator’s feeling of hurt, cheated, or gamed by the actor moreso than the work of the actor herself. Samuels presents a useful two-word taxonomy of the disability con, “in which the first term refers to the performative aspect of identity, the second term is to its presumed ‘essence’”: fake fake, fake real, real real, and real fake (Fantasies of Identification 69). The fake real is the closest to Siebers’ disability masquerade, while real fake is Samuels’ category for nondisabled performers of disability for gain or profit (69–70).

presence is therefore concentric to race and minstrelsy: musicals like Side Show generate an “aura” of disability by naming disability onstage but avoid the authentic particularities of how Daisy and Violet Hilton managed everyday life. As I argue later in this chapter, this portrayal unsettles spectators despite their knowing that able-bodied actors are playing the disabled characters.

Disability and cripping up sharply divide from race and minstrelsy when we consider the disabled performer. Lott describes how black dancer William Henry Lane, known by his stage name Juba, gained popularity as a blackface performer after P.T.

Barnum added him to an act in New York City (112–13). Lane was presumably allowed onstage not only for his prodigious skill, but also because he continued to perform the racial parody by dancing with a darkened face, drawn lips, and a curly wig despite his black body. Producing an “aura of ‘blackness’” that was nonetheless under Lane was considered a success because the elements of his racial counterfeit were an imitation of white imitations of blackness; a form of “dispossession and control by white forms of black forms that would not for a long time be recovered” (115). There is no corollary to

Lane in disability performance. Able-bodied spectators and reviewers shy away from disabled actors playing disabled characters, even when those actors engage in “disability masquerade” to appear as more recognizably disabled, because we misread the masquerade performance as truly symptomatic of the disabled condition. In the 2017 revival of The Glass Menagerie (Sam Gold, dir.), for example, disabled actor Madison

Ferris’ portrayal of Laura divided audiences because Ferris is visibly disabled far beyond the slight limp specified in Tennessee Williams’ script. Ferris, a wheelchair-user with muscular dystrophy, entered at the beginning of the play from the house; taking herself

out of her chair, she then climbed purpose-built stairs up to the playing space. Gold’s decision to have audiences attend the physical effort of accessibility in the Belasco

Theater highlighted the inaccessibility of most Broadway houses and new possibilities for a character portrayed as shy, but normal. Menagerie’s Laura relies on the “aura” of disability through an undefined limp, which Ferris pierced when she appeared as a disabled woman in concrete ways. Gold’s Menagerie opened on 9 March 2017 and closed on 21 May after 85 performances, six weeks ahead of its scheduled close.10

Writing to the disabled community, crip film critic Dominick Evans implored white disabled persons to stop making analogies between “cripping up,” or “cripface,” and blackface minstrelsy because blackface was a dehumanizing strategy designed to encode white superiority over black and brown bodies. Evans argues that “cripping up” elides black members of the disabled community, who are still fighting against the racist legacy of blackface performance. Evans’ argument posts off W. J. T. Mitchell’s (2012) characterization of race as “‘a distorting prism implanted by the use of the idea of ‘race’ as an analytic’ concept’,” which challenges us to engage in “careful description and analysis” of how race works as a medium rather than assuming it must be “dismissed in favor of some notion of transparent, unmediated truth” (15). Disability rights activist

Anita Cameron translates Mitchell’s observation that race is a medium that cannot be unthinkingly used to describe disability:

Cripface is appropriative and erases the history of Black folks and how we were insulted, ridiculed and put down by the White film establishment. When cripface is compared to Blackface, it is insulting, inappropriate and flat out wrong. Just don’t do it. And yes, I’m Black and disabled. If I see that comparison taking place I will call it out! Blackface was meant to be cruel to Black folks. (qtd. in Evans)

10 I am not suggesting that Ferris’ disability singularly caused the closure, but it was central to the debate about Gold’s liberties with the text. See Genzlinger (2017) for a description how audiences called Ferris’ casting cruel and “exploitative” in Broadway social media and discussion boards.

If race is “both an illusion and a reality that resists critical demolition or replacement by other terms,” as Mitchell claims, then cripface’s co-opting of race violently elides black disabled persons, who must then choose whether to contend with blackness or with disability when confronted with the decision to choose between blackface and cripping up (14). For Evans, the issue of intentional cruelty fundamentally separates blackface from cripping up. He proposes the term “disability mimicry,” personified by actors who

“[turn] disability into nothing more than physical characteristics” (Evans). Evans frames this reductive conceptualization of disability as a disability mockery “because whether there is malice or not [mockery] is what happens” (Evans).

Evans adds yet another term to the list of phrases describing nondisabled performers performing disability in his widely-circulated blog post. I agree with his argument that “mockery” persists, even when it is unintentional, but this framework of

“disability mimicry” does little to help us understand the pragmatic elements of how disability is performed onstage. For this reason, in the next section, I propose that we should consolidate disability drag, cripping up, cripface, and disability mimicry under the umbrella, “disability simulation.” Disability simulation, a popular technique used to presumably educate nondisabled persons about the physical experience of bodily impairment, already has significant critical traction within the disability community. I argue that the labor able-bodied actors perform when they play disabled yields the same results as traditional disability simulations: limited physical knowledge organized around impairment and an inattention to the experience of disability culture and ableism.

Disability Simulations

Disability simulations are common performance traditions that schools and organizations use to curate disability awareness and generate compassion for disabled persons. Sometimes these are simple, like when my school classmates were given noise- canceling headphones so they could better understand my deafness, or when we were all asked to circle the gymnasium in a wheelchair; others are more complex, such as blindfolding students and asking them to pass a ball (to simulate low vision) or having student fill their mouths with marshmallows to the point they immobilize their tongue then asking them to speak (to simulate cerebral palsy and speech impairment).11

Disability rights advocates such as Emily Ladau (2016) and Mark Riccobono (2017) have critiqued disability simulations because they are primarily designed to foster “awareness” of the challenges disabled people face in the built in environment, but these simulations are abstracted from a disabled individual’s experiences of social stigma, environmental and attitudinal barriers, the joys and solidarity in disability culture, and the specificity of embodied pain or pleasure. Ladau states her position plainly: “Simulation is not an ideal way to transform society’s view of disability” (“I Won’t Pretend”). Sally French came to the same conclusion twenty-five years earlier in her critique of simulation exercises for

Disability, Handicap & Society, writing, “Little evidence exists that these exercises have

11 These common activities are among those suggested in an online resource entitled “Ability Awareness Activities” by Lauren Loucks and Amy Townsend, professors at University of Central Oklahoma and Emporia State University, respectively. Their stated purpose, which I understand as shared by most programs with similar activities, is to “simulate what it is like for a general physical education student to be challenged with a synthetic disability” (Loucks and Townsend 1). The reasons a mouth filled with marshmallows or playing ball while blindfolded are inaccurate reflections of disabled embodiment may be obvious to you, reader, but if Loucks and Townsend agreed they would not have unironically articulated their goal as “eliminating stereotypes […] about people with disability through ABILITY awareness activities” (1, emphasis original). As I hope will become clear, the only thing disability simulations effectively achieve is ability awareness—but the gained kinesthetic knowledge only pertains to the activity- performer.

a positive effect on either attitudes or behavior but, despite this, they are used extensively in disability awareness training, both for children and adults” (257). Why has the mark moved so little with regards to disability simulations in the last quarter-century? I believe that a primary reason for the perpetuation of disability simulations as an educational tool is because we continue to produce disability simulations in performance entertainment and then bestow their creators with accolades and awards, which normalizes this practice for the average viewer. Once normalized, it is a short step towards implementing a version of disability simulation as an “awareness” project.

Although disability simulation activities may differ in method, disability studies scholars writing on the subject identify three typical traits: mistaken authority, a capacity of incapacity, and brevity. First, Titchkosky et. al (2019) distinguish between “copying,” a mimetic process of approximating its inspiration, and “simulation,” which is a purposefully incomplete copy that intentionally conveys what something is like rather than what it is (2).12 “Simulation,” they argue, “aims to reproduce a part of an experience, and that part is purported to ‘stand in for’ the whole” (2). This articulation helps us understand why Dominick Evans’ use of “disability mimicry” does not adequately describe the work of nondisabled actors playing disabled. In a theatrical context, a director and actor authoritatively choose which elements of a disability to feature and rely on those to suggest the more complex lived experience, regardless of whether or not their decisions accurately reflect disability experience in the world.

12 My sincere thanks to Tanya Titchkosky for sharing a pre-publication draft of her article with Devon Healey and Rod Michalko for Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, “Blindness Simulation and the Culture of Sight.” References to this article address a pre-published version. Interested readers can find the forthcoming article at doi.org/10.3828/jlcds.2018.47.

Second, Nario-Redmond et. al (2017) found in their comprehensive assessment of disability simulations that the limiting of one’s bodily capacity in a simulation only produces the experience of having comparatively limited capacity. Congenitally Deaf persons, they write, “have learned many creative ways to navigate without sound using other sensory cues and communicating in sign language. This is not something that can be simulated in a few minutes of having one’s ears plugged, and reflects an ableist perspective that emphasizes loss and limitation rather than the lived experience in an often-discriminatory world” (“Crip for a Day” 327, emphasis mine). Nario-Redmond et al.’s findings show the simulation participants primarily understand disability through a negative structure that limits their own bodily ability instead of providing new forms of embodiment. Restrictions generate a comparative understanding of disability-as- ineptitude, even if participants are more likely to have compassion for disabled individuals afterwards (326–27). Such experiences, grounded in a temporary loss of ability, confirm the privilege of able-bodiedness.

Third, and finally, disability simulations are ineffective tools for learning about and representing disability because of their brevity. Ladau laments that “at the end of the day, the temporary glimpse into disability that such exercises provide are just that — temporary” (“I Won’t Pretend”). Despite participants knowing the simulation is not permanent; the simulations emphasize the “instantaneous absence of familiar embodiment,” or a newly acquired disability, at best (Nario-Redmond et. al 327). You cannot, for example, convey in a quick activity how Deaf people learn sign language, acculturate into Deaf culture, and cultivate other sensory cues. If this were possible there would be no access issues for Deaf persons and Deaf culture would not be marginalized

and maligned. Disability advocate and wheelchair user Robin M. Eames argues that

“Disability ‘simulations’ created by abled people are never going to accurately represent what being disabled is like, because they don’t know what it’s like to begin with”

(@robinmarceline). What Eames describes is more than misunderstanding; it is an attempt to know that which is fundamentally unknowable; that pretending to have a congenital or acquired disability only helps the actor understand what it is like to pretend, which further naturalizes able-bodiedness in the process.

In Simulations Jean Baudrillard argues that a simulation not only deceives its viewer into believing it is the “original” entity, but that it destroys that which it has replaced. This possibility is especially concerning for disability simulations when so much of the experience of disability is already elided. As Baudrillard explains, “ [t]o dissimulate is to feign not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one hasn’t. One implies a presence, the other an absence” (5). A simulation, then, is characterized by absence: in this case, an absence of disability. This process of feigning is threatening because it obscures the “difference between ‘true’ and ‘false,’ between ‘real’ and ‘imaginary’” (5). The threat of feigning breaking down is especially true on stage, where these boundaries are already porous.13 Titchkosky et al. describe disability

13 Boal’s claims in Aesthetics of the Oppressed that Western theatre is culturally understood as having a mimetic relationship to the world complicates the work of simulation. Boal’s statement emerges from the Aristotelian tradition. In his Poetics, Aristotle’ sees imitation as a natural part of being human; imitation is the young child’s route to knowledge, a process of learning. Plato, by contrast, reasons in the Republic that art-as-imitation is problematic because it is removed from truth and reality; it has the potential to upend one’s emotional stability by inculcating a state of confusion, sorrow, or depression; and imitation frequently offends whom it represents. Morality figures centrally in Plato’s epistemological, psychological, and theological concerns. Is imitation a personal or public “good” (as Aristotle claims) or is it, as Plato argues, “bad”? Disability simulation draws on both Aristotelian and Platonic ideas: disability simulations were originally created to educate able-bodied persons about disability by altering sensory capabilities to knowledge, thereby increasing empathy, although they inadvertently achieved the opposite effect by depicting a reality far removed from Truth.

simulations as announcing their presence “or at least [providing] a clear representation that I am not that which I am feigning to be… I am the absence of disability while I am, simultaneously, simulating its presence” (3). In theatre, the trappings of theatre announce the presence of simulation, as most spectators will intuitively understand the bodies present are not disabled.14

For Mark Riccobono, a blind author who has published on the ineffectiveness of disability simulations, the solution to the problem of disability simulations is more participant observation and engagement with actual disabled people. Riccobono uses his own experiences to argue that these interactions are better than disability simulations because their purpose is a misguided errand because it is impossible to have a realistic understanding of a physical condition beyond our own material experience. He writes:

“Even if we can effectively provide experiences to teach sighted people about the artificial barriers we face in the physical and digital environments we encounter, we cannot fully get them to understand the emotional experience of facing low expectations in society every day (“Walking a Mile”). Riccobono’s suggestions translate easily into theatre. Engaging with disabled artists at all stages of a project (development, production design, casting, rehearsal, and public performances) will help ensure that disability and accessibility are woven into the fabric of a show instead of being an afterthought.

While it is tempting to think of disability simulations as a single-sided mimetic or mimicry, as Dominick Evans characterizes, I believe disability simulations are methetic.

Methexis is a community practice, a group sharing, central to the ritual of Greek tragedy.

14 Gordon Craig observes this process as early as 1907 in his essay “The Actor and the Über-Marionette,” writing: “Today the actor impersonates a certain being. He cries to the audience: ‘Watch me; I am now pretending to be so and so, and I am now pretending to do so and so;’ and then he proceeds to imitate as exactly as possible, that which he has also announced he will indicate” (Craig 5, emphasis original).

As a contemporary artistic practice, however, the dynamic exchange of energy in the theatre is not restricted to the tragic genre. José Esteban Muñoz describes methexis an

“accounting of the way in which an audience takes part in a drama, adding to it, augmenting it” in his call for us to move “Towards a Methexic Queer Media” (2013).

Disparaging television sitcoms such as Will and Grace and The New Normal for their transmission of normative white gay male narratives, Muñoz looks towards a mode of interactivity that is “equally turbulent and productive”—an “expanded sense of a queer commons” built on participation and vivification (564). Broadway musicals are undoubtedly queer commons, though they are not demonstrably better than primetime sitcoms at representing multidimensional non-white, queer, disabled characters and plots.

Even in the twenty-first century, Broadway is still the Great White Way, and inaccessible too.15 Despite the commercialization of “diversity” in shows like Rent, musicals are fundamentally a form of the methetic queer media for which Muñoz advocates. Most musicals require a willful suspension of disbelief to move through a world in which people spontaneously burst into song with highly choreographed numbers. If methexis, according to Muñoz, is characterized by communal participation that vivifies, or gives life to, the form, then musicals are an inherently methetic genre.

Put another way, the disability simulation onstage requires an audience’s consent to sustain the drama; “We are invited in by real people, sustained in their ability to tell a story by the reality bestowed upon them by our participation in the world which they are creating for us” (Grainger 18). Roger Grainger’s idealistic framing of the suspension of

15 Broadway earned this nickname in the 1890s, when it became one of the first streets in New York City to be lit entirely by the incandescent lightbulb. Electric lighting was a boon for commercial theaters like Niblo’s Gardens because the electric light safer and more pleasant for patrons; theaters were less hot, pungent, and flammable without gas lamps and open flames.

disbelief as an “exchange of gifts in which the gift is ourself” negates the other creators that might sustain or complicate our participation in the world of the play, such as director, designer, or the playwright, and places undue pressure on the actors. Even so,

Grainger’s premise compels us to ask if every performance is an open invitation? What if the design challenges our ability to fully participate in the performance at its most basic level?16 Does the director use a well-known text to novel, or to offensive, ends? Later in this chapter, I discuss Side Show, a musical that I believe relies on the labor of co- creation Grainger describes. Grainger mandates, however, a production “must be a willing sharing, otherwise the magic will not work” (69). This is doubly the case for disability simulations in musicals, which not only ask audiences to consent to the simulation of disability, but also propose song and dance as hypercapacitated modes of daily communication.

Willful suspensions of disbelief are not willfully ignorant—the mature spectator is well-aware the actor is simulating a disability. Describing disability’s entrance into the public sphere through popular culture as an immediate spectacle, Bree Hadley argues that disability performances of everyday life often “cast the disabled body as a source of curiosity, discomfort, stigma, or pity” (2). Thus, we might observe the content and structure of the performer-spectator relationship that comes to “define idiosyncratic

16 I have, for example, viewed Phantom several times—the Majestic, Her Majesty’s Theatre, and receiving houses across the U.S.—with significant moments nonvisible to me because of sightline issues. Sightline issues occur when theater’s architecture obscures action onstage, usually rendering portions of the playing space nonvisible. It should be noted that a playing space is created by the director in tandem with the set and lighting designers. If a show has significant portions of onstage action a theater might option to see a “partial view” seat for a discounted price. Phantom’s sightline issues are notorious because patrons in back- orchestra seats are far beneath the mezzanine balcony and therefore cannot see the Phantom’s “All I Ask of You” reprise, performed from an angel fixed at the top of the proscenium, which prompts the show’s infamous chandelier crash.

bodies as disabled” once they violate the threshold of the able imaginary (3).17 Unlike the unconscious and unscripted dramas Hadley explores, musicals with diegetic disabilities are a formalized social engagement with disability without disabled persons actually at the center. One productive benefit of disability simulations is that we can understand how able-bodied persons understand or define bodily capacity by observing the gestures actors generate. Even if spectators attach personae to bodies over biology, as Hadley suggests, commercial theatre still needs physical choreography that is iterable by multiple actors and culturally portable, too (4).

Given the degree of control that disability simulations produce, we might wonder if what a disability aesthetic offers musical theatre is that which the genre is opposed to most: unruliness. Disability circumvents audience expectations, flaunts the misfit body, and pressures the technologies of production to adapt to accessibility. Siebers’ primary concern throughout Disability Theory is building a disability politic that attends to the material concerns of impairment and the inaccessibility of the built environment, which in turn shape disabled identity. Re-centering the body, Siebers argues:

The body is, first and foremost, a biological agent teeming with vital and often unruly forces. It is not inert matter subject to easy manipulation by social representations. The body is alive, which means that it is as capable of influencing and transforming social languages as they are capable of influencing and transforming it. (Disability Theory 68)

Siebers underscores how a live body is not easily encompassed by words, however dynamic the language may be (Disability Theory 68). Bodies and language are changeable, plastic, and therefore “capable” influencing and transforming each other. A

17 Hadley’s conclusions are close to Quayson’s formulation of aesthetic nervousness as a circuit of feeling between a nondisabled and disabled person.

central issue of all theatrical representations of disability, then, might be that they try to manipulate the body in discrete and iterable ways.

In the highly choreographed world of the musical, disabled bodies are not unruly, per se, as feminist disability scholars such as Susannah B. Mintz (2007) and Rosemarie

Garland-Thomson (1997) have argued: they are defiant. Garland-Thomson highlights the messiness of disabled bodies as “literal individuation run amok”: an individuation that marks and constitutes the norm through disability’s refusal to conform to our sense of the generalized able body (Extraordinary Bodies 24). Disability, as Garland-Thomson argues, “signals that the body cannot be universalized” (qtd. in The Brain’s Body 59). To be unruly is to be “disorderly, ill-disciplined; not amenable to control,” as the Oxford

English Dictionary refers in the context of personhood; to be “uncontrollable … behaving as if not tamed, broken in, or properly trained,” in context of animals; and “difficult or impossible to handle or control; awkward, unmanageable; characterized by unpredictable or wayward behaviour,” in context “of a thing” (“unruly, adj. and n.”). The generative unruliness that disabled persons find useful in their daily lives uses aspects of each— person, animal, thing—to flourish despite cultural pressure to conform in predictable, orderly, manageable ways. There is pleasure in this refusal to let “ability” go unmarked as it simultaneously invisibilizes disability. Unruliness in detrimental to commercial musicals because they rely on actors’ regularly executing their performance “track” of specific musical lines, spoken dialogue, and choreography. To work as a musical theatre actor is to curate a ruled, disciplined life: training in acting, movement, and music; being

amenable to the will of the director; hold oneself to a lifestyle that permits the intense physical and emotional labor of theatrical work.18

About Casting

Although interrogating casting practices is not a primary concern of this project, I want to briefly note how the vocabulary describing able-bodied actors playing disabled characters has a complementary set of terms used to describe disability-inclusive casting.

In the United States, the verbiage varies and tends to target specific minority communities: “color-blind,” “concept casting,” “ability-aware casting” and “all-ability casting” are just a few of the more common terms to see on open call notices, although none is more common than the pervasive “non-traditional casting.”19 The interchangeability is primarily because Actors Equity Association has no standard language regarding disability to use in EPA casting calls, although it also reflects an inability to use an analog of “colorblind casting” to characterize a similar practice for disabled artists. The former leaves theatre artists without a set of common terms, the latter fails disabled persons because its conceptual reliance upon disability uses sight

18 The industry’s reliance on health and wellness is revealed most frequently through the use of standbys, understudies and swings. A standby performer is in the wings or near the show during a performance, ready to go on in the event the usual actor cannot; understudies are typically members of the company who are cast to cover a specific role or roles; a swing then learns several chorus roles to fill in for whichever actor has been promoted to lead for the performance. A production halts for the evening when there is no one to cover a central role. For example: on 7 February 2019, the Broadway-bound West End revival of Company had to cancel the show mid-performance when the Jennifer Sayyeng, the understudy covering the role of Bobbi, was so ill that she could not continue. Sayyeng, who played Jenny and understudied Bobbi, had to take over the lead role from an ill Rosalie Craig mid-performance the previous evening. Sayyeng’s understudy, Jaimie Pruden, covered Jenny. There was no second understudy for Bobbi, which forced the company to cancel. To save production costs, standby actors are usually reserved for roles that are particularly vocally or physically taxing, such as Phantom’s Christine, Wicked’s Elphaba, and the titular role in Billy Elliot. Since Company’s Bobbi is onstage nearly the entire show, the producers might opt to cast a standby actor when the production moves to Broadway in late 2019. 19 For the specific language of “non-traditional casting” in the AEA handbook, see equity item number five in my conclusion.

impairment to violently efface the particularity of disabled embodiment in the arts.20 If present, disability is described ad hoc through a commitment to “universal access” or

“all-ability” casting. A casting call’s standard language assumes the able body by asking performers to come “prepared to move.”21 A July 2016 white paper released by the

Ruderman Family Foundation, a disability rights organization, analyzed the 2015–16 television season and found that across live and streaming television platforms over 95% of disabled characters were portrayed by actors with disabilities while only two disabled actors played characters with disabilities (Woodburn and Kopić 27-28). “This lack of self-representation,” Woodburn and Kopić argue, “points to a system problem of ableism

[…] It also points to a pervasive stigma among audience members against people with disabilities given that there is no widespread outcry against this practice” (1). There is no similar study for disability casting practices on Broadway.

Moving beyond disability simulations

Courtney Lehmann argues that musicals are a “powerful generic vehicle” for the fantasy of colorblindness precisely because of their “utopian impulse” (73). Lehman relies on integration theory, or the idea that a musical’s libretto, score, and choreography

20 Ayanna Thompson traces the history of “colorblind” casting in her introduction to Colorblind Shakespeare (2006), arguing that “blind” casting inadvertently perpetuates racist stereotypes and generates new issues race is inexpertly co-opted to make a critical point about issues like poverty, abjection, discrimination (8–11). The 2018 revival of Carousel confirms Thompson’s claims. Black actor Joshua Henry was cast as Billy Bigelow, a carnival barker who beats his wife Julie and is killed during a botched robbery. Henry’s casting was widely hailed as a breakthrough given that it was the first instance of a black actor playing the role on Broadway but director Jack O’Brien failed to update the production with a modern sensibility that accounted for race in a meaningful way, inadvertently conflating Billy’s blackness with his criminality. This itself might have proved a powerful commentary in the midst of the Black Lives Matter movement, had it been intentional, but the fact that both of Billy’s understudies were white males demonstrates that race was not central to O’Brien’s interpretation of the Rodgers and Hammerstein classic. 21 In the UK, “integrated casting” is the industry standard for casting practices that seek to equitably include women, disabled persons, and BAME (Black, Asian, and minority ethnic) actors.

are balanced and, together, advance the plot. I will discuss integration at length in chapter four but, generally, I agree with this premise. As my introduction makes clear, the musical is a powerful vehicle precisely because it relies on embodied forms of communication. When Lehman emphasizes Richard Dyer’s distinction between utopia as a place, and utopia as a feeling, her argument holds its footing within a disability aesthetic framework: surely, a production laying claim to a disability aesthetic would find disability as a constitutive part of utopic feeling. A musical’s disability simulation cannot contribute to this utopian project because it requires restrictions and a diminishment of ability rather than reveling in the fullness of one’s capacity.

Petra Kuppers (2014) suggests able-bodied embodiment renders senses invisible—individuals tend only to recognize embodiment through rupture (43). Chronic pain, heightened sensitivity or sensory absence, motor or mental modifications due to injury or biological development—each ruptures the invisible continuity of the able body and, as Kuppers argues, “shifts the emphasis away from the body as object to embodiment as a process, a way of doing things” (44). One potential benefit of triple- threats simulating disabilities is that these performances pull actors and audiences outside of their embodiments to learn new affects, new ways of being and doing.22 “Disability,”

Garland-Thomson writes, “is the attribution of corporeal deviance – not so much a property of bodies as a product of cultural rules about what bodies should be or do”

(Extraordinary Bodies 7). The separation she marks between bodily properties (what bodies are) and mores what bodies “should be or do” (how bodies act) is crucial for understanding disability-in-performance.

22 This is not necessarily Brecht’s verfremdungseffekt, a distancing technique used to alienate actors and audiences so as to incite political action, but the effect is not entirely dissimilar.

Musical theatre is a rich site for understanding what we culturally think—or believe to be true—about what bodies are based on how we script bodies to be or what to do onstage. Diana Taylor describes performance as “a doing to, a thing done to and with the spectator” (86). Her flexible sense of doing, as an articulation by and to and for and with, gives disability traction in performance. Theatrical staging becomes a framework for articulating disability as “corporeal deviance” from “cultural rules,” as Garland-

Thomson demonstrates. Garland-Thomson extends Spinoza’s question, “What can a body do?” but her argument is also rooted in Deleuze and Guattari’s assertion:

We know nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects are, how they can or cannot enter into composition with other affects, with the affects of another body, either to destroy that body or to be destroyed by it, either to exchange actions and passions with it or to join with it in composing a more powerful body. (226)

The generation and exchange of bodily knowledge Deleuze and Guittari describe results in a new “composition,” a body built upon a doing.23 In a musical theatre context, this composition is the cumulative performance and reception of text, score, and physical action, but there is a danger of gross misrepresentation in the simulation of disability by primarily able-bodied theatre-makers for able-bodied audiences—without the input or intervention of disabled persons with the knowledge that comes from lived experience.

23 Theatre scholar Ben Spatz takes up the Deleuzo-Spinozan question, “What can a body do?”, to generate an “epistemology of practice” grounded in branches of physical culture (sports, yoga, martial arts), and the performing arts (acting, dance, song). Spatz differentiates between “technique” and “technology,” arguing against new materialist thinkers such as Elizabeth Grosz and Jennifer Parker-Starbuck who contend that the physical body is thoroughly enmeshed with its (assistive) technologies. His critique suggests that cyborg theory the presumption of technological integration is a symptom of wealth and privilege in late capitalism (11–14). Spatz’s engagement with disability is sparse, although he cites Sandahl’s interview with Victoria Ann Lewis in Bodies in Commotion (Sandahl and Auslander 259) to make the point that embodied technique is only ever relative (Spats 150–151). See Spatz, What A Body Can Do: Technique as Knowledge, Practice as Research (2015).

How might a disabled person do musical theatre differently? How do these changes make the genre more accessible for the performer? For the spectator?

Disability Simulations in Side Show

One question haunts Side Show’s conjoined twins Daisy and Violet Hilton: “Who will love me as I am?” The musical tells the story of Daisy and Violet’s search for approval as they rise from performing as a side show attraction to the vaudeville stage, and eventually to the silver screen in Tod Browning’s 1932 film Freaks. In Bill Russell and Henry Krieger’s Side Show, which opened on Broadway in 1997 and was revived with additional material by Bill Condon in 2014, the sisters’ conjoinment is central to the musical’s aesthetic impact. The Hiltons are enticing subjects for a Broadway musical but the story of Daisy and Violet presents a series of challenging barriers. How do you realize conjoinment onstage? And, if this feat is artfully achieved, how do you then articulate the competing factors in the twins’ lives? Connected yet mostly autonomous, the Hiltons’ inability to experience solitude, opposite professional goals and their inevitably fraught romantic entanglements are subjects any writer must address. Russell and Krieger’s Side

Show opened to a tepid audience response at the Richard Rodgers Theatre on 16 October

1997 and closed after only 91 performances. A substantively reworked revival opened in

November 2014 but closed less than two months later.24 Given that disabled bodies are, as Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (1997) observes, “often figured as deviant and inferior—

24 Side Show is not the only musical about the Hilton’s rise to fame; Michael Dansicker and Bob Nigro’s Twenty Fingers Twenty Toes (1989) ran Off-Broadway at the WPA Theatre for a scant 35 performances before closing.

detriments that inhibit their full social participation”—musical theatre replicates societal assumptions of bodily ability by assuming able-bodied triple-threat performers (19).

How, then, do audiences reconcile the extraordinary spectacle of disability in Side

Show and what are the dangers of voyeuristically commodifying disabled bodies? How do disability aesthetics in musical theater simultaneously code and alter our “way of feeling” about and encounters with disabled and normative bodies? Since both Side Show productions played to critical acclaim but little commercial success, does a disability simulation impact a musical’s commercial viability? I contend the unique mechanical challenge of choreographing conjoined twins tests the limits of bodily inclusivity in the

American stage musical as an artistic genre because it relies on normative expectations of the virtuosic actor’s body to execute disablement instead of valuing disability itself.

For the remainder of this chapter, I will explore the efficacy of conjoinment as production aesthetic in the American stage musical, focusing on the 1997 production of

Side Show and its 2014 revival. Disability simulation figures centrally into my venture in two ways. First, I argue the 1997 production requires audiences to project disability onto the able-bodied actors playing Daisy and Violet in a way that surpasses a typical suspension of disbelief in the theatre. By examining how the production choreographs conjoinment in musical numbers such as “Come Look at the Freaks” and “We Share

Everything,” I assert Side Show advances a social model of disability framework. Second,

I use new material added to the 2014 revival—specifically a stylized shadow play sequence in Act I—to demonstrate how the revival pivots to a medical model of disability through a photorealist depiction of disablement steeped in eugenic logic. Considering musical theatre productions and its elements of acting, music, dance and design, from a

disability studies perspective reveals how social expectations of disabled bodies—and perhaps cultural prejudices against them, too—influence how artists and audiences alike anticipate disablement will appear. Such expectations directly impact how disability is staged. My goal is to investigate how the choreography of conjoinment used to simulate

Daisy and Violet’s physical condition complicates the script’s central curative arc towards individual health and, more broadly, pressures expectations of able-bodiedness in

Broadway musicals.

Choreographing Conjoinment

Daisy and Violet’s conjoinment in Side Show is a counterintuitive marker of an exceptionally skilled and able-bodied pair of actors, despite the real Hiltons’ being perceived as severely disabled during their lifetime. I use the phrase “choreography of conjoinment” to describe the work of simulating the Hilton sisters’ embodiment onstage.

Since Daisy and Violet must seamlessly move as a single biological unit, the actors performing these roles cannot move autonomously through their blocking as liberal individual subjects. Every step—whether it be a cross downstage during a book scene or a pivot during a musical number—has to be explicitly choreographed for both actors to maintain the illusion of conjoinment. For this reason, I see Side Show’s choreography as extending beyond its dance numbers; this logic is also reflected in the original 1997

Broadway production being both directed and choreographed by Robert Longbottom.

Side Show’s choreography of conjoinment relied not only on Longbottom’s staging; it also required the audience’s complicity in projecting disablement onto actors they see and understand to be independent and able-bodied during the musical’s opening number.

Given the rarity of conjoined twins and our expectations of finding extraordinarily able-bodied actors on stage, I am interested in the question of how conjoinment operates as a disability aesthetic in Side Show. Tobin Siebers stresses in Disability Aesthetics

(2011) that disability has an aesthetic value that moves beyond tokenism; “it participates in a system of knowledge that provides materials for and increases critical consciousness about the way that some bodies make other bodies feel” (20). It is critical, then, to consider how the bodies onstage in any production “make [our] bodies feel”—but especially necessary when disabled embodiment organizes plot and performance.

Between the original 1997 production and the 2014 revival, conjoined twins were the focus of significant scholarship demystifying conjoinment in popular and academic culture. Such works include Alice Domurat Dreger’s One of Us: Conjoined Twins and the Future of Normal (2004), Linda Frost’s Conjoined Twins in Black and White: The

Lives of Millie-Christine McKoy and Daisy and Violet Hilton (2009), and Leslie

Zemeckis’ documentary film Bound By Flesh (2012). My own understanding of conjoinment is influenced by how these scholars articulate all conjoined twins—and the

Hiltons in particular—as autonomous subjects with agency and value.

Longbottom’s 1997 Broadway production was spare and impressionistic. He reveled in the metatheatricality of Robin Wagner’s set and Gregg Barnes’ costumes, which indicated time and place through period clothing, hand props, and changeable stage dressings, but otherwise left the stage to the audience’s imagination. Spectators were required not simply suspend their disbelief in the theatre; they were invited to project spatial and embodied peculiarities onto the world of the play. This participatory element was central to Side Show’s production aesthetic. If audiences are fleshing out the

stage, we have to consider what kinds of bodies they imagine occupying that space. Are they “normal” people? Freaks? Able-bodied? Disabled? Our physical and social environments anticipate certain kinds of bodies based on preconceptions about what an individual is or how she should be. This projection of bodily expectations is commonly known as the social model of disability. A social model of disability delineates between impairment and disability by arguing society itself is what “disables” individuals by expecting or policing normative intellectual, physical, psychological or sensory comportment. Inviting audiences to “fill in” the world of the play and then introducing a collection of “Freaks,” Side Show assumes the spectator will conform to normative deployments of the social model of disability and frame the side show performers as freaks on their own accord. In fact, the musical’s opening number depends upon it.

The musical’s process for introducing the freaks further clarifies how disability and physical difference are socially constructed for, and by, the audience. During the opening number Longbottom’s cast move in tableaus on large metal risers while inviting the audience to “Come Look at the Freaks.” What the spectators see, however, are normatively bodied, plainly dressed actors speaking to them in direct address. The sharp contrast between the number’s visual impact and the sensational lyrics challenges audiences to critique how labels like “freak” shape our perceptions of bodies. At the side show barker Sir’s invitation, spectators are brought under the big tent only to discover they are creating the spectacle themselves as they reimagine obviously able-bodied actors as physically abnormal. Actors played the freaks of the side show without any prosthetics, using only the occasional exaggerated gesture to denote physical difference.

In this way, “Come Look at the Freaks” instructs the audience how to engage as a

spectator by foregrounding the how categories of disability are created then applied to individual bodies.

This is a typical move of the social model of disability, which understands disability as the product of social response to bodily impairment rather than physical difference itself.25 Central to Sir’s spiel is the presentation of actors Emily Skinner and

Alice Ripley as Daisy and Violet Hilton. He introduces the various freaks of the side show before drawing the audience’s attention to “the stars of the show” (Russell and

Krieger 9). The twins, standing apart at opposite ends of the risers, begin to walk towards each other when Sir demands they sing. Daisy and Violet cross downstage and face each other while singing a descant of vowels in unison before turning to the audience during the song’s climax, at which point they “connect” at the hip. Significantly, Longbottom’s interpretation of the number was afterwards scripted in the libretto’s stage directions for replication in future performances (Russell and Krieger 10). Longbottom’s choreography of conjoinment intentionally allows audiences to see Skinner and Ripley moving separately, an affirmation they are able and independently bodied actors. This stage business crucially directs audiences to participate in the illusion of conjoinment but suggests conjoinment does not undermine seeing the Hiltons as separate women with their own agency, thoughts, and desires.

25 The social model of disability is a dominant, if heavily critiqued, tool in disability studies for understanding disablement in the industrial age. My delineation between “impairment” as a physical condition and “disability” as an exclusionary social experience based on—or in lack of consideration of— the composition of one’s body is drawn from The Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation, a British disability activist group (UPIAS 1976). Activist and political scientist Harlan Hahn offers a succinct definition of the social model in a North American context: “the failure of a structured social environment to adjust to the needs and aspirations of citizens with disabilities rather than from the inability of the disabled individual to adapt to the demands of society” (Hahn 128).

In a fan letter dated 26 December 1997 L. H. Frederiksen, a self-described

“veteran Broadway theater-goer” and “traditionalist,” writes to Alice Ripley lamenting

Side Show’s closure as a “huge loss for Broadway” (Frederiksen). Although Frederiksen describes a matinee performance as a captivating theatrical experience, he is quick to acknowledge his own wariness of attending Side Show, given its premise: “[H]ow can a musical work about Siamese twins?” (emphasis in original). Even actor Alice Ripley shares a similar logic during an interview with Richard Ridge on Broadway Beat: “Well,

I think I reacted the way most people react when they hear about the show—and that is,

‘Siamese twins? Oh geez.’ You know, I wasn’t sure. I just didn’t know if it was going to work” (Ridge). Behind Fredericksen’s query and Ripley’s grimace when she says

“Siamese twins” is an expectation of what kind of bodies are found onstage in musical theatre. Wondering how conjoined twins might ‘work’ in a genre functionally coded by exceptional able-bodiedness translates as an inability to imagine actual bodies that move differently on stage. Fredericksen was not alone in this fear; several fan letters to the

1997 Broadway company express this concern before ultimately scripting the depiction of Daisy and Violet Hilton as a kind of universal experience for difference. Despite

Violet and Daisy singing, “I want to be like everyone else,” audiences were reminded at every turn of the impossibility of that dream (Russell and Krieger 20).

The musical’s difficulties finding a broad audience have largely been understood, as Peter Marks writes in The Washington Post, due “partly to the skittishness some audience members felt toward a central aspect of the story: the romantic lives of Siamese twins” (2014). Audiences are used to seeing romance on the Broadway stage, so Marks’ assessment of a ‘skittish’ anxiety suggests the spectators’ problem is conjoinment itself.

Conjoinment is an ontological conundrum for the general public because of its rareness; very few of us have experience of having to share a singular body with another person.

Freak show scholar Robin Blyn observes conjoined twins are deemed problematic because they “trouble the liberal humanist conception of autonomous and self-possessed individuals, thereby corporealizing the slippages between the subjective and intersubjective” (7). To reformulate Blyn’s question of personhood and autonomy thusly:

“[a]re the Hilton sisters a ‘she’ or a ‘they’, singular or plural?” (7). Our social frame of conjoinment as a hermeneutical impasse runs counter to a spectator’s experience during

Side Show, when she knowingly watches actors perform corporeal difference.

The theatre-going public’s inability to reconcile the stage optics of conjoined twins is exemplified by Skinner and Ripley’s co-nomination for Leading Actress in a

Musical for Side Show at the 52nd Annual Tony Awards. Nominated as “Violet and

Daisy Hilton” instead of separate characters, the Hilton sisters are perceived as one organism, one person – interchangeable and, as Violet and Daisy sing, “one though we’re two” (Russell and Krieger 110). A production note explicitly states that the two actors playing Daisy and Violet “were never literally connected by corsets, velcro, or any other costume piece. This allowed the audience to participate in creating the twins’ connection with their collective imagination and made the actor’s achievement of appearing to be joined all the more impressive (especially when dancing)” (Russell and Krieger 1999: 5).

Emphasizing that the actors should never be physically yoked serves the seemingly antithetical purposes of creating a ‘collective imagination’ that Skinner and Ripley are conjoined all the while lauding them for their individual skill in conveying the visual illusion of being connected at the pelvis. Executing Side Show‘s choreography of

conjoinment does not rest solely on Longbottom, Skinner and Ripley: audiences are integral participants in the “impressive” feat of connection. The script’s rhetoric of virtuosic ‘achievement’ conforms to normative expectations about what bodies on the

Broadway stage should be able to do: even the feat of the Hiltons’ disability can be recuperated and made productive by the triple-threat performer.

During Act 1’s Egyptian Revival-inspired vaudeville number “We Share

Everything,” a tableau of archaeologists proclaims the twins to be the eighth wonder of the world before revealing the sisters in a double-occupancy sarcophagus. Daisy and

Violet emerge centerstage, where they remain during the song’s first refrain. From there, audiences can appreciate the Hiltons’ bejeweled flapper dresses and elaborate headdresses while they perform a series of gestures reminiscent of the Egyptian motifs popular on burlesque and vaudeville circuits following the discovery of King

Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922. As ‘We Share Everything’ progresses, Daisy and Violet transition into a stylized soft-shoe – alone at first, and then with a chorus of Pharaohs who ultimately ‘take [them] down the Nile’ (Russel and Krieger 57). Skinner and Ripley endeavor to always appear conjoined, even when they lose eye contact as they partner with separate chorus dancers. Audiences, having bought into the “collective imagination” with the purchase of their ticket, must overlook any moments of accidental separation for the musical to “work.”26 The cumulative effect of the disability simulation is a spectacle of able-bodiedness with disablement at its core.

26 The recording of Side Show held at the NYPL Theatre on Film and Tape Archive is from forgiving a mid-house perspective; separations—if any exist—are difficult to see. The tight camerawork capturing the cast’s performance of “We Share Everything” during the 1997 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade makes a moment of separation between Skinner and Ripley during the chorus line particularly visible for at-home audiences. Between these two filmed performances, we can creatively reconstruct audience perspectives from different seats in the theatre. See “We Share Everything,” dir. Longbottom.

Side Show’s competing investments in rendering the Hiltons accurately and revelling in the actors’ “achievement of appearing to be conjoined” invite us to see its performances as a rich site for theorizing disabled embodiment. Disability is not a predetermined immutable concept; it is knowable only through the system of relationships within the performance itself. This categorical defamiliarization is central to what Ato Quayson calls “aesthetic nervousness”: “what ensues and can be discerned in the suspension, collapse, or general short-circuiting of the hitherto dominant protocols of representation that may have governed the text” (26). In other words, Quayson argues disability is a sticking point in aesthetic response because we lack specific, knowable responses and adaptations to the emergence of disability. Quayson’s observation that systems of non-disabled meaning-making “short-circuit” when coming into contact with disabled bodies is particularly convincing in musical theatre, where disability is typically sublated to normative embodiment or otherwise redeployed as a metaphor.

This certainly seems to be the case during Side Show, in which Daisy and Violet’s conjoinment is a vehicle for understanding disability as enfreakment, or “the process by which individual difference becomes styled as cultural otherness” (Examining Millie and

Christine McCoy 56). Enfreakment, a styling, is a social process that results in a sharp division between the normative “us” and the abnormal “them.” Side Show tests both the efficacy and limits of staging conjoinment through synchronized blocking and choreography – stage business requiring skilful, capable bodies. Thus, the production note demanding the virtuosic skills of the actor be engaged towards a disability aesthetic figures the conjoined body as a functionally untenable body onstage.

Following Quayson, we might question if Longbottom, Russell and Krieger were figuratively “nervous” that a portrayal of conjoinment would prove too unsavoury for the spectator if successful – and for this reason scripted numbers like “Private Conversation,” during which Terry Connor (played by Jeff McCarthy) imagines Daisy as separated from

Violet. Alone at last, Terry shares a sweeping waltz and a passionate kiss with Daisy before he remembers the material reality of her conjoinment and Violet reappears upstage. Although “Private Conversation” advances the plot by establishing Terry’s inability to look past Daisy’s conjoinment, it offers audiences a visual relief from the labor of projecting conjoinment onto Skinner and Ripley. This renders the twins’ reattachment at the end of the dream sequence more influential than the conjoinment at the beginning of Act I: Daisy and Violet had to connect in order to set the show into motion but in Act II the sisters’ reconnection refuses the medical imperative and social expediency of separation. This transition out of Terry’s imagination and into Side Show’s

“objective reality” reaffirms the spectator is essential in Quayson’s communication circuit: her initial assumptions about the body and reformulations upon encountering a peripheral embodiment offer a new way of understating the sociopolitical value of disability within performance.27

“Only a little flesh”: Side Show’s medical model of disability

In sharp contrast to the original Broadway production, director Bill Condon’s

2014 revival of Side Show strove for a photorealistic depiction of the Hiltons. Audiences were no longer expected to project spatial or bodily cohesion onto the stage. Instead, they

27 This is one way of reformulating Tobin Siebers’ question of how (or if) art is changed when disability has an aesthetic value.

were given a full realization of the musical’s world. Condon substantively rewrote the script to take a “darker approach”; his revival hinged on “new songs as well as additional biographical details of the Hilton twins’ life and historical figures of the era” (Hetrick

2013). The revival’s dramaturgical shift from a social model to medical model of disability is therefore unsurprising, given the production’s increased attention to historical accuracy. Siebers describes the medical model of disability as “[defining] disability as an individual’s defect lodged in the person, a defect that must be cured or eliminated if the person is to achieve full capacity as human being” (Disability Theory 3).

Put another way, the medical model uses an individual’s medical diagnosis as a totalizing identification marker and presumes medical intervention is necessary for a quality life.

Sir discloses Violet and Daisy’s diagnosis of “abnormality” to the audience during the first number; his vocabulary reflects the musical’s setting in the late 1920s, a period when the eugenics movement was flourishing in the United States (Russell et al. 10). The foregrounding of the medical model of disability gives greater impetus for “I Will Never

Leave You”; at a moment when the sisters must choose between surgical separation to achieve conventional bodies and lives, the sisters instead affirm their fulfilment by each other.

Condon’s production begins with Terry examining a translucent billboard advertisement for Browning’s Freaks when the twins suddenly appear behind the scrim, and the world of the side show unfolds around Terry as he recalls his earliest encounter with the Hiltons. This memory play styling places a heterosexual non-disabled white man at the center of the musical’s plot, a dramaturgical alteration typical of the inherent conservativism Raymond Knapp identifies on Broadway: “[c]ommercial calculation,

standards of believability, and the dynamics of assimilation […reinforcing] the dominance of the mainstream in musicals” (“Waitin’ on the Light to Shine” 815).

Audiences are forced to decide if Terry is a reliable narrator: are they seeing an objective view of the Hiltons or Terry’s version of them? Otherwise, Condon’s Side Show leaves little to the audience’s imagination. David Rockwell and Paul Tazewell’s scenic and costume designs fully render the world and bodies onstage.28 Daisy and Violet, played by

Emily Padgett and Erin Davie, are seen as conjoined from the beginning. Unlike the 1997 production, Tazewell’s costumes connected Padgett and Davie using undergarments, shared seams and even magnets. By having the twins appear in Terry’s memory before any other freak comes onstage, Condon and choreographer Anthony Van Laast avoid all traces of Longbottom’s metatheatrical introduction to the actors playing Daisy and Violet during “Come Look at the Freaks.” This production encourages audiences to conceive the sisters as one organic unit.

This perceptual shift mirrors how the real Violet and Daisy Hilton were regularly examined by those wanting to see their “link.” A new Act I scene adapted from the twins’

1953 memoir Intimate Loves and Lives of the Hilton Sisters underscores the precarity of living under the continual threat of medical intervention. During an extended flashback sequence, the Hiltons inform Terry how their earliest caregiver, Auntie, made money by showcasing the girls’ fleshy link. Auntie would coerce their submission by threatening to physically separate them with crude appliances:

AUNTIE. WOULD YOU RATHER I TOOK A BUTCHER KNIFE AND CUT YOU APART

28 A notable example was “The Three-Legged Man,” who was realized with a full prosthetic leg mechanized to move in sync with actor Brandon Bieber.

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SO YOU’D HAVE A NORMAL LIFE? (Russell et al. 35)

With a whimpering “no,” the girls are taken to a panel of surgeons for inspection. A shadow play re-enacting the encounter is performed for the audience (Fig. 2-1).

Figure 2-1. Still from "Cut Them Apart" in the 2014 revival of Side Show; from private video collection. Backlit, the outline of four male doctors surrounding the young Hiltons is projected against a scrim. Two doctors make invasive gestures while they “examine” the girls: Daisy, bent over, holds her knees together as Doctor 2 appears to move his hand up her skirt; Violet bends backwards, away from the man. The tableau creates a vulvar v- formation between the sisters, into which Doctor 3 slowly moves his latex-gloved hand, creating the illusion of penetration in the discovery of “that little bit of flesh.”

Meanwhile, the doctors sing (Russell et al. 36):

DOCTOR 1. IN THE NAME OF MEDICAL ADVANCEMENT SURGERY WILL BE AN ENHANCEMENT AND GIVE THEM LIVES OF THEIR OWN… DOCTOR 3. WE’LL CUT INTO SKIN AND THROUGH SUB-DERMAL FLESH DOCTOR 2. ONLY A LITTLE FLESH DOCTOR 4. CUT THROUGH THAT LITTLE BIT OF FLESH

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With their groping hands and leering shapes, the doctors’ shadow choreography suggests they sexually violate the young girls. The initially benign-seeming vocabulary of

“advancement” and “enhancement” belies such physical advances, but they tellingly trip over and reiterate the word “flesh.” Discontent with a private physical examination, the doctors aim to get under the Hiltons’ skin and remove “sub-dermal flesh,” separating them. Violet and Daisy’s lack of autonomy is doubled here when we consider the hardly veiled sexual entendre of the older, educated male penetrating the young girls’ bodies and changing their flesh in the encounter. Ultimately, the possibility of adverse results from surgical separation are so enormous that Auntie, fearing her source of income could die on the operating table, abandons medical intervention.

Semi-public medical examinations were a common element of freak show entertainment in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The “medical theatre” allowed curious doctors to “authenticate” female “freaks,” lending credibility to the freak show’s reputation while simultaneously allowing paying men the ability to view an unclothed female under the guise of scientific interest. Using medical photographs taken during these sessions for the McKoy twins (black conjoined twins predating the Hiltons by nearly 50 years), Ellen Samuels (2011) has argued this physical and visual penetration links anatomic knowledge and scientific advancement with the male gaze to enforce regimes of bodily discipline and power onto conjoined twins.

That “Cut Them Apart” could be newly staged for contemporary audiences without reproach is unsurprising; in the twenty-first century conjoined twins routinely face similar medical scrutiny and affronts to their personhood. In Child’s Nervous

Systems, a medical journal of paediatric neurosurgery, bioethicist Leigh Atkinson

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considers the ethics of surgically separating conjoined twins. His aim to “protect the rights of twins and to ensure surgical intervention is not an unlawful act” is nonetheless countered with what Atkinson calls an “often, basic” question: “should one child die or should both die?” (505). This question reveals a failure to imagine an individual surviving conjoinment pre- or post-surgical separation and forecloses any possibility of flourishing through conjoinment. No sooner are conjoined twins introduced than the question becomes one of surgical separation.

Ethicist Michael Barilan (2010) similarly writes that conjoinment is fodder precisely because it “challenges our sense of selfhood and identity” (27). Following the

UK’s high-profile court-ordered separation of conjoined twins Jodie and Mary from

Malta in 2001, Atkinson and Barilan separately assert society makes four assumptions about this kind of “twinning”:

1. Conjoined twins are two people 2. Each twin wishes to survive regardless of his or her bodily form 3. All things being equal, each twin prefers a separate physical survival rather than one of continuous sharing of a physical body 4. Only medicine can separate conjoined twins; therefore, conjoinment is a medical challenge. (Atkinson 505; Barilan 28)

Barilan’s assumptions about conjoinment are predicated on notions of individualism and agency, yet the medical community increasingly pushes guardians and surgeons to make decisions regarding separation and survival for conjoined twins before the twins themselves are old enough to establish autonomy. This is, in part, due to a debate within the medical community on the individual personhood of both conjoined twins. With many surgeons advocating that conjoined twins are ‘different conceptual organisms,’

Atkinson defines personhood as “an embodied mind that is a locus of sentience, valuation, and agency” (505). Despite offering an embodied, agentic, sentient mind as the

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base level of personhood Atkinson still asks: “But are conjoined twins individual persons?” (505).

Daisy and Violet Hilton are individual persons by Atkinson’s definition and their combined refusal of surgery musically cannibalizes the doctors’ chorus in the number

“Cut Them Apart.” While the surgeons examine the girls they repeatedly sing the syncopated phrase “Cut, Cut Them Apart”; the twins’ “I Will Never Leave You” leitmotif rises from this haunting canon:

DAISY AND I WILL NEVER LEAVE YOU VIOLET. I WILL NEVER GO AWAY WE WERE MEANT TO SHARE EACH MOMENT NO MATTER WHAT OTHERS MAY SAY SEEMS LIKE EVERYBODY WANTS TO SPLIT US IN TWO BUT I WILL NEVER LEAVE YOU (Russell et al. 36–37)

Its first iteration is a hesitant and anxious fear-based response, played pianissimo, but as they vocalize their resolve and affirm each other, the orchestration swells around Daisy and Violet and their song moves into a fortissimo that drowns out the surgeons round and ends the musical memory sequence. “I Will Never Leave You” continues in truncated form throughout the remainder of Acts I and II, an audible reminder of the Hiltons’ promise to each other and to the audience that they will forego the temptation of surgery and its potential dangers to one or both their lives. The bitter irony that the Hiltons cannot physically “leave” each other without fear of death tempers these early versions from cloying sweetness. When the song finally arrives as a full musical arrangement it is their eleven o’clock number, designed to explicitly resolve the implicit drama of the musical: will the twins separate and lead separate adult lives, or will they remain conjoined? Daisy and Violet’s commitment to remaining conjoined intervenes in contemporary bioethics

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debates by advocating against full, immediate separation at birth. They are proof that a life well-lived is possible.

If one central problem for the revival was how to equitably portray conjoinment, then another was the Condon’s confusing solution giving the audience what they presumably expect: the physical separation of the twins and the visual relief confirming that the Daisy and Violet entertaining them onstage are separate non-disabled women. As the sisters sing “I Will Never Leave You,” the musical structure of the score echoes its introduction during “Cut Them Apart.” It begins with a slow recitative before gathering into a full fortississimo. When the melody can no longer musically expand through dynamics, the key changes and a bright light washes the stage. Daisy and Violet – amazed to discover they are, however improbably, separated – move in mirrored semicircles and individually showcase their “Broadway belt” for the audience with a series of overlapping descants. In a visual citation of the 1997 opening number, the sisters eventually return to each other and, standing side-by-side, reattach at the hip as the last chord dies. Just as Longbottom blocked a moment letting audiences compare Skinner and

Ripley’s separate body languages, Condon and Van Laast’s choreography lets audiences see Davie and Padgett work to virtuosically command the space before witnessing their process of physical alterations as they reconnect and finish the show conjoined (Fig. 2-2).

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Figure 2-2. Conjoined twins Daisy and Violet Hilton miraculously separate as they sing their final Side Show duet, "I Will Never Leave You"; from private video collection.

What do we make of this brief bit of stage business? In trying to reconcile the

Hiltons’ competing desires for autonomy and unity, the separation functionally serves as a visual metaphor for a newfound sense of agency. Once the Hiltons admit they are not

“The Typical Girls Next Door,” they abandon their anxieties about being perceived as

“freaks.” The visual separation dramatically concludes the plot arc introduced in the number “Cut Them Apart” when the “I Will Never Leave You” leitmotif was first introduced – only now audiences do not have to imagine them put asunder because the actresses have separated for us. The sisters’ separation is an apt example of our paradoxical disavowal and investment in the disabled body as spectators, an “intense longing to see and know the anomalous body [that] creates a dynamic in which figures of physical difference seem to call for opposing and dominating forms of authority” (Russell

52).

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Once acknowledged, a simulated disability is expected to somehow be resolved in a stage musical’s plot—this is only way the spectator’s able imaginary can be reconstituted as categorical whole. In Disability Rhetoric (2014), Jay T. Dolmage presents a concise “anatomy” of disability myths and narratives that support the able imaginary, most of which Side Show presents throughout the show disability as pathology; as an object of pity and/or charity; as a sign of internal flaw; as an isolating or individuated experience; as a sign of social ill; as a sign from Above; and as a symptom of humankind’s abuse of nature. The twins’ separation is a version of the kill-or-cure narrative, a trope in which a disabled character must be cured of their affliction or die, albeit adapted for a show that can neither kill nor cure its leads (Dolmage 34-37). This moment seemingly serves no dramaturgical purpose other than pandering to audience desires. During both performances I attended, spectators around me erupted in teary, full- throated affirmations when Padgett and Davies split apart. I understand their pleasure as rooted in the societal expectation that the Hiltons will submit to surgical separation in order to live normal lives. Moreover, this choreography assures spectators Padgett and

Davie are non-disabled actors and allows them to marvel at their technical ability to approximate conjoinment so deftly.29

A recuperative reading is nonetheless available to us, given how “I Will Never

Leave You” ultimately ends with the affirmation that Violet and Daisy are not surgically separating. Successful modes of conjoinment or separation become a queer horizon for

29 Another possible reading of the twins’ separation is that it is the achievement of the sisters finally learning to ‘separate’ their minds, as Harry Houdini instructs in Act I. This is a thematically poignant reading of the physical split but it is inconsistent with the narrative arc of Act II. Even so, we might hear Houdini’s instructions that conjoinment is ‘all in the mind’ as a wry commentary on the various ways the musical itself scripts disablement.

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Daisy and Violet—allowing them to briefly step out of the temporal stranglehold of the musical number and into what José Muñoz (2009) calls “ecstatic time,” “signaled at the moment one feels ecstasy and more importantly during moments of contemplation when one looks back at a scene from one’s past, present, or future” (26). The physical separation, enhanced with a key change and flooded light, is a flash of enlightenment: after desiring to be seen as autonomous individuals for the entirety of the show, the

Hiltons realize their individual identities are formed through their relationship with each other, and they also they choose to love each other instead of seeking fulfillment or a sense of normalcy elsewhere. This flourishing, the musical asserts, is available to conjoined twins if they are allowed the opportunity to be fully recognized as individual persons and decision-makers in their own care.

If we read the original production against its revival, we can see how Side Show reiterates social and medical models of disability, despite its critique of enfreakment, to achieve commercially appealing “universal” characters. But Violet and Daisy Hilton are not theatrical “everywomen.” Without a proverbial “backdoor” or conceit to reframe the actors’ bodies vis-à-vis separation, no choreography of conjoinment offers Side Show’s

Hiltons’ a satisfactory cure. The 1997 production demonstrates how audiences cannot project conjoinment onto the actors’ bodies and also be expected to fantasize cure without material, embodied alterations onstage. The 2014 revival stages a temporary moment of relief from conjoinment but doing so anxiously points back towards separation and underscores the kill-or-cure narrative common to the medical model of disability. In both performances of conjoinment, the spectator’s terms of viewership work against her anticipation that Daisy and Violet will ultimately choose normative ideals of

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health, and the material reality of disablement itself is lost in the spectacle of an actor’s disability simulation.

Despite the short run of both productions, Side Show serves as an example of how disability simulations implicate wider attitudes about ability and ways an individual production might articulate disability as a productive embodiment to audiences brought in at premium seat prices to entertain, and be entertained by, the marginalized, stereotyped, and ignored “freak.” For a few hours stage traffic non-normative bodies are played at the fore but, behind the proscenium, the performance of the Hiltons is ever-at- odds with the able bodies tasked with performing them. The choreography of conjoinment in Side Show models Broadway as a cultural location of disability in productive, if unresolved, ways. Although the 1997 and 2014 productions demonstrate disparate fixations on the Hiltons’ “little bit of flesh”—one through conspicuous absence, the other through photorealistic adherence—both reveal a reliance on exceptionally able- bodied triple-threat actors to achieve the disablement simulated for the Broadway stage.

Side Show’s inability to configure conjoinment as a commodity for audience consumption provides a strong, if unexpected, critique of societal expectations of the disabled body: if conjoined bodies in their most “productive” iterations on Broadway still cannot succeed under late capitalism, then we must reassess how and why certain kinds of embodiment accrue value.

Conclusions: changing disability representation

As in film and on TV, it is common in Broadway musicals for able-bodied actors to play disabled characters. In this chapter I have considered the utility of the terms for

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able-bodied actors playing disabled roles—cripping up, crip-face, disability drag—and proposed that we should retire these phrases in favor of disability simulation. Disability simulations more accurately reflects the bodily labor the actor who mistakes restrictions of her own bodily capacities for an accurate physical representation of physical impairment and social disablement. Counterintuitively, when a character is physically disabled it widens the scope of actors perceived as “able” to perform a role but the presence of a disabled character, as many disabled actors anecdotally share, does not guarantee a disabled person will be cast over an able-bodied performer.

Although acting is an art form predicated on the portrayal of someone other than oneself, a rhetoric critical of disabled actors "just playing themselves" is common within the theatre community—not least because disability simulations have long been a tactic for nondisabled actors to gain accolades. We must necessarily critique this idea during creative meetings and casting calls, throughout a musical’s rehearsal period, and in critical responses to a musical’s opening. This degrading logic becomes more apparent when we ask if musical stage performers Sutton Foster or Norm Lewis are playing "themselves" in any role as a white female or black male. Just as there is a particular embodied experience that comes with one's physical age, sex, race, and gender identity that we assume for able- bodied actors, characters with disabilities can be portrayed by actors with disabilities with greater nuance and authenticity. If there were a great number of disabled actors being cast in disabled roles, or disabled actors being cast in roles traditionally imagined as able- bodied, we might have different conversations about casting practices and the merits of mimetic authenticity in acting. But that assumes there is already an even playing field in casting and representation, which is presently untrue. To argue that nondisabled performers

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should be “allowed” to simulate disability onstage perpetuates artistic inequities favoring able-bodied actors and stereotypes about what disabled bodies do, or what disabilities culturally signify, to continue on stage and in other performance arts.

In the next chapter, I shift my focus from performing visible disabilities to nonapparent chronic and terminal illnesses by moving to the subgenre of AIDS musicals.

The lack of uniformly presenting, obvious physical markers of HIV/AIDS until its late stages presents unique challenges for the Broadway musical, which relies on easily telegraphed physical characteristics to dramatize action in large producing houses. Asking how the commercial musical resolves this issue, I will also reveal why the dramaturgy of

AIDS transforms from a tragic narrative to a comedic punchline as the U.S. AIDS epidemic moves into the twenty-first century.

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“Everyone’s Got AIDS”: Temporality, Race, and the Emergence of the Comedic AIDS Musical

Freud said we have a death wish Getting buggered’s getting killed Is this ghastly epidemic something our subconscious willed? — Sir Richard Francis Burton’s Anus, Zero Patience: A Musical About AIDS

“The poor homosexuals – they declared war on nature, and nature is exacting an awful retribution.” —Pat Buchanan, NY Post, February 24, 1983

And so this is the end of our story And everyone is dead from AIDS It took from me my best friend My only true pal My only bright star (he died of AIDS) — Gary, “Everyone’s Got AIDS,” Team America: World Police.

It is a bustling evening in New York City’s Time Square. The camera pans up from the Theatre Development Fund’s TKTS booth, a location where New Yorkers and tourists alike can purchase day-of seats for Broadway shows at discounted rates. A long crane shot explores the large advertisements illuminating the bustling intersections as taxis crawl along in midtown traffic before zooming on a theater whose marquee brilliantly displays: Lease: The Musical. Jump-cutting to the action onstage, we see the tall, blond-haired and blue-eyed Gary Johnson center-stage, singing show’s the closing number, “Everyone’s Got AIDS.” The song’s lyrics are not too complicated— “AIDS!

AIDS! AIDS! AIDS! AIDS!”—but the predominantly white, middle-class audience is

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moved to tears by Johnson’s declaration that “Everyone has AIDS” (Parker). Moving into a list-verse, Gary identifies numerous offstage characters as having AIDS: his father, sister, uncle, cousin, his cousin’s best friend, grandma, his dog ol’Blue, and even the

Pope. A large cast, dancing upstage on a structure made of metal scaffolding, punctures the list with an exuberant shout—“AIDS!”—following each name on the excessive list: a public announcement of diagnosis. With every declaration, the tempo increases until the final verse reiterates only the lyric “AIDS” until the accompanying guitar run dies. In the comparatively short musical number, which lasts only one minute and fifteen seconds,

AIDS, the shorthand for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, is named forty-two times. Even as the accompaniment ends, a chorus member audibly enjambs one more

“AIDS!” beyond the score’s concluding note: stressing that, in Lease, there is not a thing as too much AIDS. Lease is a fictional musical, produced only on the fantasy Broadway of the 2004 film Team America: World Police (Trey Parker, dir.), but as a parody of

Jonathan Larson’s Pulitzer-prize winning musical Rent it demonstrates a cultural turning point in AIDS narratives on the Great White Way.

In chapter two, I proposed that we should use disability simulation to describe the work of able-bodied actors playing disabled characters on stage. Side Show’s simulations of disability intended to ground the original and revival productions with accuracy but they achieved the opposite effect, instead highlighting the exceptional skill of the actors performing the roles of conjoined twins Daisy and Violet Hilton. As the Hiltons and the wider company of “Freaks,” the performers were acting through the experience of a temporary restriction of bodily ability, which placed disability as a categorical deficit rather than a productive, creative embodiment.

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This chapter explores how musicals engage with chronic and/or terminal illnesses when there are no obvious physical effects for the actors to simulate, thereby communicating health or unwellness to the spectator. While “the perception of a natural order of social structure in stratification” is generally “thought to be readily available in the evidence of the human body,” there are many body conditions invisible to the human eye (Green 13). Commercial theatre has a particularly rich corpus about cancer, including

Margaret Edson’s Wit (1999), Israeli playwright Anat Gov’s Happy End (2012), and

British theatremaker Bryony Kimmings’ musical A Pacifist’s Guide to the War on

Cancer (2016), but these works move beyond the borders of this dissertation since they have not received a Broadway production, and not every work is a musical. A transnational study considering these productions together is needed, particularly in countries where theaters receive government support to determine how the arts operate as a state-sponsored component of community wellness.1

Instead, I focus on “AIDS musicals” because of the creative impact of the AIDS pandemic on the New York theatre community. By “AIDS musicals,” I mean a category of musicals defined by the explicit centrality of HIV/AIDS in the narrative. Even as theatremakers, their kinship networks, and their audiences were dying from AIDS-related complications, explosive new work was generated at the boundaries of dramatists’ tolerance for loss, pain, sadness, and rage. Although plays received the greater number of commercial productions, there are notable Broadway musicals that fall under this category, including Falsettos, Rent, and The Book of Mormon, which I discuss in this

1 In the U.S. many “cancer musicals” such as Dani Girl (2014) and Fuck Cancer: The Musical (2018) are well-received in regional and community theaters but have not been produced on Broadway. These narratives conventionally offer audiences ebullient joy to counter grim cancer diagnoses, a cultural practice that reminds me of Douglas Crimp’s forceful argument that art has the power to save lives (3–16).

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chapter. AIDS musicals prove more popular Off-Broadway, where smaller houses make production runs more sustainable for shows like An Unfinished Song; All That He Was;

The Last Session; Elegies: The Song Cycle (Finn); The Big Voice: God or Merman?; The

Quilt; and Elegies: For Angels, Punks, and Raging Queens (Russell and Hood). The subgenre even crosses over into film, yielding original musicals such as Zero Patience

(1993, John Greyson, dir.) and Jeanne and the Perfect Guy (1997, Oliver Ducastel, dir.).2

Shockingly, there is scarce research on this set of commercial musicals as a unique subgenre, and what little has been written concerns Rent. This is partly due to what journalist John Istel calls “The Rent Phenomenon”: writer/composer Jonathan

Larson’s untimely death the evening before Rent opened off-Broadway in New York

Theatre Workshop sensationalized the media’s coverage of the show and made the score’s earnest message of leaving behind work that outlasts its creator pulse with a sense of urgency (“I Have Something To Say”). Theatre critics were apparently hesitant to criticize the work of a dead man, whose own death commanded more attention than the precarity of those living with AIDS in his musical. I suspect the lack of scholarship on

AIDS musicals also stems from their respective creative teams’ reluctance to identify them as such. Just as Rent’s AIDS plot was overshadowed by its creator’s death,

Falsettos’ AIDS plot is subsumed by Marvin’s family politics and The Book of Mormon

2 Despite both films receiving positive reviews, neither has been adapted to the stage. This is notable given the current trend to adapt films to musicals, which assumes a project is financially viable due to an in-built fanbase of the original material. Of the thirty-two musicals on Broadway during the 2018–19 season roughly half rely on film material: twelve are direct adaptations of film and three others use components of prior film iterations in its current production. Zero Patience’s lack of a stage treatment is perhaps unsurprising due to the difficulty of replicating the film’s camp aesthetic elements such as “The Butthole Duet,” in which two anuses have a conversation while the rest of their bodies are asleep. I read the anuses musings on their relationship to the phallus, excrement, pleasure, and disease—quoted in this chapter’s epigraph—to be a cheeky response to Leo Bersani’s question, Is the rectum a grave? For an analysis of this duet as a form of digestive politics in relation to the AIDS epidemic, see, Fawaz, “I Cherish My Bile Duct as Much as Any Other Organ,” pp. 125–26.

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uses AIDS as a comedic device in service of lampooning homosocial Mormon missionary culture rather than as significant diagnosis or material encounter.

To discern why AIDS musicals have elided critical inquiry we must first understand how these musicals emerge from an era in which a virus-victim diptych ensures “that the subject of AIDS is ‘correctly’ identified and that any possibility of positive sympathetic identification with actual people with AIDS is entirely expunged from the field of vision” (Watney 78). The “spectacle of AIDS,” Simon Watney argues, is intractable precisely because it refuses to settle on the (Human Immunodeficiency) virus or its “victim” host. Paula Treichler, intervening in cultural critiques of AIDS, calls this effect an “epidemic of signification” (19). Treichler's main argument is that AIDS is not merely a biomedical reality but a volatile epidemic of signification, that is, a meaning-making device that has real-world consequences. Informed by Watney and

Treichler, I argue Broadway AIDS musicals generate the opposite effect of what Ramzi

Fawaz calls “the digestive politics and poetics of AIDS”—the transformation of viscerally charged performances into political will-to-action (123-24). I contend AIDS musicals fail to galvanize viewers because there is no disability to simulate. If, as

Treichler contends, biomedical "facts" about the disease do not arise from objective or unbiased scientific inquiry but are quite literally shaped by pre-existing assumptions about the social nature of the disease (for example, the assumption that it is a “gay disease” or that it is a moral scourge punishing humans for their sins), then in the dense cultural production of musical theatre AIDS comes into focus only by proximity to other identity markers: race, gender, sexuality, drug use, and occupation. AIDS musicals are unable to generate visceral responses without a discrete set of actions to explicitly

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perform HIV progression, which results in their AIDS plots being sublated into other narrative elements.

Following David Román’s instructions to historians of AIDS theatre to “construct a model of analysis that cautions against the officializing rhetorical tendencies and totalizing narratives of theatre history in general,” this chapter is unlike the others in this dissertation (Acts of Intervention xx). My analysis of the “AIDS musicals” subgenre is an attempt to demonstrate how the stakes are, at times, higher than disability simulations of physical or cognitive impairments because of the real-world consequences of narrating

HIV/AIDS and comorbid illnesses as belonging to specific minority groups instead of as democratic medical conditions. My methodology is necessarily uneven across this chapter because the three musicals under consideration developed during three successive decades, and therefore engage with different cultural moments in the U.S. AIDS epidemic. As I consider Falsettos, Rent, and Book of Mormon I am creatively emulating medical responses to the Human Immunodeficiency Virus. HIV-1 is estimated to mutate more times than every known strain of influenza during the first ten days of infection, so a combination treatment is needed to effectively combat the hypermutated viral sequence and support the immune system (Cuevas et al.).3 By moving across traditional sources such as theatrical scripts, scores, moments during live performance, and playwright notes, and also medical case studies, public health white papers, newspaper articles, political policy, and critical theory, my goal is to reflect combination antiretroviral therapy for

3 There are two HIV viruses: HIV-1, which accounts for over ninety-five percent of HIV infections worldwide, and HIV-2, which is generally limited to West-African countries in its “pure” form. HIV-1 has over sixty strains and progresses to AIDS more quickly when left untreated, although it is more responsive to medication than HIV-2. Because they are different viruses, it is possible for an individual to contract both forms, in which case they mutate together, becoming “recombinant” strain (Paddock). Recombinants are equally transmissible and circulating with increasing frequency; these forms are difficult to treat because of their genetic diversity and dynamic adaptation.

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HIV infection, which dramatically lowers a patient’s viral load through different permutations of transcriptase and protease inhibitors.

Unlike Román, however, I am consciously focusing on the “official” Broadway musicals. Román’s corpus offers the most complete historiography of AIDS performances to-date, although others such as Sarah Schulman, Deborah Gould, and

Gregg Bordowitz chronicle queer cultural productions in dialogue with the AIDS epidemic as it developed. In our rush to uncover the unofficial rhetoric shaping AIDS in theatre history, I fear we have too-quickly abandoned the popular narratives that signaled the “arrival” of HIV/AIDS in musical theatre. To “read against the grain” of these theatrical productions we must contend with their dramaturgical structure, texture as a political project, and representational pattern. Other musicals in this project depict disability as a singular, specific experience and may, therefore, be more narrowly focused in execution. As artistic responses to a global pandemic, AIDS musicals present the challenge of delivering an individual material experience while speaking with a universal voice. Instead of focusing on one or two productions, in this chapter I will analyze the evolution of three productions against their contemporary political landscape in order to destabilize their reputation as “progressive” musicals.4 As we will see, AIDS representation in musical theatre shifts drastically as it moves from the late twentieth century into the early twenty-first; HIV/AIDS transforms from a tragic plot device for middle-class white characters into a comedic punchline for lower-class persons of color.

4 Rent consciously outsizes its companions in this chapter. This choice reflects how the “Rent phenomenon” has overdetermined the subgenre of AIDS musicals yet there is a paucity of materials that critically engage the musical’s dramaturgy.

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The AIDS musical

“AIDS Musicals” has been in colloquial use as a descriptive title since the mid-

1990s, although its earliest appearances in print were for film reviews of John Greyson’s

Zero Patience. The concept of an “AIDS musical,” however, is easily grasped; the plot is structurally organized around or in response to HIV/AIDS. I think of AIDS musicals as a subgenre within the “compassion musical” framework; as I discuss in the chapter one,

Rent was Mordden’s primary example in describing compassion musicals as having characters that elicit pity. Characters may be in serodiscordant relationships, living with

HIV and managing viral loads, treating AIDS-related illnesses, acting a caretaker for a friend or loved one, managing their illness alone, struggling to afford their medication, sharing needles, facing food insecurity, or have a supportive family structure. Every individual experience with an illness is circumstantial, so no two AIDS narratives need be the same. Nonetheless, the presence of AIDS changes how the playwrights execute their vision in the genre: created over thirteen years, Falsettos cannot imagine a post-AIDS future; Rent’s metronomic calendar structure links diagnosis with an obsessive relationship to time and the idea of futurity; characters with AIDS in The Book of

Mormon are outside of chronic time altogether due to their geographic location, a choice that allows the show to circumvent issues of wellness and cure. Thus, a secondary characteristic of commercial AIDS musicals is that they create a specific relationship between the disease and a character’s prognosis time.

Commercial theatre has many AIDS narratives, most of which are memoir or semi-autobiographical. These served a documentary function, a contemporary witnessing, for the epidemic plaguing New York in the 1980s and early 1990s. William Hoffman’s

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As Is and Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart (both 1985); The Baltimore Waltz (1992) by

Paula Vogel; Tony Kushner’s epic two-part play Angels in America (1992); David

Drake’s semi-autobiographical one-man show The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me

(1992); and David Rabe’s A Question of Mercy: Based on the Journal of Richard Selzer

(1997), are a few of titles that all found critical and commercial success. During the

1980s, New York “straight” plays (plays without music) depicted seroconversion and developing AIDS in a series of realist dramatic works. Theatre Rhinoceros’ The AIDS

Show: Artists Involved with Death and Survival (1984) and Unfinished Business: The

New AIDS Show (1986), Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart (1985), Robert Chesley’s

Jerker (1986), and Richard Greenberg’s Eastern Standard (1988) were among the earliest plays responding to the ongoing crisis of an expanding epidemic, increased stigma against gay men, and a lack of support from the government and medical practitioners.5

Plays continued this trend during the 1990s as musicals were wrestling with how to musicalize an epidemic.

During the height of the AIDS epidemic musicals first used HIV/AIDS narratives as tragic devices because seroconversion was considered a “death sentence”; there was no broadly accessible medical treatment that offered a return to normal bodily function, let alone cure. The timeline from the first HIV infection to developing AIDS can be as short as five years, and by many HIV-positive individuals were years into this prognosis clock by the time virologist Robert Gallo’s HIV-screening blood test, ELISA, was widely implemented in 1985. AIDS researcher Anthony Fauci’s articulation of how HIV’s

5 Jerker is the shorthand for Chesley’s one-act; its full title is Jerker, or The Helping Hand: A Pornographic Elegy with Redeeming Social Value and a Hymn to the Queer Men of San Francisco in Twenty Telephone Calls, Many of Them Dirty.

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delayed appearance helps us understand how the 1990s became an extension of 1980s diagnostic time:

[It] was like an iceberg, and what we were seeing was the tip of the iceberg, people who had already become clinically ill, where they came to a physician because they were sick. But beneath that, beneath the surface were the many, many people who were infected. They didn't know they were infected and were not yet ill. The first cohorts of patients that we admitted to the Clinical Center at the NIH in 1981, '82, '83 and then in '84, before we knew that there was this enormous number of people who were infected and had not yet gotten sick, every person we saw had advanced disease, so we had a skewed appreciation of what this disease was all about, because we thought that you get HIV infected and you were deathly ill and that was it, not fully realizing the vast numbers of people who were incubating this illness for years and years. (“Interview: Anthony Fauci”)

The second act of William Finn’s Falsettos is based in 1981 when the gay community and drug users were first presenting immune suppression symptoms and related conditions like Pneumocystis pneumonia and the previously-rare skin cancer Kaposi’s sarcoma, although Finn did not begin to write the material until the late 1980s. Whizzer’s character arc towards death from a mysterious illness affecting gay men was unimaginable when Finn penned the material that became Act I in 1979. In this way, the incubation time for Finn’s creative process mirrors Whizzer’s illness and that of other asymptomatic persons with HIV.

After Falsettos, the trajectory of AIDS narratives in musicals like Rent had to move beyond the “death sentence” rhetoric because antiretroviral combination drug treatments such as AZT and protease inhibitors were dramatically prolonging life, making HIV a chronic but livable condition and even reversing symptoms of AIDS by helping T-cells multiply (therefore bolstering the immune system). Román describes

Rent’s depiction of AIDS as the “banalization of AIDS” (Acts of Intervention 275).

Informed by the George H. W. Bush administration’s normalization of AIDS as a

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permanent social problem like homelessness, poverty, and crime, Román argues that,

“the banality of AIDS strips the epidemic of its political and personal emergency; it shifts the drama inherent in all experiences of AIDS, regardless of status, from the deadly serious to the almost trivial” (275). Musicals had to adapt again in the mid-2000s when clinical trials for using existing antiviral drugs to prevent HIV transmission before exposure were underway. By the time The Book of Mormon opened in 2011, a single pill combination of tenofovir disoproxil and emtricitabine known as Truvada was under review as a daily strategy for Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP). Truvada had already been used for managing select strains of HIV-1, but when taken in a smaller dosage as

PrEP it dramatically decreases the opportunity for HIV-infection by over 92% (Jiang et al.). In 2012 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Truvada, making it possible to imagine a “post-AIDS” future for the first time since the CDC’s first warning of “an association between some aspect of a homosexual lifestyle or disease acquired through sexual contact and Pneumocystis pneumonia in this population” in the 5 June

1981 Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. The theatrical impact, as I argue later in this chapter, is that Rent parodies and the musical The Book of Mormon are unconcerned with contagion or the deleterious effects of a compromised immune system.

Cumulatively, these medical advancements aided a shift from Falsettos’ AIDS-as-tragedy arc and the banalization of AIDS in Rent to what I call an “AIDS pasquinade”: a use of

AIDS as a comedic device that erases the performance of material suffering and death from AIDS and its related symptoms.

Charlotte Greenspan comes close to articulating this trajectory in “Death Comes to the Broadway Musical,” citing Rent and Falsettos as “[exploring] the joys and sorrows

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of being part of a subculture” through the deaths of Mimi and Whizzer from AIDS (158).

Oddly, Greenspan does not make the distinction between Whizzer’s death and Mimi’s miraculous revival, which undermines the premise of her article; a more exacting comparison would be made between Whizzer and Angel, given how both characters die from AIDS during their respective second acts. Still, Greenspan’s observation about death in Sweeney Todd (1979), Little Shop of Horrors (1982), and Chicago (1975), that

“the sheer number of people who die helps numb the audience’s reaction to the dreadfulness of death; these shows portray the banality of death,” seems especially applicable to Rent as the touchstone for AIDS musicals (158). Like Román, Greenspan’s articulation of AIDS as “banal” understands HIV/AIDS in the specific context of

Larson’s narrative in Rent; indeed, Parker and Stone’s parody “Everyone’s Got AIDS” is itself a validation of their claim that the musical damagingly conceptualizes HIV/AIDS as commonplace, even trite. Their implicit critique is never stated outright: the commercial success-cum-ubiquity of Rent made it difficult for some audiences—especially those with no other proximity to HIV/AIDS—to separate the musical’s framing of AIDS as a banal condition of modern life from its material reality, which is anything but trivial.

In The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity (2005) and The

American Musical and the Formation of Personal Identity (2006) musical theatre historian Raymond Knapp argues how “practitioners of the American musical have time and again proven that commercial success and presenting a challenge to audiences are not mutually exclusive potentialities,” and uses examples of race, gender, and sexuality to demonstrate how Broadway musicals navigate commercial viability and social critique

(National Identity 284). Two glaring omissions in Knapp’s eight-hundred-plus paged,

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two-volume historical survey is an articulation of disability as a specific embodiment that impacts American drama and sustained consideration of AIDS. The absence of disability is less surprising, as my argument in chapter one makes clear, due to Broadway’s reliance on nondisabled performers for economic survival.6 AIDS, however, deserves more attention than Knapp’s brief consideration as an aside analysis of Satine’s death in the

2001 movie musical Moulin Rouge! (Baz Luhrmann, dir.) suggests. Knapp’s reading of

Satine’s tuberculosis as a metaphor for AIDS underwhelms because, as Susan Sontag argues in Illness and its Metaphors (1978) and AIDS and Its Metaphors (1989), tuberculosis has its own material reality separate from illnesses such as cancer and AIDS.

While Satine’s deteriorating health may feel familiar to spectators, the social histories of these conditions are not interchangeable. If, as Douglas Crimp argues, “AIDS does not exist apart from the practices that conceptualize it, represent it, and respond to it,” and that “We know AIDS only through those practices,” then AIDS musicals present sites for understanding how the embodied experience of AIDS and its politics are mediated for the wider, whiter, cis-heterosexual culture that constitutes the majority in Broadway’s tourism industry (1).

6 Knapp approaches the subject of disability in his articulation of Passion’s “unattractive” Fosca as “physically unhealthy and mentally unstable,” but he sidelines the issue of disability and wellness to discuss Sondheim’s use of the epistolary song (Personal Identity 303-308). He invokes wellness and sickness in his analysis of the oft-repeated phrases “Beauty is power, / Longing a disease” and “Your love will live in me.” Knapp describes love as a “variety of immortality” because one continues to live beyond natural death in the heart of a loved one (307). Given that Fosca’s letters written from the confines of her bed when she is unwell, and how Giorgio and Clara’s letters are penned with the fervor of love-sickness, rhetorically framed as a diseased longing, I understand Sondheim’s creation of the epistolary musical to be a genre-response to (and implementation of) a disability aesthetic. Passion’s musical structure, organized by the action of letter writing, delays for its reception, and then reading, deserves more serious consideration as an expression of crip time.

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Falsettos, AIDS, and the “Tight-knit family”

As the first of Broadway’s AIDS musicals, William Finn’s Falsettos (1992) responded to New York City’s developing metropolitan gay sensibility and the AIDS epidemic in as close to “real time” as commercial theatre could achieve. The musical follows Marvin, an upwardly-mobile middle-class husband and father who decides to leave his wife, Trina, for his lover Whizzer. Set in 1979, Marvin admits that his family does not “go by the book” but he wants a “tight-knit family” comprised of “Wife, Friend, and Son” all the same (Falsettos 15). As Marvin and Whizzer navigate the growing pains of being a publicly “out” couple—Marvin wishes Whizzer would play a conventional domestic role, while Whizzer does not want to give up his sexual autonomy—Trina enters a relationship with Marvin’s psychiatrist, Mendel. Marvin and Whizzer find themselves at an impasse and decide to break up, which drives Marvin to reconnect with his son Jason. The second act moves two years into the future, where we find Marvin,

Trina, and Mendel in the midst of planning for Jason’s approaching Bar Mitzvah, aided by the caterer (and Marvin’s lesbian neighbor) Cordelia and her partner Dr. Charlotte.

Marvin and Whizzer reconnect after Jason invites Whizzer to his baseball game, but their rekindled romance is short-lived—early in the second act Whizzer is hospitalized with a mysterious illness that Dr. Charlotte notices primarily affects gay men. Jason, who is looking to the men in his life for guidance as he questions what it means to be a man, decides to hold his Bar Mitzvah in Whizzer’s bedside so his father’s partner can participate. Falsettos ends at Whizzer’s grave, with Marvin turning into his family’s embrace as a mourning lover, frightened by his own diagnostic uncertainty. In this section, I argue that while Whizzer’s death offers the only conceivable ending for his

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character following his contraction of HIV, and it is historically accurate, Falsettos’ use of AIDS as a tragic plot device inadvertently reinforces a conventional heterosexual family structure.

Falsettos was composed over thirteen years, almost exactly in sync with the emergence of the AIDS epidemic. The musical that debuted on Broadway was a combination of three Off-Broadway one-act musicals that became known as “the Marvin trilogy”: In Trousers (produced twice in 1979 by Playwrights Horizons), March of the

Falsettos (20 May – 26 September 1982 at Playwrights Horizons), and Falsettoland (28

June – 12 August 1990 at Playwrights Horizons). Finn collaborated with director James

Lapine for the latter two one-acts and on the combination Falsettos following

Falsettoland’s run at Playwrights Horizons, which was so successful that it transferred to the Lucille Lortel Theatre for a second run from 25 September 1990 – 27 January 1991.

Falsettos, directed by James Lapine, opened on 29 April 1992 at the John Golden Theatre and closed after 487 performances and 23 previews on 27 June 1993. Its 2016 revival, again directed by Lapine, ran from 29 September 2016 to 8 January 2017 at the Walter

Kerr Theatre.7

Historical Accuracy

Falsettos is unique from the other AIDS musicals in this chapter for its historical accuracy. Finn’s timeline for writing the second act in the latter years of the decade enabled him to articulate the fearful uncertainty that accompanied the emergence of HIV

7 As with the original production, the 2016 Lincoln Center Theatre revival proved so popular that it was immediately optioned for a national tour. The first national tour of the Falsettos revival is in rehearsals at the time of this writing, with previews beginning on 8 February 2019 in Fayetteville, Arkansas at the Walton Arts Center.

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in public life. Dr. Charlotte, an accomplished physician and self-professed dyke, informs the audience, “LOOK, A VIRUS HAS BEEN FOUND” (Falsettos 127). Reading a medical journal at home and contemplating how increasingly large numbers of

“BACHELORS ARRIVE SICK AND FRIGHTENED” at the hospital, Dr. Charlotte deduces:

SOMETHING BAD IS HAPPENING. SOMETHING VERY BAD IS HAPPENING. SOMETHING STINKS, SOMETHING IMMORAL, SOMETHING SO BAD THAT WORDS HAVE LOST THEIR MEANING. RUMORS FLY AND TALES ABOUND, STORIES ECHO UNDERGROUND: SOMETHING BAD IS SPREADING, SPREADING SPREADING ROUND. (Falsettos 124-125)

Charlotte’s articulation of “something bad” as a rotten, “stinking,” thing elliptically casts the virus as an unknowable contagion, but in 1990 it also carried a second connotation of the medical community’s delayed response to HIV/AIDS as a moral panic. Her

Treichlerlian description presents HIV/AIDS as a representational vacuum precisely through its virulent spread; it is knowable only in proximity to race and sexuality, or when expressed through comorbid illnesses—and even then, it is enigmatically

“something bad.”

Dr. Charlotte’s use of “bad” is similar to the dichotomies used to describe homosexuality and AIDS in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, which was developing contemporaneously. Kushner’s Roy Cohn, the powerful New York Republican ironically besieged with AIDS, pontificates on the utility of labels in relation to the disease. Cohn articulates the problem with binary-driven language despite its centrality in AIDS discourse. “Your problem, Henry,” Roy says, admonishing his long-time physician, “is

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that you are hung up on words, on labels, that you believe what they seem to mean.

AIDS. Gay. Homosexual. Lesbian. You think these are names that tell you who someone sleeps with, but they don’t tell you that” (Angels 46). Cohn’s attempt to dissociate words from their ontological power is forcefully argued, but pitiably received. For Cohn, divorcing “gay” from “men who have sex with men” is the last defense against the

“diagnosis” of homosexuality, a label he fears and, consequently, denies. Dr. Charlotte’s

B♭ major musical notation (Fig. 3-1) in “Something Bad Is Happening” reveals her how the “bad” label is an incomplete, inadequate representation for the magnitude of this new virus.

Figure 3-1. Dr. Cordelia’s wavering run anxiously telegraphs her fear of the unknown virus decimating the gay community as she concludes her Act II solo number, “Something Bad is Happening” (10).

As she sings “SPREADING… ROUND!”, “round” begins on a whole b-flat note, which begins to waver between B♭ and C5 in a series of eighth notes. This modulation runs against the piano’s more expansive progression between whole-steps on the clef, never in harmony with Dr. Cordelia, which sharply highlights Dr. Cordelia’s inability to resolve the discordant expression. Aurally, Finn creates a foreboding sense of disquiet, which transitions to “Second Racquetball,” the scene in which Whizzer first exhibits symptoms

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of immunosuppression. As Cordelia’s scoring bridges into Whizzer’s, Falsettos performs both sides of the doctor-patient crisis, a choice that intends to generate as much compassion for Cordelia, as she attempts to treat an incurable condition, as it does for the terminally ill Whizzer.

“You’ll be, kid, a man, kid, if nothing goes wrong.”

Falsettos’ historical accuracy of the HIV/AIDS crisis is complicated by William

Finn and James Lapine’s refusal of the label “AIDS musical” or use the HIV/AIDS narrative as a primary marketing device. Finn and Lapine are both gay men, but their interviews regarding the musical’s importance firmly prioritize the reorganization and reconstitution of the family unit. In a 1992 interview for Time magazine, Finn described his decision to use the singing term “falsettos” for the musical’s title as emerging from his abnormal set of characters: "I used the term because it is for songs outside the normal range of the voice, and these were characters outside the normal range. There hadn't been musicals or many plays dealing with homosexuals in a non campy way. Now, as our notion of families broadens, these characters are well within the range” (Henry). Finn’s use of the more clinical “homosexual,” rather than gay, fag, or queer—all of which appear in the musical—is one example of the code-switching Finn performed to sell the show in mass-media outlets.8 The journalist and his Time editors seemed to be sensitive of how to pitch the story to its readers. The resulting story title? “The quirky William

Finn.”

8 The 11 May 1992 interview occurred one week after Falsettos opened to positive reviews, but critical acclaim is hardly a guarantee for a compassion musical’s financial success, as Sondheim’s Passion would demonstrate two seasons later.

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The article draws comparisons between Finn and another gay composer, Stephen

Sondheim, by characterizing the composer and lyricist as “the quirky, quixotic, querulous and unquenchable William Finn” (Henry). The hyperbolic “Q” wordplay hints at Finn’s own unarticulated queer identity and leaves readers to contextually decipher the creator’s relationship to his work. Moreover, the family unit figures strongly in the interviews for this article. Described as a “grandmother,” lead producer Fran Weissler, remarked how

“[Falsettos] was a big departure for us, our usual investors and our usual audiences. Half of the money in the show [it cost $950,000 to mount, about a fifth of the average musical] is our own. But we had to do it--we couldn't not do it” (Harry). Weissler, perhaps best known for shepherding the Tony-winning 1990 revival of Fiddler on the Roof to

Broadway, tellingly imagines her investors and audience as conservative—with their pocketbooks, if not in their politics. Weissler’s comments make sense alongside Finn’s framing of Falsettos as offering alternative kinships to the conventional heterosexual coupling of a man and wife with a child, but the focus on family obscures how the show’s depiction of HIV/AIDS as a terminal illness was breaking ground in commercial musical theatre.

William A. Henry III, the two-time Pulitzer-winning journalist who wrote the story, seemed to think Finn was burying the lede too.9 Henry’s sub-headline for the article defines Falsettos as “musical about homosexuality, AIDS and families,” neatly inverting Finn’s own description, before continuing: “A BROADWAY MUSICAL

9 William A. Henry III died of a heart attack on 28 June 1994 at the age of forty-four. His last journalistic work was moderating a roundtable discussion of gay rights, although his book In Defense of Elitism was published posthumously. In a short Time article announcing his death, Henry purportedly wished for a life in the theatre, but thought himself not capable the exacting athletic Broadway standards: “There aren't many parts for a short, plump actor who can't sing or dance” (“Bill Henry … Dies”).

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ABOUT A man who leaves his wife and son for another man, then breaks up with the male lover, woos him back and ultimately watches him die of AIDS might not sound like most people's idea of entertainment” (Henry, emphasis original). Henry never answers exactly who might find this narrative trajectory entertaining; he instead marks the issue and pivots to praising Finn for his pithy lyrics and hummable score. In the liner notes for

Falsettos 2016 Broadway Revival Cast Recording, André Bishop and Ira Weitzman, doubling Finn’s comments, offered a definitive reading of Falsettos as primarily organized by family politics in the cast album’s liner notes:

Quite simply: the world has caught up with its vision: what was unconventional in the 1980’s and the early 1990’s [sic] is widely accepted now. There has been progress! Today’s modern family is no longer such a “teeny tiny band.” The family unit consists of men and women of all races, all sexual orientations, all religions, all ages. A family in the early years of the 21st century is simply an extension of those you love, and the world was not particularly ready to hear that when Falsettos was first produced. That vision of family, ultimately, is the message of this beautiful show, and it is one we must dearly cling to as we face the future. (Falsettos BCR 7)

Bishop and Weitzman’s comments that “the world was not particularly ready” for

Falsettos belie the musical’s popularity when it was first produced as one-acts during the

1980s and 1990, and the original 1992 production. What is remarkable here is that their optimistic fixation on “the future” is at odds with the show’s reflection on the finality of death under the AIDS epidemic. I do not dispute that queering the family is a central goal of this musical; what I aim to demonstrate here is how Marvin’s gay identity, his lover

Whizzer, and Whizzer’s HIV status are subsumed by the plot’s fixation on re-constituting a traditional family unit and Jason’s trajectory towards becoming a (heterosexual) man.

In other words, the family is preserved by the death of Marvin’s “friend” from an AIDS- related illness.

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Marvin’s attempts to create a “tight-knit family” structure Act I and he is only successful in connecting with Jason, father-to-son, after Whizzer admits, “I never wanted to love you” and leaves Marvin (Falsettos 83-87). Marvin’s break from Whizzer compels

Jason’s forceful admission that he prefers girls to boys, which prompts Marvin’s reflection:

I LOVED YOU. I LOVE YOU. I MEANT NO DISGRACE. THIS HERE IS LOVE. WHEN WE’RE TALKING FACE TO FACE [...] FATHER TO SON I FOR ONE WOULD TAKE LOVE SLOWER. I’VE MADE MY CHOICE. BUT YOU CAN SING A DIFFERENT SONG. (Falsettos 85-86)

His affirmation that his “choice” has been a “disgrace” is used to support Jason’s decision to “sing a different song”: the proverbial harmony of heterosexuality. Marvin’s mournful articulation of his homosexuality as a “choice” presents a firm “nurture” response to homosexuality’s nature-versus-nurture debate and simultaneously devalues any claim to read Marvin as a bisexual character.10 Moreover, Marvin’s rhetoric of choice is used to assuage Jason’s “nature”-oriented concerns about the genes he shares with Marvin:

“WHAT ABOUT CHROMO-SOMES/ DO THEY CARRY? / WILL THEY CARRY/

WHO’S THE HOMO NOW?” (36). Jason’s “coming out” as straight following his father’s break-up is significant not only because it enables a fantasy of a generational

10 Marvin is rarely considered to be bisexual, though opportunities for this depiction remain present in the script—particularly when Marvin slaps Trina in a jealous rage after she informs him of her new relationship with Mendel (Falsettos 80–82).

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transfer at some future time in Jason’s adult life; it also establishes the primary narrative function in Whizzer’s character arc as facilitating Jason’s maturation into a man.11

Whizzer’s character is understood as a foil for Jason in Act II when Jason makes a deal with God to “GET BAR MITZVAHED. / IN EXCHANGE FOR:/ COULD YOU

PLEASE MAKE MY FRIEND STOP DYING?” (Falsettos 143). Jason’s acceptance of

Whizzer as a “friend” (picking up on Marvin’s use of “friend” in Act I) and member of his family compels him to hold his Bar Mitzvah at Whizzer’s hospital bedside. During

Jason’s Bar Mitzvah, which signals his passage from boyhood into adult life, Whizzer is included in the family lineage as Jason’s step-father Mendel sings:

MENDEL. SON OF ABRAHAM, ISAAC, AND JACOB. SON OF MARVIN, SON OF TRINA, SON OF WHIZZER, SON OF MENDEL, ALL EXCEPT MENDEL. AND GODCHILD TO THE LESBIANS FROM NEXT DOOR, MENDEL. SING. (Falsettos 151)

By naming Whizzer in a lineage including the forefathers of the Abrahamic tradition,

Mendel gives credibility and import to the role Whizzer has played in shaping Jason. He also places Whizzer before himself in this lineage, perhaps indicating Whizzer’s lengthier relationship with Jason or his impact on the boy’s decision to get Bar Mitzvahed or both.

Mendel’s acknowledgment Whizzer as more than a “friend,” alongside Trina’s inclusion of Dr. Charlotte and Cordelia (Marvin’s “Lesbians from next door”) as members of her family is the final confirmation of Finn’s queer vision of the family.

Despite this hard-earned expansion of the family unit, Whizzer dies at the moment of his familial incorporation. Whizzer is scripted to indicate he is unwell, after

11 Jason’s reproductive futurity is explicitly stated during the Act II song, “Everyone Hates His Parents,” in which Jason sings to his step-father, the psychiatrist Mendel, “I’LL COME THROUGH/ I’LL HAVE KIDS … OH, EVERYONE HATES HIS PARENTS” (Falsettos 121).

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which Marvin and Cordelia lead him offstage. He returns to the stage only in Marvin’s mind, appearing in perfect health. Whizzer’s death was an unimaginable character arc when a completed March of the Falsettos debuted in spring of ‘82, in which Whizzer’s plot ends with his critique of the sustainability of monogamy in gay relationships, evinced by his decision to leave Marvin. His death in Falsettoland (1990) is prolonged to serve as the lynchpin for Jason’s Bar Mitzvah ceremony confirming his manhood rather than his romantic narrative with Marvin. Whizzer succombs to his illness after he serves this purpose. This reading is further confirmed by Jason’s worries in Act I that he will be fatally “sick” like Marvin:

IS IT FATAL? DO YOU SEE REAL SIMILARITIES BETWEEN US? HE AND WHIZZER LIVE LIKE … WELL I THINK IT’S CLEAR. (Falsettos 55)

Jason’s worry that homosexuality is “fatal” was intended as a child’s humorous overreaction in 1982 but by the early 1990s it grimly foreshadowed Whizzer’s death and his father’s likely contraction of HIV, too.

Whizzer’s attempts to convince himself and his family that “Everything will be alright” ring hollow against his defeatist eleven o’clock number, “You gotta die sometime”:

I WOULD CRY IF I COULD. BUT IT DOES NO DAMN GOOD TO EXPLAIN I’M A MAN IN MY PRIME. YOU GOTTA DIE SOMETIME. (Falsettos 145)

As Whizzer’s “SCENE TURNS TO WHITE,” with him accepting his decline at the end of his soliloquy, Jason enters the hospital room and declares it is time for his Bar

Mitzvah. Jason’s stage directions have him knocking on the door during Whizzer’s final

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repetitions of the word “sometime,” disrupting the measured 4-4 cadence of his song and denying audiences the opportunity to applaud Whizzer’s final solo performance. This compels audiences to either expend an emotional response as Jason recites from the

Torah or hold their emotion until the Bar Mitzvah dissolves into the final number “What

Would I Do?”, which ends with enigmatic stage direction: “TRINA consoles MARVIN.

Are they at a cemetery? Are they dressed in black? Fade to BLACK” (Falsettos 155).

Either way, Falsettos ends with Jason’s maturation into manhood, which is narratively abetted by his acceptance of Whizzer’s “choice” of sexuality and his inevitable death.

Thus, Falsettos’ final tableau has Marvin back in Trina’s arms, changed; he is a better father and man for having loved and lost Whizzer. Finn architects the first use of AIDS in a Broadway musical as a second act tragic plot device, which will be seen again in Rent when Angel’s death similarly brings disparate characters together in their grief.

The Banalization of AIDS? How Rent Keeps Crip Time

In the twenty-six years since Jonathan Larson’s Rent first posed the question,

“How do you measure a year in the life?”, homosexuality and AIDS—the most controversial elements of the 1996 Pulitzer-prize winning musical—are now mainstays of commercial LGBTQ art. The musical’s rejoinder to “measure in love,” however, belies the seriousness of the question its characters ask: How should you experience life when living with, or in proximity to, AIDS? David Román uses Mimi’s miraculous Act II revival and the musical’s commercial success to argue Rent contributes to the cultural banalization of AIDS. While I agree with Román, this conceptualization figures Rent’s relationship with HIV/AIDS as existing outside time: the banal is devoid of emotional

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impact; it is common, every day, trite. The banal is not urgent, passionately felt, or painfully lived. I argue that while the cumulative effect of the Rent phenomenon contributed to mainstreaming HIV/AIDS, making it accessible as a target for lampoons rather than perceived as a tragedy, the musical is ostentatiously marked by crip time.

Thus, while Rent may have contributed to the banalization of AIDS, Larson’s approach to

AIDS was anything but banal: rather, he used Angel’s HIV/AIDS as a tragic counterpoint to generate an optimistic sense of joy at Mimi’s recovery.

His score’s breakout hit “Seasons of Love” catalogs benign measurements of time—minutes, cups of coffee, speeding tickets—but elsewhere each character’s relationship to time is aggressively marked by their health and sexuality. Much like

Alison Kafer’s assertion in Feminist, Queer, Crip (2013) that “disability is seen as the sign of no future,” Larson scripts AIDS as a chronicity of the immediate present: “There is no future, there is no past”—there is “[n]o day but today” (Kafer 3, Larson 45). In “Six

Ways of Looking At Crip Time,” Ellen Samuels reflects upon Kafer’s work with personal anecdotes demonstrating the expression crip time. Thinking of crip time as a kind of

“time travel” extracted from normative temporal progression, as a “grief time” to reckon with loss, as a “broken time” to for bodies adjusting to new rhythms, as a “sick time” with heath leveraged against labor value, as a “writing time” enabling creative endeavors, and as “vampire time” that blurs the boundaries between life and death, Samuels shares with us crip time’s liberatory potential. Her six formulations inform and organize my argument that Rent keeps crip time. As a heuristic for “expectations of ‘how long things take’… based on very particular minds and bodies,” Kafer’s model of crip time helps us understand how Rent “bends the clock” to present mostly asymptomatic bodies onstage

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despite the centrality of prognoses and diagnostic time in both Jonathan Larson’s personal life and his musical (27).

Rent as Time Travel

Kafer describes crip time as a kind of “flex” time that compels us to reimagine our notion of what “can and should happen” in a given period, writing, “Rather than bend disabled bodies and minds to meet the clock, crip time bends the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds” (27, emphasis mine). Only in the theater can we span an entire year while still sharing space with real, material bodies in the comparatively short duration of two hours and thirty minutes. In one way, Rent offers us a model for a kind of flexible time that literally meets bodies at their significant moments of need; in another, it elides the debilitating effects of chronic illness, presumably because it hampers narrative momentum. Act I is a sustained, nearly real-time experience of one night, while Act II spans the following year.

Time is a commodity seldom considered until we find ourselves out of sync or running short—missing the bus, burning cookies, losing sleep, receiving a terminal diagnosis. Onstage it takes even greater import as a trope for living, as an articulated framing device, and as a theatrical limit of engagement. Audiences do not live in the theater, after all, and must be sent home after a performance ends. How time behaves in a play or musical can tell us much about the writer’s relationship to a subject matter and what messages the audience might receive from a performance. Does time move rapidly?

Leisurely? Stand still? How is it measured? How is time expressed? Elinor Fuchs argues that understanding how time operates in the world is central to interpreting the creative

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logic of a play. Namely, we cannot understand what a play is trying to impart without first articulating the mechanical rules of the “‘theatrical planet’ on stage” (6). But to understand how time works in Rent, we must first examine the cultural moment of the musical itself.

Rent as Grief Time

Rent’s script, with its explicit aim of chronicling the experience of “people living with, living with, living with, not dying from disease,” was plenty conspicuous with its earnest references to time before Larson’s unexpected death from an undiagnosed aortic aneurysm on the morning of the musical’s off-Broadway debut (85). His death only intensified the presentism in the musical’s oft-repeated tagline “No day but today” and the highlighted material reality of inadequate access to proper medical care for low- income residents of New York City. In the four days preceding Rent’s opening night off-

Broadway at New York Theatre Workshop, Larson presented himself at two separate hospital emergency rooms, complaining of chest pain. After a series of tests Larson was sent home from both Cabrini Medical Center and St. Vincent’s Hospital and Medical

Center, with differing diagnoses of food poisoning and a seasonal virus. An autopsy revealed Larson had a tear inside of his aorta more than a foot-long (Rosenthal). The primary definition of “rent,” a tenants’ payment to a landlord, may have organized the plot of the musical, but rent’s other definition—a large tear—took on new meaning after the composer’s death. Larson’s posthumous popularity prompted investigations into emergency room care at both hospitals.12 Cabrini and St. Vincent’s were subsequently

12 Sarah Taylor Ellis offers an alternative reading of the definition for “rent” as a “tear in the fabric of linear time in an attempt to intervene in time’s progression by embracing the present moment” (198). Ellis

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fined by the New York State Health Department for substandard treatment and deficient care. In an interview with The New York Times following the citation, actor Anthony

Rapp (Mark, OBC) stated, “There is a whole new wave of grief, knowing that this maybe could have been prevented. And it's tragic knowing that if this happened today, Jonathan, the toast of Broadway, would have been treated with the utmost care” (Rosenthal).

Following Larson’s death, the character Roger is a prescient stand-in for Larson’s own urge to, as Roger sings, “find one song to leave behind” (16).13

For those in the original production, the musical became an expression of grief at the loss of a friend and artistic collaborator, but for audiences in the theater, and Larson himself, Rent was an expression of grief for the thousands lost to AIDS. Writing on grief,

Judith Butler asserts that, “To grieve, and to make grief itself into a resource for politics, is not to be resigned to inaction, but it may be understood as the slow process by which we develop a point of identification with suffering itself. The disorientation of grief—

‘Who have I become?’ or, indeed, ‘What is left of me?’ ‘What is it in the Other that I have lost?’—posits the ‘I’ in the mode of unknowingness” (Precarious Life 30). Rent’s narrative arc focuses on Mark and Roger, white heterosexual men whose goal is to produce art that authentically chronicles the experience of living in the East Village in

1989. As an HIV-positive Latinx queer, the character Angel is the Other whose death

convincingly argues Rent “queers’ time,” a concept I take up more explicitly in the next chapter when discussing time slips and disability chronotropes. 13 John Istel describes Larson’s death as irrevocably skewing the musical’s impact, writing, “It may have been dismissed as facile, derivative and exploitative of its subject matter, or it may have been seen as a vital, innovative rock opera that heralded a bright future for the composer. Either way, or somewhere in between, the composer’s literal presence would have forced critics to actually listen to what he had to say” (“Media Uproar” 14). Rick A. Simas shares a similar concern in his Rent review for Theatre Journal, contending, “With so much coverage devoted to the history of Rent and the death of its author, Jonathan Larson, two days before the show's first preview, it is difficult to analyze the work apart from its hype” (220-21). These opinions are echoed in reviews from Donald Lyons and Peter Galvin, for the Wall Street Journal and The Advocate, respectively.

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unmoors her community precisely because her predominantly cishet white circle of friends identifies with her, and they come to know suffering through her death. The same is ostensibly true of the audience, who—if not white, cisgender, or heterosexual—at least possess the expendable income to enjoy a night at a Broadway musical. Unlike Angel, they are presumably not busking on the streets for money to afford food, clothing, and shelter. But, as Asma Abbas contends, “suffering does not stand outside of representation. An orientation to suffering is, thus, an orientation to representation”

(Abbas 51). Thus, grief is a gateway for the representation of crip/queer characters in commercial entertainment spaces they might not otherwise occupy.

Rent as Broken Time

When Rent debuted off-Broadway in January 1996 at the New York Theatre

Workshop, the New York theatre community was reeling from the AIDS epidemic.

Larson himself had recently lost two close friends to AIDS but he was cautiously optimistic, as a note containing tickets to the show for his friend Victoria Leacock reveals: “Darling Vix, '96 will be our year. (No more funerals.)” (Tommasini). New hopes for the theatrical mainstreaming of crips and queers were validated by positive critical responses to gay-authored plays such as Tony Kushner’s opus Angels in America

(1993) and Terrence McNally’s Love! Valour! Compassion! (1995), but commercial musical theatre had difficulty gaining traction with AIDS-oriented plots.14 This was, in

14 As Rent facilitated a cultural phenomenon that brought new attention to issues such as HIV/AIDS, poverty, homelessness and queer sexualities, 1996 also saw the creation of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News Channel, which then-CEO Roger Ailes described as a “haven” for viewers to escape liberal bias in mainstream news media (B.C. Anderson). Ailes famously was a media consultant for Republican presidents including Nixon, Reagan, and George H. W. Bush, and later, Donald Trump. He resigned from Fox News in 2016 after numerous allegations of sexual harassment and misconduct, actions that stand in sharp relief against Ailes’ fiercely religious, conservative, anti-queer view of HIV/AIDS. In The Loudest

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part, due to the seemingly oppositional nature of the genre itself: musicals usually involve high-energy singing and choreography—how do you adapt the genre to include debilitating disease and death?

Finn and Lapine’s Falsettos hits this stumbling block once Whizzer’s falls ill to a mysterious illness affecting gay men. That Falsettos ends at Whizzer’s grave is indicative of its chronological placement in 1982, early in the AIDS crisis, and an inability to imagine positive incorporations of an AIDS narrative for audiences watching in 1992 who know the horrors still to come in the following decade. Larson’s solution to these problems was to place Rent in 1989-90, two years after AZT (zidovudine, Retrovir) was approved by the FDA. Unlike Falsettos, time in Rent must progress forward because an

HIV-positive diagnosis was no longer a “death sentence.” AZT, taken in a dosage of one

100mg capsule every four hours, slows the progression of the virus and prolongs life. By

1995, the pharmacological combination treatment known as the “AIDS cocktail” was introduced to patients with HIV/AIDS. This paring of a variety of nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors and protease inhibitors was called antiretroviral therapy or simply

A.R.T—“ART.” The effects of this ART greatly shaped the optimistic strain of Larson’s own artistic project: unlike Puccini’s Mimi, Larson’s Mimi could conceivably live for years with access to the right cocktail of medications. “No more funerals,” indeed.

Voice in the Room (2017), biographer Gabriel Sherman chronicles how Ailes “charged at a group of AIDS activists who had infiltrated a [Rudolph] Giuliani fundraiser in the ballroom of the Sheraton in Midtown Manhattan,” dragging trans protester Kathy Otterstein down a flight of stairs (131). New York City Immediately following the altercation Police Sergeant Raymond O’Donnell suggested to reporters Ailes might be fined or jailed for a third-degree assault charge, but the police force later told Otterstein she did not have enough evidence to make a case (Sherman 132). This was the first publicized instance of his personal and vitriolic opposition to AIDS activism but, as a political consultant and CEO of a conservative media juggernaut, Ailes was well-positioned to influence policymakers and lay viewers with an anti- LGBTQ agenda throughout the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

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Rent as Sick Time

Rent offers Mimi the rehabilitative promise that coincides with the 1996 release of protease inhibitors, which lowered HIV viral loads and dramatically improved the quality and longevity of life for HIV/AIDS patients, but Angel dies. From his introduction to his death, Angel is rhetorically trapped in the chronicity of AIDS whereas Mimi’s miraculous revival in Act II figures her chronic illness as a site of new beginnings. For

Angel, a gay Latinx street performer and drag queen with AIDS, personal comfort is endlessly deferred to tomorrow in her refrains, “Today for you, tomorrow for me” (28).

This is reiterated throughout Act I, when she puns off her own name, generously offering money, food, and emotional support to Roger, Mark, and her lover, Collins. Although

Angel discloses that her body “provides a comfortable home for the Acquired Immune

Deficiency Syndrome” during her first scene, Angel is asymptomatic until the Act II number “Contact,” a simultaneous sex scene between the show’s three couples (14, 111–

115). It is here that Angel reverses her refrain and sings “Today for Me, Tomorrow For

You,” which eventually is truncated to “Today Me, Tomorrow You” (Fig. 3-2). Time accelerates as Angel repeats this line, and she is dead by the number’s end. Thus, what begins as an exclamation of sexual ecstasy transforms into a warning cry about the transmissibility of AIDS through sexual contact. Despite its sexually explicit content,

“Contact,” is staged in an elliptically chaste way. Larson describes physicalization of the number as a “sensual life-and-death dance” that occurs at “[v]arious fantasy bed locales,” although the actors “eventually… converge on the table and cover themselves with a white sheet” (111). Lit by fixed-focus lamps positioned behind the proscenium on stage left and right, the bodies of the central cast are obscured in shadow; thus, their sexual

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contact is hidden from view. When Angel emerges, dressed in white and backlit by a blindingly white floodlight, he spreads his arms as he offers himself up for the taking

(Fig. 3-3).

Figure 3-2. Collins (Michael McElroy) comforts Angel (Justin Johnston) during “Contact,” shortly before her death; still captured from the 2008 video production Rent: Filmed Live on Broadway.

Figure 3-3. Angel (McElroy) warns the audience of the dangers of “Contact.”; still captured from the 2008 video production Rent: Filmed Live on Broadway.

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Director Michael Greif’s staging is a visual homage to Jesus’ crucifixion scene in

Andrew Lloyd Webber's’ Jesus Christ Superstar (1971); the musical’s pulse on contemporary sound during the early 1970s was a predecessor for what Greif and Larson were hoping to achieve.15 We might productively theorize “Contact” as an apt demonstration of the rapid slippage from wellness to illness as AIDS develops, but we cannot do so without marking how Rent's only explicitly staged death is performed by a queer person of color.

Novelist and cultural historian Sarah Schulman argues Rent advances three specific claims that directly feed the musical’s enduring popularity: that “heterosexuals are the heroic center of the AIDS crisis”; the musical’s world positions heterosexual love as “true love,” while homosexual love is “either doomed or shallow or both”; and “the experiences of gay people and people with AIDS are exactly the same as the experience of those in the dominant culture” (Schulman 100). I find Schulman’s analysis persuasive because each element is constitutive for the next. In other words, LGBTQ-identifying persons and persons with AIDS cannot be incorporated into mainstream culture at the level of success Rent has achieved without its co-optation and sanitization of these marginalized identities. Although many heterosexuals contracted HIV and developed

AIDS, the LGBTQ community was unquestionably at whatever center—heroic or not— the AIDS crisis had, yet Larson places two white, cisgender, heterosexual males at the center of his story. In one way, this absolves him from a kind of cultural tourism that he might have been party to if he wrote Angel and Collins as the central protagonists; in another, this move casts Rent’s queers—most of whom are also people of color—to the

15 The musical’s quasi-religious reliance on “Angel” is further solidified at the end of Act II when Mimi speaks to Angel during her near-death experience.

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narrative margins. From there, their relationships are used as a benchmark to measure the success or failure of Mimi and Roger’s romance. As a biracial, HIV-positive, and gay couple, Angel and Collins are the only characters who can realistically speak to the devastating toll the AIDS crisis took on the LGBTQ community. They are not completely abstracted from queer life: there are other sexually fluid HIV-positive characters in the

“Life Support” therapy group scenes, but since these characters are not portrayed as close friends the group’s diminishing number throughout Act II (presumably from AIDS- related deaths) is not substantively engaged. So while the therapy group visually indexes loss for the audience, its diminishing numbers is never explicitly remarked on by Rent’s central characters—most especially by Mark, the musical’s narrator.

Mimi, the Latina nightclub dancer and drug-user, begins her Act I solo “Out

Tonight” with the presentist argument presented elsewhere by Angel and the Life Support members. She argues that the time—“close to midnight”—gives her plenty of time to

“play,” and she therefore rejects considerations of the future (41). Her mantra to “live each moment as [her] last” influences her continued use of heroin and cocaine despite her

AIDS diagnosis before she eventually shares Roger’s determination to live to see and sing about “Another day,” as they do at the musical’s conclusion (43–45). The musical ends with Mimi and Roger rekindling their relationship and the community’s hopeful return to able-bodied wellness despite their AIDS diagnoses. As a result, Rent’s subjects either begin and end the show as manageably “healthy” or they die; each character passes through illness in a traditional kill-or-cure narrative formula, refusing to flexibly imagine alternative bodies or futures one might inhabit. I contend this narrative resolution is a positive reframing that is, as Tavia Nyong’o writes, “less a question of choosing failure

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than choosing what to do with the failure that has chosen us”—a subversion of failure that might present queer/crip embodiments as horizons of possibility to audiences but for the musical’s steadfast orientation towards heterosexual futurity (“Let’s Pretend”).

Rent as Writing Time

One way of demonstrating the conventional contours of Rent’s success as an

AIDS musical is its reception at the 1996 Tony Awards. Although Rent itself picked up

Tony Award for Best Musical, and Larson swept the writers' categories with both Best

Book of a Musical and Best Original Score Written for the Theatre, the production lost in the best direction, best choreography, and best lighting design categories. As the lovers of the story, Adam Pascal and Daphne Rubin-Vega were nominated in their respective Best

Performance by A Leading Actor and Actress categories for their work as Roger and

Mimi Marquez; the queers were labeled as supporting roles. Idina Menzel was nominated for Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Musical for her portrayal of the fiery bisexual artist Maureen Johnson, and Wilson Jermaine Heredia was nominated for his performance as Angel Dumott Schunard. Heredia was the only actor to win their category. Leather-clad and wearing a single hoop earring in a sea of tuxedos, Heredia accepted his Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Musical with the proclaimation,

“Here’s to awareness and action against all of the ills that are represented in this play that can be alleviated through unity, and here’s to a new era in theatre” (“50 Tony Awards”).

16 The categories Rent lost went to George C. Wolfe’s production of Bring in ‘Da Noise, Bring in ‘Da Funk, a musical revue-style performance about black history. It cannot be overstated that, between both productions and also a celebrated revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The King and I, the 1996 awards did feel like a new moment for the representation of nonwhite actors on Broadway stages.

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Heredia’s words echo performance artist Jeff Weiss’ description of the necessity to create art in response to the AIDS crisis:

However sad and sorrowful our losses, the fact of daily life (read performance) should go on… We have a moral and ethical obligation to persist in the living of real (as opposed to ‘reel’) time. That is the power of theater. We’re all in this together, at the same time. We’re totally engaged in being human together, sharing the identical instances as our time advances, parallel, in unison. (qtd. in Schulman 61)

Weiss articulates the performative maintenance of everyday life as a discursive field and a “moral and ethical obligation” in a way that foreshadows Petra Kuppers’ own characterization of “involuntary disability performances” as a “conscious and artful manipulation of one’s narrative of a disabled self, a performance of selfhood in politicized storytelling” (“Performance” 137-39). Weiss and Kuppers’ articulations of productive engagement with illness and disability demonstrate the very kind of future

Heredia hoped Rent would provoke.

Rent as Vampire Time

As a rebuttal to critiques of Rent’s transformation into “a piece of cultural capital on the Great White Way” and its accompanying loss of status as a politically queer musical, as theatre historians like John Clum and Helen Lewis argue, I suggest Rent’s crip/queer sensibility is preserved in its accessible afterlives (Taylor Ellis 196).

Characterizing performances as inherently ephemeral, Peggy Phelan argues in

Unmarked: The Politics of Performance that “The disappearance of the object is fundamental .… It rehearses and repeats the disappearance of the subject who longs always to be remembered” (147). The Rent phenomenon ensured the production cannot be disappeared from cultural memory or the archive. It is well-known that Rent is much

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indebted to Puccini’s La Bohème, itself a stage adaptation of Henri Murger’s 1851 novel

Scènes de la vie de bohème; the novel and opera libretto set the foundation for the central love story and its proximity to terminal illness. It is equally acknowledged in theatre circles that Larson borrowed heavily from Sarah Schulman’s novel People in Trouble

(1990)—specifically adapting versions of the queer characters’ subplots and the use of

AZT breaks as a marker of time. Rent offers these sources in palimpsestic layers, scripting new responses with every performance in this era when spectators can take the

Truvada pill to reduce the risk of contracting HIV—but only if they have access to progressive health insurance and adequate medical care. Moreover, although theatre is an ephemeral event, the cultural power Rent culled ensured that the original cast stage production was filmed for preservation in the New York Public Library's Billy Rose

Theatre Collection; a film adaptation (Chris Columbus, dir.) was released in 2005; the final live performance of the original Broadway production (with a replacement cast) was recorded and sold in 2008; Larson’s papers are housed in a special collection at the

Library of Congress; and the musical is toured live across the U.S. and abroad in both professional and amateur productions. Put simply, there are several ways to engage with the musical at an individually desirable time, pace, intensity, and number of repetitions.17

17 These forms of access are in direct contradiction to the lack of access marginalized populations had to Rent in the first few years of its Off-Broadway and Broadway runs. As Román chronicles in his afterward to Acts of Intervention, the counterculture Bohemians the musical was supposedly representing onstage had increasingly limited avenues for seeing the show as its popularity skyrocketed. Rent’s Off-Broadway venue, New York Theater Workshop, was a 150-seat theatre and was quickly sold out on an extended-run; its Broadway home, the Nederlander Theater is a larger house at 1,206 seats, but the tickets were more expensive too. The average pre-sale ticket cost over seventy dollars, with a limited number set aside for special day-of purchases at twenty dollars per seat (Acts of Intervention 280–281). For comparison, when Rent closed on Broadway tickets to musicals averaged $94.85 per seat and the average for the 2017/18 season was $125.70 (Statista).

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The musical also operates in “vampire time” because it was “frozen” at the first preview after Larson died, so the creative team and cast never had to chance to do the editorial work on the show that would have inevitably happened during previews both for the off-Broadway run and for its subsequent Broadway transfer. One might even think of nightly performances of a “frozen” show as an (re)animated corpse, made perpetually young by new performers—young blood—who cycle into the show when others tire or leave.18 Despite Rent’s intense presence in popular culture, it is essentially an unfinished work, with all of the flaws and structural problems that come with that.

Rent continues to be, for better or worse, a central access point for HIV/AIDS in the national imagination. Thus, to engage it fully means we must parse its durational framework as a kind of crip time that meets bodies wherever and however they are. This work requires we understand the ethics of performing stories about characters with nonapparent chronic illnesses, and compels us to more broadly consider how sexuality, disability, debility, and fears of contagion dynamically represented onstage in theatrical representations of the American AIDS epidemic are received by new audiences as they age.

“Your family has AIDS”: Rent and the return to family values

In the few interviews regarding the show Larson held before his death, he—like

Finn—was fixated on how AIDS was bound up with moralizing politics about the family unit. Theatre critic John Istel characterizes Larson as someone who was “deeply

18 Although I say this with some cheek, theatre historian Ethan Mordden named his 2004 book on contemporary Broadway The Happiest Corpse I’ve Ever Seen, a phrase taken from the title song in Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret (1966). Sally’s uses the phrase to describe the appearance of her hedonistic friend Elsie’s body.

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disturbed by a society that could become obsessed with an exclusionary notion of ‘family values’ while alienating itself from the fundamental human values of community, caring and love. Society’s embrace of superficiality and the power of mass media are the culprits” (“Media Uproar” 16-17). State intervention in the burgeoning AIDS crisis was stymied on behalf of “family values,” which created rhetorical slippages from homosexuality to AIDS, depicting HIV as a moral panic rather than a virulent epidemic.

“In this manner,” Watney argues, “the axiomatic identification of AIDS as a sign and symptom of homosexual behavior reconfirms the passionately held view of the ‘family’ as a uniquely venerable institution” (Watney 77). While Larson was downtown drafting the 1993 New York Theatre Workshop version of Rent, and Falsettos played uptown in the John Golden Theatre, HIV-positive individuals addressed the nation during the televised 1992 national conventions for the Democratic and Republican parties. Gay

Clinton campaign advisor Bob Hattoy and heterosexual mother Elizabeth Glaser invoked the body politic as they critically addressed President Bush: “We are part of the American family, and Mr. President, your family has AIDS,'' Hattoy said, "And we're dying, and you're doing nothing about it” (“25 Years of AIDS”). Mary Fisher, an HIV-positive mother, made a similar announcement in her “A Whisper of AIDS” speech at the August

G.O.P. convention:

Tonight, I represent an AIDS community whose members have been reluctantly drafted from every segment of American society," she says. "Though I am white and a mother, I am one with a black infant struggling with tubes in a Philadelphia hospital. Though I am female and contracted this disease in marriage and enjoy the warm support of my family, I am one with the lonely gay man sheltering a flickering candle from the cold wind of his family's rejection. (Fisher)

As white, cisgender individuals, Glaser and Fisher leverage their platform to speak for racial and sexual minorities in rhetorically similar ways to Finn and Larson’s work. What

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is Mimi’s reincorporation to the family unit in Rent’s second act but an expression of

“warm support” in sharp contrast to the “cold” of the streets? Larson’s dramaturgy is at odds with his own critique of the family in a musical, which he described in relation to

The Who’s Tommy, saying, “I don’t agree with the story [Pete Townshend and Des

McAnuff] chose to tell in Tommy, which was this sort of return-to-family-values thing at the end” (“I have Something to Say” 14). Collectively, Hattoy, Glaser, and Fisher argue for a more expansive notion of family care networks that both musicals demonstrate. But even AIDS musicals are, as Augusto Boal might characterize them, a dominant art made for the dominant class, who in turn controls the means to create and disseminate art further. However humble or radical Larson’s intentions, Rent uses a heterosexual couple to advance its politics at the expense of a gender nonconforming Latinx queer. In this way, it does not actually push its audience beyond their comfort zones, which is what makes the controversial topic of AIDS “work” in a musical.19

Although Rent’s dramaturgical clock is similar to Falsettos’—Act II accelerates the progression of HIV/AIDS and ends with a death in the musical’s central romantic couple—Mimi’s recovery offers a salve for the tragedy of Whizzer and Angel’s deaths.

19 Film critic Lindsay Ellis succinctly describes why Rent’s activism is radically unlike the theatrical protests of ACT UP New York. Ellis argues Rent is not seeking “revolution” as such, but “romantic validation”: “They use terms like ‘revolution’ in Moulin Rouge, but really it’s about emotionality with artistic movement set as the backdrop. Shows like [Phantom of the Opera and Puccini’s La Boheme] have romantic ideas in the guise of revolution but none of them challenge any existing power structures in a way that might alienate the wealthy audience, especially as portrayed in [Rent]” (L. Ellis). Istel saw Larson’s “revolutionary” bohemians as “Tamed by the proscenium frame, [their] ‘lifestyles’—which existed before Rent—[and] were suddenly ripe for the co-opting” (Istel 16). In Istel’s piece, two of Joan Marcus’ now iconic production photographs are cut side by side; one of Adam Pascal and Daphne Rubin-Vega, the other of Wilson Jermaine Heredia, Jesse L. Martin, and Anthony Rapp. As the show’s primary lovers, Pascal looks off into the distance while Rubin-Vega leans into him, clutching his arm. Heredia, Martin, and Rapp are mid-song, enjoying banter, with Heredia’s Angel and Martin’s Collins framed around Rapp’s Mark, who gazes wistfully in the distance. The difference between the subtitles is striking: Pascal and Rubin- Vega, as Roger and Mimi, are described as “struggling against the ticking of their HIV-positive clocks” (“Media Uproar” 17). Heredia, Martin, and Rapp, their “bohemian friends,” are living a life in which “sentimentality is the pulse” (“Media Uproar” 17).

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Much like Whizzer’s death facilitates an emotional reunion between Marvin and his estranged ex-wife and son, Rent uses Angel’s death to reunite Mimi and Roger. If Larson had followed La Bohème’s narrative arc, Mimi would have succumbed to her illnesses, leaving Roger (the updated Rodolfo) to mourn her loss. When Mimi is discovered by

Maureen and Joanne late in the second act, she is off of her AZT; living in a park during winter without adequate shelter, food, or clothing; and in severe withdrawal. Yet, she is saved—send back—by Angel’s divine intercession:

(Suddenly MIMI’s hand regains movement. Incredibly she’s still alive.) MIMI. I jumped over the moon!! ROGER. What? MIMI. A leap of Moooooooooooo— JOANNE. She’s back! MIMI. I was in a tunnel. Heading for this warm, white light … MAUREEN. Oh my god! MIMI. And I swear Angel was there—and she looked good. And she said, “Turn around girlfriend—and listen to that boy’s song…” (Larson 139–140)

As her fever breaks, Mimi’s “incredible” return to life is facilitated by one last act of giving for Angel, who implores her to return to hear Rogers act of creative expression and love.20 I read Mimi’s citation of Maureen’s metatheatrical Act I performance art piece, “Over the moon,” as Larson’s wry way of signaling his break from Puccini’s narrative arc. Puccini’s Mimi dies because she is innocence embodied: too good for this world, she falls prey to it. Larson’s Mimi is a near-total inversion of the character. This deus ex machina is made more obvious by the lack of a significant stage exchange between Mimi and Angel; there is no dramaturgical reason Angel should visit Mimi,

20 One further, final, example of how Angel’s death is used as a plot device in service of others: Collins rewires an ATM at the local food emporium to dispense free cash to anyone who enters the PIN “A-N-G-E- L” (Larson 135). This information is delivered shortly before the discovery of Mimi, so while Angel’s last act of giving in the musical is technically reuniting Mimi and Roger, she is presumably invoked after the events of the musical every time the characters withdraw money. One reading of “I’ll Cover You,” might extend her offers of financial support in Act I to this Act II plot point.

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instead of her mourning lover, other than Larson’s desire to give a hopeful ending for the primary couple. This choice fantastically prolongs Angel’s life as well as Mimi’s.21

To be sure, Larson uses crip time to historicize the American AIDS crisis and imagine life flourishing in proximity to the disease, even as he simultaneously de-centers lesbian and gay lives in favor of a heterosexual coupling that offers a promise of reproductive futurity. More significantly, Mimi, singing “I’D DIE WITHOUT YOU” to

Roger as the musical ends, is a turning point away from the AIDS-as-tragedy narrative in

Falsettos. As an artistic response to the disease, Rent offers what Michael Callen describes in Surviving AIDS as “a different way of thinking about AIDS at such a crucial turning point in my life [that] provided a framework for me to justify believing that I might survive my disease. It was a life raft that kept me afloat in a sea of doom and gloom” (6).

Lease, HIV Profiling, and the Democratization of AIDS

If Rent reflected Larson’s experiences as a liberal with a low socioeconomic standing during the AIDS crisis, then Lease, the Team America parody, is no less indicative of creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s political investment in preserving whiteness, heterosexuality, and a high-income bracket. Team America: World Police is a stop-motion animation film that uses marionette puppets to depict a paramilitary counter- terrorism team working to defeat an international terrorist organization supplied by North

21 Rent historian Emily Garside argues that reading Angel as an example of the “bury your gays” trope would be, “a misreading of the work in context […] In blunt terms, there is little point to a ‘90s musical about AIDS if everyone lives. The harsh and tragic reality of the 1990s was that far too many people like Angel died from the plague. Pretending otherwise would be to erase queer history” (Garside). I do not disagree with Garside’s premise that Larson could not have simultaneously sanitized the AIDS epidemic and made claim to an authentic musical, although I believe she misses the barbed critique in Angel’s death: it is not merely that Angel dies, it is that her death is co-opted for Mimi’s resuscitation.

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Korean dictator Kim Jong-il. Released one month before the November 2004 presidential elections that would secure a second term for incumbent President George W. Bush, the film ironically celebrates contemporary American imperialism and reflects the political values of the G.O.P. and the Bush administration during the early 2000s. The plot hinges on the successful recruitment of Broadway actor Gary Johnson away from his starring turn in the hit musical Lease so that he might use his acting skills to infiltrate and take down a terrorist cell. In order to deemphasize Broadway’s importance in the plot, and confirm the heterosexuality of Johnson, the film positions Broadway musicals as a location where “undesirable” sexual acts, such as seroconversion and rape, occur.22 The movie was hailed as one of the “Best Conservative Movies” by the National Review

Online, where Brian C. Anderson praised how the film’s “utter disgust with air-headed, left-wing celebrity activism remains unmatched in popular culture” (NR Staff). John

Nolte, editor-at-large for online far-right online media platform Breitbart, also lists Team

America as one of “five patriotic movies that piss off the left,” arguing that to enjoy the film Leftists must “go to their inner-happy place where Christians are thrown off tall buildings, Obama’s face has replaced that of Jesus on the Christian cross, and everyone in

America gathers at 6 a.m. for calisthenics and a gay wedding” (“4th of July”). Team

America and its Rent parody, Lease, mark the AIDS musical’s shift towards the political conservatism that underpins the 2011 Broadway hit The Book of Mormon.

22 Lease’s citation of Rent imagines its characters as unabashedly sexual, causing the seroconversion and eventual AIDS diagnosis of “everyone.” A joke in the film’s final act underscores this characterization of Broadway as a location of sexual deviancy when Gary’s teammate Chris confesses he does not like actors because he was raped by cast members of Cats during a post-show meet-and-greet: “They were drunk and out of control. Rumpus Cat and Macavity kept feeling up my leg. I tried to leave, but Rumpleteazer held me down and … I was raped by Mr. Mistoffelees” (Parker).

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At the time of Team America: World Police’s theatrical debut, Parker and Stone were rapidly becoming poster-boys for the G.O.P. Their bawdy humor on the Comedy

Central cartoon South Park is steeped in conservative critiques of big-government, liberal, Democratic Party-politics, and it generated a strong fanbase with a group of viewers who came to be known as “South Park Republicans”: center-right voters who mostly describe themselves as “fiscally conservative but socially liberal” (B.C.

Anderson).23 In 2001 Parker and Stone surprised audiences at an event for the liberal advocacy group People for the American Way by announcing they were Republicans;

Stone later confessed, “I hate conservatives but I really fucking hate liberals,” during an online question-and-answer session with fans (“South Park Studios Chat”). Although

Parker and Stone transitioned to libertarianism during the decade between “coming out” as Republican and their Broadway debut, their depictions of homosexuality and

HIV/AIDS are remarkably static during this time (Gillespie and Walker). In short, after their comedic approach to AIDS proved successful in Team America they replicated and expanded this method in The Book of Mormon.

Lease’s expansive list-verse, cited in this chapter’s epigraph, names characters who are not present onstage as AIDS patients in an exuberant pop-bop that appears to cite them as a way of generating a coalitional politic. The number culminates with a call to

“MARCH ON WASHINGTON/ LEAD THE FIGHT AND CHARGE THE

BRIGADES” a reference the October 1987 Second National March on Washington for

Lesbian and Gay Rights.24 In a generously benign reading of this scene, the widespread

23 As Parker and Stone moved away from the Republican label, their fan base adapted by calling themselves “South Park Conservatives” (Tierney). 24 Called “The Great March,” the New York Times ran a story hours before the march estimating the rally would draw over 200,000 citizen-activists, including members of ACT UP, although later accounts

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cases of AIDS present HIV as an equal-opportunity infector and “everyone,” including the unlikeliest of subjects, can (and will!) develop AIDS. Such a reading would be in line with ACT UP’s radical politics that, as Deborah Gould argues, “shook up straight and gay establishments” by using performative activism to widen the public’s articulation of affected populations during the epidemic (5). I offer a reading that sees Lease as a more insidious product of Parker and Stone’s conservative politics set against the backdrop of the Bush administration healthcare policymakers requiring physicians comply with name- based reporting. Name-based reporting compelled the public disclosure of the names and personal information for all HIV-positive patients. I am not claiming Parker and Stone explicitly used debates about name-based HIV reporting to scaffold their parody, but I am asserting it is impossible to separate the policies of their known political affiliations from the political content of their work.

In the late 1990s Lawrence Gostin, a scholar in public health law, argued name- based reporting ought to be avoided but may be necessary to maintain public health:

Public health authorities must substantiate the need for a named identifier when collecting information. If they could achieve the public health good as well, or better, without personal identifiers, the collection of non-identifiable or aggregate data is preferable. These data collection principles recognize that government authority to acquire sensitive personal information ought to be justified by substantial public health good that cannot be achieved by means that are less invasive of individual privacy. (qtd. in The Role of Name-based Notification 28)

Although Gostin favored a limited data aggregation approach during the mid-90s, he later concluded that nature of the AIDS epidemic merited increased government surveillance

estimate the number of attendees as high as 750,000. The event also marked the first public presentation of the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt; it would not return to Washington, D.C. until October of 1996, six months after Rent moved to Broadway Nederlander Theatre and became a cultural phenomenon. Given how the direct address in “Everyone’s Got AIDS,” invites audiences to march, and quilt, we can estimate the parody Lease is set sometime between 1986-87, two years before Rent. For more information, see Cannon (1987), Williams (1987) and Ghaziani (2008).

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on new HIV infections and AIDS cases despite international concerns of human rights violations for breaching patient confidentiality (1997, 1998). In 2000, UNAIDS recommended that politicians “engage in consultations with those most affected by the epidemic before adopting a [name-based] reporting system” given how “the fears of those at risk for HIV infection and the existence of social contexts within which individuals have been subjected to discrimination, stigmatization, and acts of violence” (The Role of

Name-based Notification 34). Officials at the federal Centers for Disease Control in the

United States implemented policies based on research concluding name-based reporting has no substantive impact on individuals presenting for testing, but these studies used multiple states across the U.S. with comparatively low percentages of new HIV infections and progressive AIDS cases as its representative sample set (Peterson et. al. 1996,

Nakashima et. al. 1999). Including states such as Louisiana, Michigan, Nebraska,

Nevada, New Jersey, and Tennessee, none the major epicenters for HIV transmission were included and the populations were majority white.25

A 1999 case study in the American Journal of Public Health demonstrates how the narrative of the public’s neutral, if not positive, response to name-based reporting generated by such studies was damaging because they excluded the most at-risk populations: metropolitan gay men and people of color (Woods et al.). Using a sample of high-risk males who were not informed of public health benefits of name-based reporting, Woods concluded that sixty-three percent would not receive HIV-testing if name reporting was required; forty-three percent of men who were informed of public

25 New Jersey is a partial exception to this rule; Newark and Jersey City, NJ were later ranked in the top sixteen cities designated to receive funding in the Ryan White Comprehensive AIDS Emergency Resources (CARE) Act (2003). See below for more information on this George H.W. Bush policy.

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health benefits would still not test due to the reporting structure. Thus, when the Bush administration, in tandem with the CDC, began compelling states to implement policies for name-based reporting from 2000-2008, recent data demonstrated the policy was explicitly oppositional to the UNAIDS recommendation asking for substantive engagement with individuals most likely to experience social stigma, discrimination, and violence.

In 2003 Bush authorized the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief

(PEPFAR) and reauthorized the Ryan White CARE Act. Declaring, “AIDS can be prevented” and “Antiretroviral drugs can extend life for many years,” Bush asked

Congress during his State of the Union address to pledge fifteen billion dollars to his five-year PEPFAR agenda targeting Africa and the Caribbean (Bush). Bush championed this “work of mercy beyond all current international efforts to help the people of Africa” but demurred from addressing the still-urgent issue of HIV/AIDS in the United States, where HIV-related illnesses were still among the top-ten leading causes of death for

Americans aged 20-54 years-old. Despite this shocking statistic, U.S. sex education reform was organized around abstinence-only tactics (Bush; Heron and Smith). Bush’s

2003 address is significant for understanding the Republican party’s twenty-first century

AIDS politics in two ways. First, HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment was conceptualized as an act of Christian compassion but specifically racialized as a foreign

Other. His invocation of black Caribbean and African AIDS patients fixed the virus and its advanced syndrome outside the United States and also rescripted the “out of Africa” narrative prevalent in the early days of the U.S. epidemic. Second, Bush used AIDS to pivot to foreign and domestic terrorism: “This nation can lead the world in sparing

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innocent people from a plague of nature. And this nation is leading the world in confronting and defeating the man-made evil of international terrorism” (Bush). In a single sentence, Bush established a moral war against AIDS as a “plague of nature” in

Africa and compared it to the “man-made” terror originating in the Middle East. This rhetorical connection invited his predominantly white voter base to transpose their fears about blackness, queerness, and contagion into the non-Christian Afghani subject who posed a danger to the national body. After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on

U.S. soil, Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address presented a clear distancing from the

AIDS epidemic as the most significant loss of life in recent American memory. I argue this narrative return to Africa and the racialized specter of terrorism enable Parker and

Stone’s use of HIV/AIDS as a comedic plot device.

Name-based reporting was re-labeled as “HIV profiling” in a July 2006 opinion editorial for The Advocate by Black queer theologian Irene Monroe. The neologism was initially used as a riposte against the Bush administration’s international HIV/AIDS work under the auspices of global “family values” while closing life-saving needle exchange programs and sex education resources, although it has since been taken up by sociologists and public health officials without the political invective. “HIV Profiling” invoked the rise in racial profiling by police forces across the United States, most notably exercised through “stop and frisk” checkpoints in African-American communities and the invasive policing of Muslim-Americans by the New York Police Department’s “Demographics

Unit” under the guise of counter-terrorism operations. To “profile” individuals by serostatus fantastically magnifies the Human Immunodeficiency Virus, making it somehow manifest in or on an individual despite being invisible to the naked eye.

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Monroe’s concern that HIV profiling reproduces dehumanizing mechanisms like the inking of Holocaust prisoners and chattel slaves was not unfounded; as early as 1986, conservative commentator William F. Buckley’s proposed in The New York Times that

“Everyone detected with AIDS should be tattooed in the upper forearm, to protect common-needle users, and on the buttocks, to prevent the victimization of other homosexuals” (Monroe; Buckley).

Buckley’s proposition is homonationalism par excellence: he moralizes AIDS by conflating HIV-positive homosexuals with those who have AIDS and then cleaving this group from HIV-negative homosexuals who are being “victimized.” Jasbir Puar articulates homonationalism in the global north as a “brand of homosexuality [that] operates as a regulatory script not only of normative gayness, queerness, or homosexuality, but also of the racial and national norms that reinforce those sexual subjects” (Terrorist Assemblages 2). Thus, the HIV-negative gay male is not incorporated as a tolerable American subject, but “even exemplary of neoliberal democratic ethics and citizenships” (Terrorist Assemblages 1; Kulick 28). While HIV profiling was marketed as a public health good in ways that made the United States seem culturally and medically progressive, it downplayed the devastating effects on non-white and non-affluent populations across the country while “[projecting homophobia] onto other spaces and other bodies, which emerge as both uncivilized and threatening” (Kulick 28). Lease’s name-based positions HIV as a democratic infection; the bodies rambunctiously proclaiming AIDS diagnoses are coded as white and cisgender and the audience enjoying the performance does so in the anonymity of the crowd. As we will see in The Book of

Mormon, Parker and Stone return to a list-verse similar to that in “Everyone’s Got

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AIDS,” as a means for introducing the audience to an imagined Ugandan village in the song “Hasa Diga Eebowai.” Following Monroe, I see this dramaturgical tool as insidious

HIV profiling that invites American audiences to laugh at the pervasiveness of AIDS in the global south from the safety of theaters in New York, London, and Sydney. Despite the centrality of HIV/AIDS in The Book of Mormon’s plot, Parker and Stone’s script presents the syndrome as a running gag without introspection about the homophobia, imperialism, and racism that constitute this homonationalist depiction of AIDS.

“Hasa Diga Eebowaii”: The Book of Mormon’s AIDS Pasquinade

Lease’s sharp satire is effective because Rent is ubiquitous with Broadway. A

May 2018 sketch on Saturday Night Live called “Lil Rent,” demonstrates how the musical’s staying power enables it to be a site for comedic apprehension of the precarity of living with HIV/AIDS. The sketch humorously depicts a local children’s theatre company producing an “abridged, family-friendly” version of Rent by substituting

HIV/AIDS with diabetes:

Mark. This is a scene from Act I, where my character is singing about his friend Roger, who is diabetes-positive. In the late 1980s, when the show takes place, diabetes was this new sexually transmitted disease that people didn’t know a lot about. It was scary. Roger. Yeah, back then diabetes was basically a death sentence. (Begin Scene) Mark. They say diabetes is a gay disease, but Roger got diabetes from having sex with his girlfriend… CLOSE ON ROGER, WHOSE GIRLFRIEND LEFT HIM A NOTE SAYING WE’VE GOT DIABETES BEFORE SLITTING HER WRISTS IN THE BATHROOM Take your insulin, Roger! (“Lil Rent – SNL”)

SNL uses the “on-air” reporter Janet as the proxy for audiences critical of Lil Rent’s director, who uses the “Find and Replace” feature in Microsoft Word to swap all

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references to HIV/AIDS with diabetes. The sketch’s plot is predicated on audiences understanding that AIDS is a serious condition, but the humor comes from the seeming discrepancy between the white children performing a musical in an affluent Colorado neighborhood (“You can buy tickets online now for $175!”) and HIV-positive intravenous drug-users Roger and Mimi. Given that white, heterosexual actors execute

Lease and Lil Rent, these parodies distance whiteness from the imagined non-white and queer person with AIDS.26 Parker and Stone, however, do the opposite: they materialize a whole community of black Africans with AIDS to achieve a comedic effect in The Book of Mormon’s “Hasa Diga Eebowaii.” I contend the musical’s racialized depiction of

HIV/AIDS is no longer an exacting lampoon of a cultural object or phenomenon, but a form of pasquinade about AIDS in Africa itself.27 This difference is subtle but significant:

Rent has the cultural capital to withstand a critical representation without actually damaging the cultural object itself; The Book of Mormon exploits an urgent crisis located far from New York City for laughs under the guise of “satire” while offering no reflexive redress of the national and racial inequities in the script.

The financial success of The Book of Mormon compels us to ask how this AIDS musical is different from those of the 1980s and 1990s. If American musicals contemporary to the peak of the AIDS crisis in New York City could only use HIV/AIDS as a tragic plot to be financially viable, then is the Ugandan AIDS crisis allowed as a

26 Mimi Marquez was played by white comedienne Amy Schumer, who stated, “I don’t speak Mexican, I only speak White” (“Lil Rent – SNL”). 27 There is little difference between satire, lampoon, and a pasquinade—they are often used synonymously in English. Pasquinades are named for Italian academics practice of posting verses on a Roman statue “Pasquino” during the sixteenth century; over time, these verses were replaced with more critical lampoons, called “pasquinades” after the statue. This trajectory of intentional “truthful” observations transforming into satire is similar to the trajectory of the use of HIV/AIDS in AIDS musicals. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, pasquinades are “lampoon[s] posted in a public place”; a theatre is perhaps the most public of contemporary unmediated “live” forums (“pasquinade, n.”).

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punchline in Mormon because those affected are geographically displaced from the metropolitan center? How is this shift aided by the substitution of white, metropolitan

American characters for black, poor, Ugandans? If “comedy is tragedy plus time,” as

Alan Alba’s Lester in Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989, dir. Woody Allen) suggests, then what is Mormon’s relationship to time?28 How does Mormon reflect early twenty-first century AIDS politics? Do Broadway audiences find it humorous because the AIDS crisis is increasingly distant in our cultural memory? Alternatively, is the depiction of AIDS enjoyable because the characters, happily topsying through the pop score, seem altogether outside of AIDS’ progressive diagnostic time? As I will demonstrate, this paradoxical reliance on historical distance and an absent crip time allow The Book of

Mormon to operate as a comedic AIDS musical.

“Can’t you take a joke?”: Comedy in The Book of Mormon

A few words on political correctness, comedy, and AIDS musicals: the comedy of

Trey Parker and Matt Stone is vehemently not “P.C.” And that is a by design. In

Seriously Funny, Shawn C. Bingham and Sara E. Green persuasively demonstrate how

“political correctness” is used as a gag for minoritarian communities, often to shore up conservative norms of public participation: “Just as social constructionism argues that reality is constructed and alternative ways of knowing are possible, humor presents alternative perspectives and ways of understanding social life, especially from the perspective of those outside the dominant group” (125). Policing who can talk about what

28 This aphorism, along with “comedy is repetition with difference,” is a mainstay in comedic performance studios in undergraduate and MFA theatre workshops. Although it is often mistakenly attributed to television comedy legend Carol Burnett, Alba’s character is first known utterance of the quote. Supposedly, the phrase was created by Allen and Alba’s longtime collaborator, Larry Gelbart (EW Staff).

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usually comes at the expense of when or why. 29 In Geoffrey Hughes’ discussion (2009) of linguistic reclamations of “cripple” by disabled people alongside Jewish or black reappropriations of slurs, we find an apparent breakdown in the circuit of feeling between the disabled comedian and the able-bodied spectator that seemingly emerges from the surprise resignification of the slur itself. That “some of it is unexpected”—‘it’ being humor that is by, for, and about a minority group rather than members of the dominant culture, is a positive change (x–xi).

Parker, however, described the creative team’s aims with Mormon as wanting “to make this not about just cynical and Mormon bashing, but hopeful and happy, because to me that’s what musicals are about. And not … like ‘Next to Normal,’ which made me want to kill myself” (Itzkoff, 8). Parker’s articulation of what musicals are “about”— relaying a “hopeful and happy” narrative instead of more “cynical” musicals like Next to

Normal (2008) is telling. The first musical since Rent to win the Pulitzer, Brian Yorkey and Tom Kitt’s Next to Normal’s explicitly addresses protagonist Diana Goodman’s struggles with bipolar disorder, her search for proper pharmaceutical interventions, and

Mad Pride-esque criticisms of contemporary psychiatry practices. Contextually, Parker’s invocation of suicide is an intentionally politically incorrect joke, but it falls flat considering how Goodman does attempt suicide near the end of Act I and many spectators shared suicide prevention hotline information on social media following their

29 However, as Choi and Murphy (1992) argue, language is not innocent: “Political correctness is a serious matter, grounded in suffering, prejudice, and difference, and has certainly made everyone consider the plight of others, giving a new emphasis to respect. But it has also provoked a great deal of satire, irony, and humor, which have their place in a study of this kind. Some of it is unexpected: we have become used to Jews and blacks telling jokes about themselves and reclaiming ethnic slurs; but now we have jokes being told about cripples, by cripples who insist on using that designation. Consequently, the earlier tendency to see things in dichotomous terms of plain black and white is increasingly complicated” (qtd. in Hughes x).

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viewing of the show. His juxtaposition of Mormon and next to normal suggests that attending the material realities of disability are not appropriate topics for musicals, and

Mormon reflects this opinion.

Mormon eschews what Mitchell and Snyder term “social realist” criticism, which comedy scholar Rebecca Mallet theorizes “reinforce[s] broader discriminatory attitudes” by representational mimesis (7). Mormon relies on the suspension of disbelief inherent to all musicals—that characters will sing and execute choreography, regardless of their circumstance—to shield its discriminatory depiction of Ugandans. But recognizing racist jokes as jokes, Michael Billig argues, does not mitigates their content (30). Julie Allan and Ian Stronach, reading able-bodied laughter at disability as a taboo, contend the

“direct must be made indirect” to become palatable; Tom Coogan sees these “direct” jokes used as an “oppressive faux transgression by which bigoted jokes maintain social hierarchies,” normalized by the “social compulsion to ‘have a sense of humour.’”

(Stronach and Allan 35; Coogan 7). Put another way, eliciting laughter through, or laughing at, a disability does not inherently normalize disability or move it outside of conventional social order. McRuer (2006) makes a similar point in his assessment that the television program Queer Eye for the Straight Guy is “involved in a cultural practice that is so ultimately widespread as to be banal: identifying a hapless state, linking it metaphorically to disability, and laughing at it” (177). Made “banal” by practices identifying, containing, and disciplining disability, McRuer’s reading of Queer Eye’s disableist comments informs my understanding of Mormon as a new node in the trajectory of a post-Rent banalization of AIDS.

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As comedy scholar Jerry Palmer argues, “humor needs to be both understood and permitted in order to be a joke” although whose permission is needed presents an unanswered “question of power relations” (80). For Palmer, parody is the space where the “ethical and aesthetic converge” (80). Reading Palmer through Siebers’ conceptualization of a disability aesthetic as a bodily feeling, then we see the power relations in Mormon’s comedy as a convergence of nondisabled creators and disabled subjects. Douglas and Palmer’s conceptualization assumes there is power to be leveraged both ways, as in the case of Rent and Lease. Mormon’s predominantly American, white, able-bodied creative team, however, reiterate structural inequities already at work by mining HIV-positive black Ugandans for comedy. Unlike Lil’ Rent, there is no ironic character acting as an audience proxy onstage. The musical’s conventional construction, beginning with the introduction number “Hello!” and the “I Want” song “You and Me

(But Mostly Me),” invites spectators to identify with Elders Price and Cunningham, not the Ugandans they meet during their mission. An HIV-positive black spectator is narratively coerced to identify with the white protagonists and laugh at the bodies onstage that more closely represent her own embodied experience.

When Elders Price and Cunningham arrive in Uganda, their local guide Mafala teaches the missionaries how Ugandans cope with the region’s severe issues, which include famine, drought, AIDS, and a violent warlord named General Butt-Fucking

Naked. Like Rent’s Angel and Lease’s Gary, the first personal information we learn about the locals in Uganda is their HIV-status: “WE HAVEN’T HAD RAIN IN

SEVERAL DAYS. (HASA DIGA EBOWAII!)/ AND EIGHTY PERCENT OF US

HAVE AIDS. (HASA DIGA EEBOWAII!)” (Parker et al. 18). “Hasa Diga Eebowaii,”

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Price and Cunningham learn, translates into English as “Fuck You God.” The phrase intentionally invokes The Lion King’s popular aphorism “Hakuna Matata,” but it conveys a resignation to one’s circumstances instead of adopting a “no worries” approach.30 This sense of resignation becomes evident when Mafala introduces members of the village:

MAFALA. HERE’S THE BUTCHER, HE HAS AIDS. HERE’S THE TEACHER, SHE HAS AIDS. HERE’S THE DOCTOR HE HAS AIDS – HERE’S MY DAUGHTER, SHE HAS A… … WONDERFUL DISPOSITION. SHE’S ALL I HAVE LEFT IN THE WORLD. AND IF EITHER OF YOU LAYS A HAND ON HER – I WILL GIVE YOU MY AIDS. (Parker et al. 22-23)

The first three lines of Mafala’s list-verse demonstrate the pervasiveness of AIDS in the community. When Malfala introduces each local, she or he cheerfully acknowledges the social hail by their profession and AIDS diagnosis rather than other identifying information. Unlike the slow death in Falsettos, or the rapid viral “Contact” in Rent,

Mormon’s African characters are already outside of prognosis time: although AIDS narratively debilitates them, they seem otherwise healthy. Enthusiastically moving in a syncopated adaptation of an otwenge, or elbow dance, without physical symptoms of disease or tiring, the chorus lives up to co-creator Robert Lopez’s vision of Africa as being “Disney-esque” on stage (“A Month of ‘Mormon’ Day 24”). The chorus ensemble performs a series of increasingly complex musical numbers throughout the musical, culminating in an elaborate reenactment of the founding of the Mormon church by Joseph

Smith.

30 As the leader of the local village, Mafala’s name is an intentional assonance of Simba’s father, Mufasa in The Lion King.

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Despite the Ugandans continually reminding the missionaries (and the audience) of their material problems, the lack of any unwellness normalizes their debility as a state of “injury and bodily exclusion that [is] endemic rather than epidemic or exceptional”

(Maim xvii). “The political mandate behind such […] a move from disability to debility,”

Puar argues, “invite[s] a deconstruction of what ability and capacity mean, affective and otherwise, and to push for a broader politics of debility that destabilizes the seamless production of abled-bodies in relation to disability” (“Prognosis Time” 166, emphasis mine). Debility, as Puar uses the term, is distinct from disability because it undercuts the correlative relationship of wellness to able-bodiedness. In the AIDS musicals I have previously discussed, AIDS is a disability under conventional medical and social model frameworks because of the social stigmas, as well as increasing physical impairments and death experienced by HIV-positive characters. Mormon’s characters with AIDS, however, are seamlessly incorporated into the athletic world of musical theatre performance without apparent harm despite the characters’ diegetic disabilities; disenfranchised, their illnesses are maximally productive in racial capitalism nonetheless.

Supplementing disability, this debilitation “shadows and often overlaps with disability,” making AIDS an in-between category in Mormon because it elides the non-disabled- disabled binary (Maim xvii).

Puar articulates maiming as a process of the biopolitics of debilitation that works by extracting value from “populations that would otherwise be disposable” (Maim xviii).

In The Right To Maim (2017) she argues neoliberal health and labor profiteering generates debility by slowly depleting marginalized groups, particularly in the global south. Mormon theatricalizes this process: Ugandans’ needs for food, healthcare, and

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peace invoke the specter of disability and are exploited throughout the musical. Parker,

Stone, and Lopez’s black bodies in Mormon are so disposable that most characters go unnamed, whereas every white missionary is introduced and subsequently addressed by name and the reverent salutation “Elder.” Even Nabalungi, Mafala’s daughter and the leading female protagonist, is perpetually misnamed by her would-be love interest,

Arnold. Elder Cunningham’s egregious misnaming of Nabalungi substitutes her given name with commercial companies with international recognition, such as Neutrogena,

Neosporin, and Nesquik. Others include Nala, Simba’s love interest in The Lion King;

Nagasaki, the location of the United States of America’s 9 August 1945 nuclear bombing in Japan; and Necrophilia, the sexual attraction to corpses.

As the audience’s central contact in the village and Elder Cunningham’s romantic foil, Nabalungi challenges the script’s ascription of value. In her only solo, Nabalungi compares her precarious village to the security of the Church of Latter-Day Saints’ home,

Salt Lake City, Utah. She imagines “Sal Tlay Ka Siti” as a paradise:

I BET THE GOAT-MEAT THERE IS PLENTIFUL AND THEY HAVE VITAMIN INJECTIONS BY THE CASE. THE WAR-LORDS THERE ARE FRIENDLY. THEY’D HELP YOU CROSS THE STREET— AND THERE’S A RED CROSS ON EVERY CORNER, WITH ALL THE FLOUR YOU CAN EAT. (Parker et al. 42)

Nabalungi’s fantasy of Salt Lake City is the conceptual opposite of her home but she does not register the different location as having a substantive cultural difference beyond general niceness. “Sal Tlay Ka Siti” has warlords, sure, but they are helpful warlords!

The song is significant because it explicitly conveys, for the first time in the musical, the material desires of the locals. Comedic mispronunciations and malapropisms mask her needs, but an earnest argument that Ugandan life has value beyond the sheer act of

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survival lies beneath the laugh lines. Singing how Salt Lake City must be “perfect” because “flies don’t bite your eyeballs” there, and “human life has worth,” Nabalungi makes the subtle distinction between bios and zoē, unintentionally arguing that the musical’s Ugandans are presented solely as bare life.

Alice Carter, in a 2014 review of The Book of Mormon national tour production written for the Chicago-based TCA Regional News, declares the musical is “still irreverently fun” and argues the musical’s humor is predicated not on the portrayal of

Africa but on the gross ineptitude of the Mormon missionaries themselves: “Once removed from the protective bubble of their like-minded families,” Carter writes, “they quickly find they are woefully ill-equipped to explain their religion to people beset with poverty, AIDS, a warlord, and general chaos. The simplistic wisdom of ‘Turn It Off’ may have worked in Salt Lake City, but it is no help in a more complex environment”

(Carter). Carter’s surface reading is correct in that The Book of Mormon capitalizes on the disjuncture between the sheltered family experiences its Mormons describe in Salt Lake

City and the violent culture in “KIT-GUL-LI UGANDA” (Parker et al. 16). Elder

Cunningham’s mispronunciation of Kitgum, the large municipality in Northern Uganda, is just one of a series of severe errors in the representation of Uganda and its peoples. The fictional village of Kitguli is remote, small, and poor. Its community is overwhelmed by the AIDS pandemic and lives in decaying thatched huts in perpetual fear of a local warlord named General Butt-Fucking-Naked—a man who is roving from village-to- village, practicing female genital mutilation on its womenfolk. Kitgum, by contrast, boasts a population of almost fifty-thousand , two hospitals and regional airport, the headquarters for the Irene Gleeson Foundation, and a town council that administers the

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local government. Though not without its concerns, the municipality is hardly the backward village in which Elders Price and Cunningham are called to serve.

The Book of Mormon does not wholly misrepresent the prevalence of AIDS in the

Northern Uganda region. According to the Ugandan Ministry of Health’s 2010 epidemiological surveillance report, “The Status of the HIV/AIDS Epidemic in Uganda,” antenatal testing in Kitgum demonstrated an HIV prevalence of 18.9 percent, well above the median HIV prevalence of 10.1 percent in general northern region, and the region has high numbers of adults and children on ART (“Epidemiological Surveillance Report

2010” 9-11, 39). Kitgum’s antenatal HIV prevalence is higher than any other sentinel site outside of major urban areas and higher than both Lira and Mbarara, the major urban sites who reported 13.5 and 11.8 percent HIV prevalence in 2009 respectively (9-11). Overall,

Uganda’s model estimates a national HIV prevalence of 6.3 percent, with 1,192,372 people infected with HIV as of December 2009 and over half that number needing access to ART (45-46).31 The Ministry of Health published this report in June 2010, just months before The Book of Mormon’s August pre-Broadway workshop (45-46). Although much of the book was written between 2006 and 2009, a time when HIV transmission is an ever-increasing public health issue in Kitgum, the emergence of Uganda's epidemiological survey alongside The Book of Mormon in summer of 2010 confirms the

31 In a “2015 Uganda HIV/AIDS Progress Report,” access to ART across the nation markedly improved, from 214,087 active ART clients in 2009 to 959,447 ART active ART clients in June 2016 (Annex 9). Although the number of estimated Ugandans living with HIV was projected at 1.5 million, an increase of nearly 27 percent since 2009, nearly 64 percent of persons living wtih HIV had access to ART by the end of 2016, as compared to the 18 percent with access in 2009 (vi). These changes are the direct result of Uganda’s development of a National HIV/AIDS Strategic Plan in response to their epidemic crisis, which aims to eliminate new cases through prevention and early HIV-identification, as well as provide a robust care framework for children and adults living with HIV/AIDS. See “The Uganda HIV And AIDS Country Progress Report July 2015-June 2016.”

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prevalence of HIV/AIDS in the musical’s more common descriptions of Northern

Uganda.

Returning to Carter’s description of the fictional Ugandan village as a “complex environment” in which the ‘Turn It Off’ philosophy is simply inadequate reveals much about our expectations of Price and Cunningham as our protagonists. Their role as missionaries is to preach the faith tenets of The Church of the Latter-Day Saints and extends no further; Mormon’s missionaries, living cloistered together and under a curfew, are neither explicitly charged nor organizationally encouraged to integrate themselves into the local community of Kuguli. Moreover, the “nifty little Mormon trick” of “turning off” aspects of the self in conflict with a heteromascilinist Mormon worldview does not enable the missionaries to empathize with Mafala Hatimbi and the rest of the Ugandan village:

WHEN YOU’RE FEELING CERTAIN FEELINGS THAT JUST DON’T SEEM RIGHT TREAT THOSE PESKY FEELINGS LIKE A READING LIGHT AND TURN ‘EM OFF! LIKE A LIGHT SWITCH! (Parker et al. 25-26)

“Turn It Off,” campily delivered by Elder McKinley in an elaborate tap number, parallels homosexuality and race as Other forms of embodiment that are strictly off-limits. Just as

McKinley must deny his sexual urges or risk eternal damnation, Mafala dissuades Elder

Cunningham from establishing a romantic and physical relationship with Nabulungi by using the risk of contracting HIV/AIDS as leverage. The Elders must turn off their empathy or suffer physical consequences, which in turn stymies their ability to share

Ugandan material concerns about food scarcity, accessing antiretroviral treatment, or protecting themselves from violent harm at the hands of mercenary soldiers.

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This limit is explicitly underscored in Act II when the mission president writes to congratulate the Elders on their recent baptisms of the local people by signing off,

“Congratulations on becoming ONE with the people of Africa!” (Parker et al. 76). Elder

McKinley, overjoyed by this salutation, bursts into spontaneous song:

ELDER MCKINLEY: I AM AFRICA! I AM AFRICA. WITH THE STRENGTH OF THE CHEETAH, MY NATIVE VOICE SHALL SING ELDERS: WE ARE AFRICA! WE ARE THE HEARTBEAT OF AF-RI-CA! ELDER SCHRADER: WITH THE RHINO ELDER THOMAS: THE MEERCAT ELDER CHURCH: THE NOBLE LION KING. (Parker et al. 76)

The Elders, dressed in white and framed by Ugandans in a silent tableau, perform “I Am

Africa” as an earnest song of assimilation. What follows is an attempt to define the essence of “Africa”—to restrict it to meter and rhyme and, in doing so, demonstrate their mastery over the continent. But by cataloging generic features like “the sunrise on the savannah” and “the monkey with the banana,” the Elders replicate the mission president’s move using of using Uganda as proxy for the diverse whole of the African continent.

Moreover, their claims to “be” Africa anxiously avoid being mistaken for the black bodies in Africa: they’re the sweat of the jungle man, Nelson Mandela’s tears, the “lost” southern Sundanese youth seeking refuge in the United States. To be clear: the musical number encourages spectators to listen with irony and watch with suspicion, but it also offers no in-text critiques. Elder Cunningham singing, “I AM AFRICA!/ JUST LIKE

BONO!/ I AM AFRICA!”, is like Bono in that we are watching a spectacular manifestation of a colonial white savior complex presented in a song whose simple verse and chorus replicate the structure and tone of “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”, the 1984

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star-studded Band Aid humanitarian relief song that famously features the U2 frontman belting the line “Well, tonight thank God it’s them instead of you.” This violent division between the land and its inhabitants is repeated in Cunningham’s claim to “[fly] in here and become one with the land!” (Parker et al. 76).32

Race co-mingled in a powerful fantasy of who embodied the AIDS-patient in the

1980s, generating an imagined character-type that still proves challenging to change, as the continued financial success of The Book of Mormon indicates. This fantasy patient, if white, was undoubtedly the carrier of an exotic disease from the Caribbean, where the

“highly sexually active” and “promiscuous” Caucasian homosexual male likes to vacation and engage in “rectal insemination” (with a black male partner) before traveling back to the United States (Treichler 22).33 A final reiteration of Mafala’s initial joke that

Elders Price and Cunningham might be infected with AIDS is played at the end of Act I when General Butt-Fucking Naked murders a chorus member, who audiences learned has

AIDS during the diagnostic introductions in “Hasa Diga Eebowaii,” and Elder Price is exposed to an overwhelming amount of the doctor’s blood.

32 It is hard for even the most guileless viewer to miss the ironic whiteness of the missionaries when the Elders combine associations with Charles Marlow in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness with tropes of hypersexualization of black bodies as they streak their fingers across their face and gesture to their genital, singing, “WE ARE DEEPEST DARKEST AFRICA/ SO DEEP SO DARK IN AFRICA/ WE ARE FIELDS AND FERTILE FORESTS WELL ENDOWED!” (Parker et al. 80). 33 Paula Treichler offers a dense collection of terms used to describe gay males in Science from June 1981 through December 1985 in “AIDS, Homophobia, and Biomedical Discourse: An Epidemic of Signification.” The terminology in these reports present the white gay male AIDS-patient as non- monogamous and hypersexual, while the transmissor of the virus is unnamed, but nevertheless an aggressive (if not predatory) black Haitian male (22). Demonstrating how the “fragile anus” hypothesis, which characterized the anal tissue as being more susceptible to viral transmission than the “rugged vagina,” emerged from these characterizations, Treichler builds a convincing argument for how the medical community and U.S. government’s inefficient responses were partly due to these abiding fantasies of the homosexual “lifestyle” (23-25). It is not difficult to trace a line between these fantasies and the representation of AIDS in Rent and The Book of Mormon, musicals in which the majority of characters with HIV/AIDS are African/-American or Latinx. Rent’s cis-het, white male lead Roger is the notable exception but he is the only character whose diagnosis is explicitly scripted; he contracted HIV from intravenous drug use with his old girlfriend, April.

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THE GENERAL: By the end of the ALL females in this village WILL BE CIRCUMCISED. OR I WILL GET BUTT-FUCKING NAKED AND DO THIS!!! — and shoots the man in the man in the face. A very realistic and large squib blows blood and brain matter all over Elder Price. All the villagers scream and run away. (Parker et al. 41)

The warlord’s threat of getting “butt-fucking naked,” coupled with his threats of murder and female genital mutilation, frame black masculinity as a violent enterprise and reveals how the musical uses fears about sexual contact with, and contagion through, the black body to generate laughter. Price, exposed to the doctor’s “blood and brain matter,” would immediately need to take a post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP)—an antiretroviral drug regimen a patient must initiate within seventy-two hours of exposure to HIV.

For all the concern about the transmissibility of AIDS between the musical’s black characters, Price is oddly unconcerned about having had to spit out the stranger’s blood and wipe it from his eyes. When Price reappears, bloodstained, at the mission two scenes later, his fellow mission brothers inquire:

ELDER CHURCH: Elder Price, what happened to YOU? Price looks down at his blood-covered shirt for a beat, then – ELDER PRICE: Africa...is NOTHING like The Lion King – I think that movie took a LOT of artistic license. ELDER CUNNINGHAM: He’s upset because we just saw a guy get shot in the face. ELDERS: Oooh./Ewww./That’s not good./Etc. (Parker et al. 44)

The absence of concern from Price, or his brothers, for his contact with a large quantity of a HIV-infected blood emphasizes Mormon’s position that HIV/AIDS is debilitated condition of blackness. In other words, Price cannot contract HIV in The Book of

Mormon because his infection would violate the us-versus-them terms upon which the narrative’s humor are premised: the missionaries may be misguided in their white savior complexes, but at least they do not have AIDS!

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I doubt Parker, Stone, and Lopez believe this to be functionally true, but their musical presents no other option and it is unlikely that their affluent audiences sitting in the posh Eugene O’Neill Theater for an average $141.85 seat sees infection as a pressing concern either (“Historical Grosses”). Just as conservative politicians in the 1980s fantasized that AIDS belonged only to specific marginal groups, therefore downplaying the possibility of heterosexual transmission, The Book of Mormon creators craft clear boundaries to allay patrons of their anxiety about their own potential risk for contracting

HIV. Sander Gilman (1988) made a similar argument in his comparative reading of AIDS and syphilis, contending, “The more heterosexual transmission of AIDS becomes a media

‘fact,’ the greater the need for heterosexuals to retain the image of aids as a disease of socially marginal groups” (Gilman 105). However, as Bruno Latour reminds us, we are socialized to compartmentalize our response to HIV/AIDS precisely because it cuts across so many sensitive issues, including science, economy, labor, and sex (Latour 2).

Mormon offers a new take on the AIDS epidemic as a “strange uncertain story mixing biology and society” that appears to use humor in order to “[counter] neglect of the disease by the larger culture,” but its stereotypical representations of blackness and absence of any markers of the illness’ physical impact damagingly recycle old tropes

(Gilman 105; Performance in America 57). The Book of Mormon is still selling remarkably, with its box office gross for the first week of January 2019 reporting ticket sales at 103.56% gross potential (“Historical Grosses”). Unlike the other musicals in this chapter, Mormon is still in its original production run. Future studies will need to address how revival productions of the musical contend with new racial politics, HIV-prevention

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medications, and the ethics of transmitting a purposefully skewed cultural history of

HIV/AIDS.

The legacy of the AIDS musical

As an entr’acte, Rent’s “Seasons of Love” sits outside of the narrative’s time and space. Musicals often use the first song in Act II as a kind of soft filler, to assist spectators who are still returning to their seats from long concessions and bathroom lines.

Conventional entr’actes are designed to reacclimate an audience to the world of the play without delivering any major plot points. “Seasons of Love” catalogs seemingly unimportant aspects of life, issuing the imperative to “measure in love” (Larson 88). The elegiac song subtly chastises the audience for undervaluing moments already lost by the dying or already dead, highlighting the impossibility of memorialization in crip time. Put another way, “Seasons of Love” makes an odd double-assertion: one can escape or transcend the progression of the clock in musical theatre by imagining moments outside of time—but even these moments are literally measured in the score as the performers and musicians are labor to “keep time.” Lyrically, we leverage instants that have not yet passed or even may never occur against moments we listeners have presumably taken for granted. Crip time may indeed bend the clock, but it does not allow us to suspend its progression altogether.

As the single-most famous number from AIDS musicals, “Seasons of Love” is performed on award shows, telethons, in memorial services, and benefit concerts as an act of a palliative care for those affected by the AIDS epidemic. Much in the way that

“Seasons of Love” was used to chronicle and celebrate singular moments against the

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precarity of life in Rent, the song was performed during the 72nd Annual Tony Awards telecast to mark time’s preciousness against the Parkland school shooting. A familiar cast of characters stood in a variegated line across center stage and counted 525,600 minutes—only audiences were not watching Mark, Mimi, Roger, and Joanne. Instead, the performers were drama students from Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in

Parkland, Florida. When recontextualized by mass shootings during the early twenty-first century, the song became a salve for those living under the terrifying threat of gun violence in the United States. While media pundits and police postmortems parsed the number of minutes for a shooter to execute their plan, the Stoneman Douglas students’ singing “Seasons of Love” invokes a different history of terror to mark 525,600 minutes for the newest epidemic affecting Americans: gun violence. According to the CDC

WONDER database, 2017 had 39,733 cataloged deaths by firearms; approximately 4 for every 100,000 persons (“Firearms deaths”).

Stoneman Douglas students became a lightning rod for national debate on gun reform following a school shooting on 14 February 2018, during which fourteen students and three staff members were killed, and an additional seventeen people were wounded, in just under six minutes. “Seasons of Love” lasts 2 minutes, 52 seconds. The Tony

Awards performance was a reprisal of sorts for the Broadway community, who joined the

Stoneman Douglas students for the 16 April 2018 telecast From Broadway With Love: A

Benefit for Parkland, USA. From Broadway with Love was first imagined as a singular benefit concert following the Sandy Hook shooting in Newtown, CT on 28 January 2013, but it has since become a serial event following the shooting in Newtown; the mass shooting in Orlando, FL at the LGBT nightclub, Pulse; and the event in Parkland. From

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Broadway With Love: A Benefit Concert for Sandy Hook (2013) began with Robin de

Jesús, an openly gay actor from a small town in Connecticut, singing the first verses of

“Seasons of Love.” de Jesús’ performance seems, retrospectively, to articulate the impossible tragic loss of young lives in the contemporary moment and prefigure the trajectory of terrorism to follow.

The Rent phenomenon may have enabled “Seasons of Love” to represent other tragedies, but its emotional impact relies on the song’s earlier context. In this way, the de- coupling of “Seasons of Love” from the AIDS epidemic reminds us that “post-AIDS does not necessarily mean the end of AIDS,” as Román argues in Performance in America

(51). Holland Carter offers a useful observation about that AIDS-related art must always be contextualized, because, “In those years, combating the enemy was a D.I.Y. mix of community organizing, medical volunteerism and direct action. Art was very much in the picture, because artists were hit hard by the epidemic, but also because art is (or can be) strategically useful. It can broadcast or insinuate messages into the larger culture, embody complex truths, absorb fear, preserve memory” (“Art from the Age of AIDS”). Carter’s articulation of AIDS art as a form of memory preservation that might also absorb past fears about future transmission challenges theatre artists and scholars to consider how

AIDS musicals are received in a “post-AIDS” era. It is less common than it once was for

Broadway standards to cross into the popular American songbook, but “Seasons of Love” is an exception. One might study how the song is used by those outside the theatre community to learn how (or if) the song’s history impacts its reception by “Post-

Millennials,” defined by the Pew Research Center as born 1997-onwards (Dimock). The twenty-first-century shift from AIDS-as-tragedy to AIDS-as-comedy, even as AIDS

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musicals are re-signified for new tragedies, evinces how AIDS musical resist closure and convinces me we that are in a new stage in AIDS’ discursive history.

Broadway composer Michael Friedman’s death on 9 September 2017 from

HIV/AIDS complications demonstrated the limits of the “Post-AIDS” pasquinade. While

The Book of Mormon was operating at full capacity, where audiences roared nightly at the comedic, transactional exchange of AIDS, the theatre community mourned the loss of the artistic director of Encores! Off-Center and the composer of Bloody, Bloody Andrew

Jackson (OBC 2010) and other popular Off-Broadway and regional musicals. Aged forty- one, Friedman tested positive for HIV just nine weeks before his death. He had not been tested in a few years and by the time he approached a doctor his immune system was severely compromised. Multiple friends and collaborators interviewed for a story about his death in the New York Times claimed to have seen spots similar to Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions but assumed it must have been another condition—it was 2017, after all, and HIV is now a manageable condition. After a series of short hospitalizations and antiretroviral medications, Friedman acquired acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) and was admitted to the intensive care unit at NYU Langone on 19 August, where he remained until his death twenty-one days later (Paulson).

Theatremakers like Lin-Manuel Miranda and Will Frears publicly mourned the loss of Friedman himself, and also the music left un-created. Hashtagging

#RIPMichaelFriedman, Miranda tweeted “Aching with gratitude for the music & joy he gave us. Mourning all the music we’ll never hear” (@Lin_Manuel). Frears describes a

“grief at the work that won’t be finished — all the things he was talking about that I wanted to watch him work through” (Paulson). Friedman’s death sent a jolt through the

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theatre community precisely because it was far more similar to Whizzer’s untimely death at the end of Falsettos, which closed as a revival production in January of that year, than

The Book of Mormon’s Ugandans with AIDS who have been singing and dancing without any signs of disease progression since 2011. As a prominent young artist in New York,

Friedman’s death was characterized by Public Theater artistic director Oscar Eustis, as “a real warning shot across the bow for anybody who thinks this disease isn’t deadly any more” (Paulson).

“Measure in Love”: Moving from the AIDS musicals

In this chapter, I proposed AIDS musicals is a subgenre of compassion musicals whose dramaturgies are structured by the presence of HIV/AIDS and diagnostic time. I have also demonstrated how their respective emergences in the chronology of the U.S.

AIDS epidemic impacted their strategies for HIV/AIDS inclusion and modeled ways of reading crip time as a constitutive element of these works. By tracing the AIDS musical’s evolution over forty years and arrival on Broadway in the early 1990s, the narrative of how onstage depictions of HIV/AIDS reflected offstage AIDS politics and research emerges clearly for the first time. As much as Broadway patrons enjoy(ed) Falsettos,

Rent, and The Book of Mormon, their respective treatments of HIV/AIDS sublimated or altogether disavowed queerness in favor conventional heterosexual relationships and none of these three shows ends with a positive prognosis for the future. The specter of illness hangs over Falsettos’ Marvin, whom we know had condomless sex with Whizzer;

Rent’s Roger and Mimi, who must take their AZT or risk serious health complications; and Mormon’s Africans, who praise the teachings of their white savior through “The

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Book of Arnold” but have received no material or medical aid for their impoverished village.

Moving forward, two significant takeaways impact my understanding of other musicals in this project. First, there is no standardized, scripted practice for “performing

AIDS,” even in a set of musicals explicitly addressing the condition; second, the articulation of specific diagnoses imparts ideologies of ability, functioning, and general wellness that are bounded within a curative model and stress the kill-or-cure paradigm

(Angel, forthright about her diagnosis, dies, while the more secretive Mimi lives). These concepts advance my argument that disability simulations are a stumbling block for the able imagination in theatre because HIV/AIDS is a condition without a discrete set of easily simulated symptoms, so it can only be staged in proximity to other identity or character markers: queerness, race, class, and drug use.

As we will see in the following chapter, cognitive disabilities are similarly challenging for playwrights, composers, actors, and theatregoers. Presented as already debilitated, or outside of a curative arc, neuroatypical characters generate an affect that

“moves us away from terms such as ‘past,’ ‘present,’ and ‘future’ to reorient us around what Manuel DeLanda calls ‘non-metric time’: speed, pace, duration, timing, rhythms, frequency” (Maim 19). AIDS musicals are aggressively marked by a linear, chronological relationship to time, whereas compassion musicals with neuroatypical characters use memory as a narrative device to crip time in ways that elliptically fold linear narrative to avoid time prognosis time altogether.

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Chapter 4

Integrating Disability: Neuroatypicality and Trauma in The Light in the Piazza

Indeed, she could be remarkably lovely when pleased. The somewhat long lines of her cheek and jaw drooped when she was downhearted, but happiness drew her up perfectly. Her dark blue eyes grew serene and clear; her chestnut hair in its long girlish cut shadowed her smooth skin. Due to an accident years ago, she had the mental age of a child of ten. But anyone on earth, meeting her for the first time, would have found this incredible. — Elizabeth Spencer, The Light in the Piazza

Yes, obsessed, as always, with the vanishing of time! — Sylvia Plath, Journal Entry, 24 January 1953

House lights dim and a harp ripples a series of cascading arpeggios poco a poco, accelerating little by little, as the lights rise on a piazza (Guettel 1). A soft afternoon light fills the stage, revealing wide arches and columns that exude old-world charm. It is 1953,

Florence, summer. Transitioning into a pastiche of musical motifs “with passion,” the orchestra plays to an empty public square (3). Downstage arches fly to the wings as a voice begins to sing with the overture, and a woman enters, taking in her surroundings.

The middle-aged woman steps into a spotlight: hair pinned and curled, dressed in a pink tailored two-piece ensemble, carrying a guidebook, and wearing sensible heels. Her face is contemplative; her mouth, closed. Hers is not the voice doubling the orchestra’s first- string violin. It belongs to a younger woman who has entered upstage, carrying a sketchbook and tucking loosened strands of long, blonde hair away behind her ear. The young woman’s melismatic run of open vowels ends across an orchestral swell, and then

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the music softens to a pianissimo as she turns to her companion, asking, “Mother? What happened here?” (3).

Craig Lucas and Adam Guettel’s The Light in the Piazza (2005) begins with

Margaret and her daughter, Clara, on vacation in Italy. Margaret is escaping an unhappy marriage to her husband Roy and relishes being halfway around the world from her home in Winston-Salem, where seemingly everyone knows her daughter’s secret. With a book by Craig Lucas and music and lyrics by Adam Guettel, The Light in the Piazza is an adaptation of Elizabeth Spencer’s 1960 novella about a young woman named Clara, who falls in love with a local boy while vacationing in Italy. Although she is guarded by an overprotective mother who attempts to curtail the relationship because of her cognitive disability, Clara proves that she is capable of much more than her doctors anticipated or

Margaret believed possible. Fabrizio comes to love Clara because of her way of seeing the world, not in spite of her disability. As Guettel’s score makes clear, the only barriers

Clara must overcome are language (Fabrizio speaks only Italian) and Margaret’s anxieties about letting her daughter go.

In Henry Kissel’s updates to Words with Music: Creating the Broadway Musical

Libretto (2006), Broadway conductor Lehman Engel’s foundational text for aspiring book writers and lyricists, he lamented that by the early twenty-first century, “Broadway had become a gawdy [sic], expensive recyclable bin” and praised Light in the Piazza for offering a return to conventional Golden Age standards (436). Light in the Piazza, Kissel argues, “vindicated” Engel’s argument that good musicals all share a principal structure yet ultimately “depend on things that cannot be codified” (438). Kissel does not articulate which elements defy categorization, although one might surmise from his writing

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elsewhere in the volume that he means a particular wit in the wordplay; melodies that move the heart and live in the ear; and a score that complexly renders a particular locale, its people, and their customs. I begin with Kissel’s assessment of musicals like Piazza to argue that Clara’s neuroatypical bodymind changes the execution of standard structures in the book musical. Following Kissel’s words, the “thing” that resists codification in

Piazza is Clara’s disability, which resists categorization in Spencer’s novella and Lucas’ libretto.

As I will prove, Clara’s musical motifs function as a disability simulation that enables her to defy medical and social models of disability and helps Margaret empathize with her daughter. In this way, this chapter approaches disability simulation as a project that bridges neuroatypical bodyminds with normate characters.1 This is in contrast to chapter two, in which disability simulations widened the conceptual gap between disability and able-bodiedness, and the AIDS musicals in chapter three, which required other identities to serve as proxies for nonvisible illnesses. I am less concerned with the compositional mechanics of Piazza’s score, although examining the musical structure is necessary at times to understand how the compositions drive the stage action. Instead, I am interested in how a score can disrupt the standard orders of time on stage when it conveys a neuroatypical perspective.

1 My use of “bodymind” continues the trend in disability studies to reject the cartesian mind/body split as an outdated model for understanding the dynamic relationship between embodiment and perception. In using this phrase, I am consciously thinking of Mark Johnson’s argument (2007) that “what we call ‘mind’ and what we call ‘body’ are not two things, but rather aspects of one organic process, so that all our meaning, thought, and language emerge from the aesthetic dimensions of this embodied activity” (1). Disability studies scholars will be more familiar with the term, which entered the field through Margaret Price’s “The Bodymind Problem and the Price of Pain” and was recently expanded in Sami Schalk’s Bodyminds Reimagined (2018).

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To explore this premise, I will first demonstrate how Piazza’s creators trace the musical’s genealogy through the dominant theory of the “integrated musical” theory, which conceptualizes a musical’s book, score, and choreography as working in unison to advance character and plot. Next, I propose Piazza is an exemplary model for Scott

McMillin’s critique (2006) of the supposedly “seamless” integrated musical’s failure to unify felt “difference” (1). My aim here is not only to clarify how Clara’s cognitive disability impacts Guettel’s score, but also to reveal Margaret’s unaddressed and nonvisible trauma. Just as Clara’s disability affects the score, Margaret’s traumatic encounter with Clara’s accident reshapes the book’s linear progression through time. To support this claim, I offer close readings of four musical numbers in Piazza that explain how

Guettel’s score alters the conventional effects generated by their dramaturgical placement: the “I Want” song, the Act I finale, the next-to-last scene, and the Act II reprise of the I Want song.

The “Integrated” Musical

Unlike European opera and operetta, which are entirely sung-through or connect numbers with a melodic recitative, in musical theatre songs must emerge from a spoken libretto. Accordingly, there are strategies for when and why these songs occur. The

“integrated musical,” which Scott McMillin defines as a musical in which “all elements of the show—plot, character, song, dance, orchestration, and setting—should blend together into a unity, a seamless whole,” is a distinctly American achievement (1).

Integrated musicals emerged from the rich revue and vaudeville performance circuit that dominated stages in the United States during the early twentieth century. Jerome Kern

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and Oscar Hammerstein II’s Show Boat (1927), about performers and dock workers on the Mississippi River showboat Cotton Blossom, was the first musical comedy where musical numbers were seamlessly integrated into the plot, although its songs were not necessarily character-driven or related to the given circumstance.

Before Show Boat, an evening at the theater usually contained individual skits or sketch comedy, dance numbers, and solo musical acts, which siloed the elements of integration instead of organizing them around a plotted narrative. Hammerstein’s score expanded attitudes about what music in the American theater could do to service a plot, and in 1943 Hammerstein returned to Broadway with an adaptation of Lynn Riggs’ play

Green Grow the Lilacs (1930) with a new writing partner named Richard Rodgers. The production, Oklahoma!, was heralded as the arrival of a fully integrated musical. With music by Rodgers and book and lyrics by Hammerstein, Oklahoma! was the first performance during which spectators witnessed a show whose songs were predicated on given circumstances, thus pushing the narrative forward. Hammerstein’s use of song as an integral component of storytelling launched Oklahoma! into unparalleled success and inaugurated Broadway’s “Golden Age,” so named because musicals “reflected both

‘delight in the apparently limitless opportunities America afforded for self-invention’ and, simultaneously, the country’s international status, power, prestige, diversity, national culture, and wartime anxieties” (Wollman 111).

Hammerstein describes his theory of integration as a “welding” of two talents into a single expression: a show that is equal parts craft of the composer/lyricist and the librettist. He writes: “This is the great secret of the well-integrated musical play. It is not so much a method as a state of mind, or rather a state for two minds, an attitude of unity”

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(15). That this “attitude of unity” emerges from an undefined “state of the mind” is productively open-ended: if there is no delineated mental “state” that a musical must convey, then the conveyance of nearly any mental state might be appropriate for a musical. Hammerstein’s only criterion is that a creative team executes the libretto and score in a “single expression” (15). That the famous librettist includes the caveat of “a state for two minds” indicates how creative differences and productive frisson might exist within a single work and gives us an opaque window into his creative relationships—

Hammerstein nearly always worked with partners. What happens when there are more than two writers on the creative team? Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, for example, boasts a book by Julie Taymor and Glen Berger, revisions by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, and music and lyrics by Bono and the Edge. Is there a state for five minds, as

Hammerstein might argue? Turn Off the Dark was largely panned as incoherent after it was subjected to an extensive series of re-writes before the show was “frozen” after writers agreed that material could not improve without a radical reconceptualization; its pained history suggests integration theory relies on a finite number of creators.

Broadway has come to rely on the integrated musical form for financial success.

Producer Jack Viertel puts it simply: “Opinions may differ on shows like Bloody Bloody

Andrew Jackson and Passing Strange, but their failure to find large, appreciative audiences has a lot to do with their formlessness. Audiences do like to be told a definite story in a compelling way” (5). Caroline Lavine, in Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy,

Network (2015), argues that formal qualities belong to both the aesthetic and the sociopolitical, and that “‘form’ always indicates an arrangement of elements—an ordering, patterning, or shaping” (3). Summarily defining the history of formalist

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interventions in literary, cultural, and performance studies (4–6), Lavine demonstrates how forms act as containers that demarcate difference (some forms are not like others); beget intersections with other forms (the limitations of one structure highlight the need for another); travel through different cultural spaces and social material (media accrues value as it plays in different social groups, and sometimes these values conflict); and enact political work (we must confirm or reject these values). This capacious definition of

“form” clarifies Viertel’s critique of formlessness. Following Lavine, Viertel’s successful integrated musical must have a distinct, singular shape from other musicals; be crafted in such a way that the individual arts of book, score, and choreography rely on each other for their full expression; have enough “universal” appeal to ensure financial stability while still presenting an individual positionality, or way of being in the world. If a formalist reading of compassion musicals includes both the social and the aesthetic, then it leads to the question: How does a social form like ableism structure our aesthetic experience of a musical? By answering this question, we begin to see how integrated musical’s structural reliance on the triple-threat is an intentional product of ableism.

Integration theory gained traction alongside Oklahoma! and Rodger and

Hammerstein’s popularity, although scholars have contested its use during the last sixty years as alternate forms—such as the “concept musical”—arose. Before Oklahoma! musicals were called “musical comedies,” and relied on the exceptional talents of performers who often broke the narrative frame to deliver their exceptional skills.

Mordden, in Beautiful Morning’ (1999), uses “musical play” to describe Oklahoma!’s impact on Broadway, where it prompted composers like Leonard Bernstein, Frank

Loesser, and Kurt Weill, to demonstrate new possibilities for music advancing the plot

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(88–93). Joseph Swain and John Lahr concur. By Swain’s estimation, Oklahoma!’s innovation is how the dialogue and music “interrupt” each other, which allows for the orchestra to continuously underscore the scene, and Lahr describes the musical play as

“an artful marriage of music and lyrics that traded in narrative (Swain 95; Lahr 84–85).

Noting the “absence of a systematic definition of integration,” Brian D. Valencia offers the most succinct articulation of the term as “the aspiration to seamless transitions from spoken book scenes into musical numbers and then back again, from the assurance of a logical cause-and-effect relationship between the dialogue and the songs over the full arc of a musical’s plot” (343, emphasis original). Valencia’s description of integration as

“aspirational” builds on McMillin’s argument that a musical’s book and score “crackle with difference” and therefore the integration model is inherently faulty (2). In his analysis, McMillin argues “Difference can be felt between the book and the numbers, between the songs and dances, between dance and spoken dialogue—and these are the elements that integration is supposed to have unified” (2, emphasis mine). If difference is

“felt,” we must consider what is causing the differences between the book and score more generally, and then in Piazza’s particular execution.

Conventional musical theatre dramaturgy would identify these differences as belonging to the libretto and score, and the heightened dramatic reality of a sung number in comparison to a spoken scene. In most musicals by writers like Rodgers and

Hammerstein, Sondheim, Schwartz, and Ahrens and Flaherty, librettos and scores are tied to specific bodyminds of a protagonist character who, unknowingly, structures our engagement with space and time within the world of the play. McMillin argues that such musicals have two orders of time: progressive time, by which he means the sequential

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movement between plot points, and lyric time, an insertion that suspends “the cause-and- effect progress of the plot” in favor of “principles of [musical] repetition” (McMillin 9).

This model reflects what Valencia calls an “outmoded” dictation that numbers either

“forward plot” or “illuminate character” (343). Limiting a musical number’s functionality to “two narrative-based alternatives,” Valencia contends, “stunts the theatrical imagination” by demanding a mimetic realism through an inherently non-realistic genre

(343).

While I agree with Valencia’s assessment that mimesis may limit the imaginative possibilities for the genre, it is predicated on the expectation of a nondisabled character, for whom lyric time is not realistic. Crip characters, however, may find solace, comfort, power, rejuvenation, or even naturalistic expression in the contemplative space of lyric time. Progressive time is deeply invested in compulsory able-bodiedness; characters are expected to hit musical marks with forward momentum throughout book and score.

Characters serve the plot. Most Broadway songs share the AABA musical structure: music of the first two As introduce then expand a melody and thought, B serves as an emotional and aural apex, bridging the argument of the first two As with the character’s conclusion, which arrives in the final A strain. McMillin observes that the AABA structure’s repetition “would be intolerable in conversation, but it is normal and even enjoyable in lyric and musical structure, that celebrates doing things again and again”

(32). Thus, lyric time is repetitive time, and the challenge of the integrated musical is to effortlessly transition between the two.

McMillin’s argument against the use of integration to describe the musical elides the productive tension between spoken dialogue and sung music. This approach

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contradicts the traditional methodologies of theater scholars such as Geoffrey Block, who proposes five “Principles of Integration”:

The songs advance the plot.

The songs flow directly from the dialogue.

The songs express the characters who sing them.

The dances advance the plot and enhance the dramatic meaning of the songs that precede them.

The orchestra, through accompaniment and underscoring, parallels, complements, or advances the action. (“Integration” 97––100)

Block’s argument for integration is structured through words that convey a sense of unified purpose and ease, like “flow,” “advance,” and “linear.” These principles of integration are rooted in a Wagnerian aesthetic of coherency, the concept of organic unity popular in nineteenth-century opera. James Leve similarly defines musical organicism as

“motivic development and strong thematic connections over the course of an entire composition” (5). Arthur Knight extends integration’s logic to aspects such as plot conflict and resolution, and tone, in Disintegrating the Musical, writing, “The cleverness, novelty, and apparent ease with which such difficult conjunctions or dissolves are created fuel the utopian feeling the musical conveys and provide the analog for how life would feel if all more ‘serious’ conflicts and contradictions could be similarly resolved” (15).

Together, Block, Leve, and Knight generate an image of an “organic” body that is composed of disparate elements but naturalized by these elements’ interrelated functions.

McMillan rejects this organicism, arguing that disjunction between spoken word and song can be productive, pleasurable even. He writes: “It takes things different from one another to be thought of as integrated in the first place, and I find that the musical

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depends more on the differences that make the close fit interesting than on the suppression of difference in a seamless whole” (2, emphasis mine). This approach rejects the totalizing discourse of integration in musical theatre scholarship that has followed

Rodgers and Hammerstein’s reflections on their work, calling it an act of

“suppression.” If integrated music presents the fantasy of an organic functioning body, then McMillin’s method of reading for “difference” sees the body of the musical as erratic, irregular, abnormal—disabled. Thus, an “aesthetic of disunification,” McMillin’s term that for the disconnection between song and score, is an alternate formulation of

Siebers’ disability aesthetic and a cripping of the integrated musical in scholarship. This

“tough” aesthetic “has the potential for resisting structure” and is “capable of turning the established pieties into song-and-dance routines fraught with social criticism” (29).

Siebers’ study of disability aesthetics primarily theorized modern art and visual culture; McMillan’s aesthetic of disunification suggests that Siebers’ notion of disability aesthetics is too passive for musical theatre. As a text, is a mistake to think only the book or score itself cause a theatregoer’s emotional response. Performers labor onstage to elicit feelings from their audiences; the moving body introduces a dynamic, material variable into the story, provoking feeling with every knowing aside or impromptu gesture. Given how musicals rely on live actors, a unidirectional analysis of disability aesthetics between spectator and art is not enough. To understand a musical’s aesthetic value, one must consider the book, score, and performance as a collective whole. In other words, the impact of one body on another connects performer and audience, performers onstage, and spectators with their peers as the world of the play is built, rehearsed, and performed.

Kristina Richardson reaches a similar conclusion in Difference and Disability in the

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Medieval Islamic World, in which she claims an orientation to aesthetics “reveals a dialectics of influence” between dominant and subjugated bodies (14).

To demonstrate how Piazza's disability aesthetic reveals an unexpectedly progressive orientation to neurodiversity given its traditionalist trappings, I first contend the show’s book and score diverge from conventional musicals because they are split between Margaret and Clara, respectively. This schism, or disunification, offers radically different arguments for how to experience The Light in the Piazza—one is an investment in linear narrative and time, the other is a privileging of emotional experience as a kind of valuable situated knowledge. Although I agree with Leon J. Hilton’s argument that

“neurodiversity and neurodivergence offer powerful new methodological possibilities for theatre and performance studies,” I will take up the 2005 original Broadway production of The Light in the Piazza to demonstrate that writers Craig Lucas and Adam Guettel use conventional forms of the integrated musical to “crip” the show rather than innovate new production techniques wholesale (Hilton 166). To make this argument I will turn to key moments in Piazza, using the script and score to model a cripistemology in musical theatre performance that offers an understanding of the interiority of neuroatypical characters like Clara.

Integration, Disability, and Piazza

Adam Guettel and Craig Lucas’ musical adaption The Light in the Piazza (2003) spent nearly 50 years in development. Guettel’s grandfather, Richard Rodgers (of

Rodgers and Hammerstein fame), purchased the rights to the stage adaptation of

Spencer’s novella after viewing the 1962 theatrical adaptation (Guy Green, dir.) starring

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Olivia de Havilland as “Meg” [Margaret], Yvette Mimieux as Clara, and George

Hamilton as Fabrizio. In an interview for the podcast Broadway Backstory, Guettel describes how his grandfather, and then his mother (Mary Rodgers, a composer best known for her 1960 musical Once Upon a Mattress), tried to make the story work but could not discern how to present a musical organized around a cognitively disabled girl

(Hines). And so, the rights to the musical eventually passed to him. Since Guettel owned the stage rights to The Light in the Piazza, he and book writer Craig Lucas were able to work for a longer period than is traditional for Broadway-bound shows precisely because they did not have a commercial producer exerting influence over the development of the material. This, crucially, allowed Guettel and Lucas to maintain artistic agency over the musical during its early stages of development (Hines, 00:18:40).

Adam Guettel is listed on Barry Singer’s August 1997 list of “True Believers in the Future of the Musical” in the New York Times as composers and librettists born in the late years of the Golden Age and therefore eschew contemporary pop/rock idioms of the megamusical, the movical, jukebox musical, and their ilk. James Leve invokes art film to classify the work of these writers as “art musicals.” Describing how they present an alternative to mainstream Broadway, which is ruled by what Steven Adler calls “the banality of theme-park sensibility,” Leve’s characterization of the art musical is not dissimilar to Mordden’s compassion musical (Adler 227). Leve writes: “Intellectually and musically challenging, [art musicals] appeal to the discriminating theatregoer by featuring an unusual story and a thought-provoking theme …. if anything on Broadway can be said to be ‘art for art’s sake’ it is these musicals …. They aspire to be on

Broadway but can rarely survive there” (287). Like the compassion musical, Leve’s

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classification of art musicals links form and content to question a production’s commercial viability. As we saw with the commercial pop/rock productions in the last chapter, not all compassion musicals are art musicals. Not every art musical is a compassion musical, although many do contend with disability, race, and sexuality in similar ways.

Leve’s classification of Guettel as an “art musical” composer throws Guettel’s work with relation to the integrated musical in sharp relief. Art musicals “favor a unified score” and “evince the writers’ postmodern sensibilities rather than express the optimistic point of view of Golden Age musicals,” by using the tools of artifice to “emulate the tradition of the integrated book musical” and eschew easy sentimentalism common in commercial Broadway (Leve 288). Guettel’s turn to a neuroatypical character is unsurprising, given his view that musicals are a marginalized, “contemptible pop culture field that gets no respect”—but he does not believe “musicals have gotten an unfairly old- fashioned reputation” (Singer). Guettel’s creative logic necessitates continuing to push and perfect the form by giving theatregoers material that seems at odds with their “old- fashioned” perception.

Despite these commentaries framing The Light in the Piazza as a traditional integrated musical—an homage to Broadway’s Golden Age by none other than Richard

Rodgers’ grandson himself—Piazza is a radical experiment in the form of the American stage musical. Other musicals, such as Anyone Can Whistle, Sweeney Todd, Next to

Normal, American Psycho, and even Dear Evan Hansen depict cognitive and psychosocial disabilities on stage but they are predicated on a deficit-oriented “mental illness” framework rather than parsing disability and disorder as separate from, or a part

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of, conceptual wellness and normative ideas of mental health. Piazza is unique in its presentation of Clara’s “specialness,” to borrow from her mother’s description, in two ways. First; Piazza evades the specific language of diagnosis with regards to Clara, choosing instead to have Margaret provide narrative evidence of Clara’s prior trauma.

Lucas and Guettel’s elliptical handling of Clara’s diagnosis is comparable to that of

Tobias in Sweeney Todd (1979; music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, book by Hugh

Wheeler). Tobias is scripted as a childlike young adult who ostensibly has an undisclosed cognitive disability. Mrs. Lovett acts as his surrogate mother but, as such, is unable to provide insights into his medical history.2 Second; together, Piazza’s book and score are a theatrical example of what Michael Bérubé calls an “intellectual disability chronotrope”: a narrative that “marks its relation to intellectual disability precisely by rendering intellectual disability as a productive and illuminating derangement of ordinary protocols of narrative temporality” (83). Put another way, Clara’s disability upends the normal protocols of progressive and lyric time in a musical, productively offering an alternative way of experiencing the narrative.

Bérubé characterizes the disability chronotrope in The Sound and the Fury as conveying Benjy Compson’s sense of time and narrative; the disability chronotrope yields a “textualization of that character’s intellectual disability such that the character’s

2 Like Piazza, Sweeney Todd is adapted from a literary text; in this case, the penny dreadful serial The String of Pearls: A Romance (1846-47). In the anonymously authored text Tobias Ragg is a “sane as any ordinary Christian need wish to be,” and the character who functions as a moral center for the tale (The String of Pearls, “Chapter 27”). Ragg was Todd’s assistant who is committed to an insane asylum on Peckham Rye, a park in south London, after publicly accusing Todd of murder. Chapter 27, “Tobias Attempts to Escape the Madhouse,” suggests that it is Tobias’ imprisonment and mistreatment in the asylum that drive him mad: “if by any ingenious process the human intellect can be toppled from its throne, certainly that process must consist in putting a sane person into a lunatic asylum” (The String of Pearls, “Chapter 27”). When audiences meet Tobias in Sondheim’s musical, he is coded as childlike innocent and cognitively disabled. He is then driven “mad” by the horrific discovery that his mother-figure, Mrs. Lovett, and Todd have been killing locals and baking their body meat into pies.

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sense of time and narrative so pervade and structures the novel that it can no longer be attributed to that character’s private stream of consciousness” (91). Intellectual disability chronotropes generate time-slips as the reader makes sense of a neuroatypical order of time and experience. The disability chronotrope is useful for understanding Piazza’s structure, which purposefully disintegrates the libretto and score, giving the book to

Margaret and the score to Clara. This effectively generates a theatrical experience in which a story is being told by able-minded woman in the tempo of a neuroatypical experience. Here I draw on Sami Schalk’s clear definition of “able-mindedness” to describe Margaret and her sensibilities. “By able-mindedness,” Schalk “means the socially constructed norm of mental capacity and ability that is typically posed in binary opposition to mental disability. Able-mindedness includes concepts such as rationality, reasonableness, sanity, intelligence, mental agility, self-awareness, social awareness, and control of thoughts and behaviors (Bodyminds Reimagined 61). Although the chronotrope conveys a neuroatypical experience it relies on able-mindedness to recognize it as such.

This unarticulated rule necessitates that the “disability chronotrope is predicated on an unambiguously fictional disability [that] poses the question, in the starkest of terms, of how to treat the most vulnerable humans among us” (Bérubé 103).

Book writer Craig Lucas and composer Adam Guettel have been outspoken about how their dispute as to who is the musical’s central protagonist yielded different approaches to the script and score. Lucas felt Spencer’s novella, as the show’s source material, clearly dictates Margaret is the protagonist. He describes the book as

“Margaret’s story” because “we only [understand] how to take on Clara’s yearning and possible disappointment through the mother’s eyes” (Hines 00:11:30). Guettel takes Clara

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as the heart of Piazza’s story, and he wrote the score with her character at the fore. He describes his approach as charting the emotional stakes of Clara’s relationship with

Fabrizio, saying, “The sound of losing somebody, of having a deep love torn from you— as she does sort of midway through the show—and the sound of finding that love—the ecstatic first bloom of that—is the same music; it’s just contextualized differently” (Hines

00:12:15). Guettel is describing the titular number of the show, “The Light in the Piazza,” which is heard as a motif throughout Act I before its full Act II arrangement, but he could easily be discussing the number “The Beauty Is,” which is first sung by Clara in Act I before Margaret’s reprise in Act II. If Lucas’ thesis is for a linear, neurotypical relationship to time in narrative, and Guettel’s dramatic hypothesis is that our emotional response to a given set of information changes over time with every recontextualization, then we begin to see how Margaret’s experience of time progressively slips into the past as she sings through a score organized around Clara’s experience of the world. The clear delineation between “Statutes and Stories,” the past and the present, Margaret sings of is erased as the musical is performed. This shift culminates in Margaret’s revisiting Clara’s song from the show’s opening moments, which completes the intellectual disability chronotrope.

As in Spencer’s novella, the stage adaptation of The Light in the Piazza is narrated by Margaret Johnson. Unlike Spencer’s work, however, the musical is not told in the present tense. Speaking in a series of asides to the audience from an undetermined time and place, Margaret oscillates between the narrative “present” with the audience and the narrative past-as-present of the musical’s primary plot as she recalls her trip to

Florence. This slippery co-mingling of time, place, and memory, formally called a

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“memory play,” was first introduced onstage by Tennessee Williams in his 1945 drama

The Glass Menagerie. Williams describes the world of his play as non-realistic because it stems from a particular body, because, “Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart” (3). This description could easily be ascribed to Lucas and Guettel’s musical, given how closely their own production note describing the world of the play echoes Williams’ language:

From scene to scene, the action in The Light in the Piazza is continuous; one world bleeds into another; characters walk from indoors to out and back in again; the effect intended is seamless, cumulative… The flow of emotions takes precedence over the literal: the world moves with the heart. (Lucas and Guettel iv)

The fluidity with which Lucas describes the world of Piazza was chiefly expressed through Michael Yergan’s scenic design and Christopher Akerlind’s lighting design. As characters moved from the Piazza to their hotel rooms, public museums to private apartments, from Florence to Rome to America, the world seamlessly transitioned around

Margaret’s narrative. Save for a few moments that I discuss below, Margaret drives the scene changes in this musical.

Tennessee Williams was reacting to the realist movement sweeping American theatre and utterly uninterested in the “straight realistic play with its genuine Frigidaire and authentic ice-cubes, its characters who speak exactly as its audience speaks, corresponds to the academic landscape and has the same virtue of photographic likeness”

(xix). Laura Wingfield, “crippled” by a childhood illness, and her mother Amanda, a

“little woman of great but confused vitality clinging frantically to another place and time,” are antecedents to Clara and Margaret Johnson (xiii). But if Amanda’s challenge is an inability to separate Laura’s reality from the desires she holds for her daughter, then

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Margaret poses the opposite problem: she is so afraid of the practicalities concerning her daughter’s disability that she nearly thwarts the very marriage she desires for Clara. None of these four women speak or appear in “photographic likeness”—their respective scripts use their tumultuous emotional landscapes to camouflage each daughters’ disability.

Williams’ production note clarifies that Laura’s “defect need not be more than suggested onstage” and Amanda is silent, whereas Clara’s parents clearly articulate her disability in Lucas’ libretto. Kelli O’Hara (Clara in the Original Broadway Cast) downplayed her disability so much in performances that many viewers initially did not understand the girl has a traumatic brain injury. In an interview with the New York Times,

O’Hara draws Clara in contrast to her understanding of disability as a material condition:

“She’s a very fictional person already,” Ms. O’Hara said. “From all the studying I’ve done, a person who suffered the trauma she did would likely be overweight, might drool or say inappropriate things like, ‘Let me get in your underwear.’ I wanted to find something believable but not repellent, so she could be loved. So I couldn’t really use any developmentally challenged people as models, and as a result, she at first seemed totally normal.” (“Characters Who Are More Than the Sum of Their Tics”)

O’Hara has made a career of playing precocious ingenues and confident leading ladies in grandly-scaled revival productions of Golden Age classics such as South Pacific, The

King and I, and Kiss Me, Kate, so the role of Clara fits easily within her acting profile.

Her candid commentary about Clara, however, is surprising for its ableist tone; by suggesting that the character would be unlovable if she were to simulate Clara’s disability more faithfully, O’Hara tarries along the threshold of the “aura of disability” I discussed with regards to Menagerie’s Laura in chapter two. For O’Hara, Clara is situated somewhere between “believable” and “repellent”; as an entirely fictional construct; Clara

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is an idea of what disability is an the abstract rather than a material reality.3 When Katie

Rose Clarke took over the role of Clara following O’Hara’s departure she simulated

Clara’s disability in more obvious ways.4 Clarke’s performance included paralinguistic features such a pulsing her fingers against her temples when confused, arm flapping, and other nuanced self-stimulatory behaviors that telegraphed the character’s emotional or sensory overload. Eight years younger than O’Hara, and with a considerably brighter voice, Clarke consciously played the role with physical traits closer to the character’s presumed mental age of twelve (“Katie Clarke on InnerVIEWS”). Clarke’s choices emphasized the sharp contrast between Clara’s verbal play in the score and Margaret’s attempts to precisely control the narrative in Piazza’s book.

Margaret is the narrator in both the novella and its stage adaptation, and the musical’s libretto is bound to her cognition: we experience the plot when and how

Margaret remembers each event. Even so, Clara’s cognition evades the formal constraints of the memory play. Clara’s musical motifs anchor the musical’s score, destabilizing her mother’s authority as reliable narrator and impressing her distinctive voice and worldview upon us. To understand how Piazza seriously engages with a disability aesthetic, a kind of transference of bodily feeling, is to take this musical’s slippery relationship to time seriously. Jaclyn I. Pryor theorizes time slips as “moments in live performance in which normative conceptions of time fail, or fall away, and the spectator

3 It is consequential that O’Hara played Franca, Fabrizio’s tempestuous sister-in-law during Piazza’s pre- Broadway engagements. As the sadder but wiser girl, Franca acts as Clara’s foil: self-assured, full-throated, mature, and world-weary. She and Clara, as Ann M. Fox notes, converge as opposite sides of the abbandonata in Act I’s “The Joy You Must Feel,” and Act 2’s “Octet” (783-784). Fears of abandonment drive both women to “Hysteria,” in the score, although Clara is the only character who is coded as “hysterical.” 4 O’Hara departed the show on 4 December 2005 and Clarke began her run as Clara on 15 December. Ensemble member and Clara understudy Jennifer Hughes covered the week between the two. Clarke did not immediately take over for O’Hara because she was completing her last semester of college.

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or artist experiences an alternative, or queer, temporality” (8–9). Pryor’s conceptualization of linear or “straight” time is primarily invested in a queer theoretical tradition but her ontological framing of performance as “[exceeding] the present by calling past (and sometimes future) histories into being” is undoubtedly a form of what

Alison Kafer calls “crip time.”5 I noted how Kafer describes crip time as a kind of “flex time” that compels us to reimagine our notion of what “can and should happen” in a given period in the previous chapter. In the theater, the clock is bent to the bodies of performers onstage; in a memory play, time moves with the heart’s physical beats and emotional yearnings. The Light in the Piazza’s narrative clock continually bends to

Clara’s bodymind as Margaret returns to and measures time against her daughter’s traumatic brain injury.

Piazza’s Traumatic Brain Injury

Before continuing further, I must note that Clara’s mental disability is not an exacting opposite of able-mindedness. She may not portray all of Schalk’s characteristics for able-mindedness simultaneously, but she does present them individually throughout the show. For example; during “Passeggiata,” Clara exhibits contextual understanding and a dexterous associative ability when learning Italian from Fabrizio; she intuits his meaning during his search for English words to describe her skin:

FABRIZIO: YOUR MILK … YOUR MILK IS … Eh. CLARA: My milk is what? What milk? FABRIZIO: NOT MILK, IS LIKE MILK CLARA: LIKE SNOW?

5 The term “straight play” is frequently used to describe a non-musical theatrical production, with musical theatre being the alternative. One might wonder if musicals, ipso facto, are “queer plays.” In this way, compassion musicals are always already crip/queer.

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FABRIZIO: EH SÌ, BUT NO I KNOW SNOW (Lucas and Guettel 30)

When Fabrizio begins pointing to her body, muttering “Come si dice,” “How do you say?”, Clara bursts out in a flash of apprehension, “MY SKIN!” (31). Clara’s linguistic ability is expanded further during Act II’s “Octet,” in which she capably learns the Latin required for a Catholic wedding ceremony (60–62). In a similar rush of understanding,

Clara breaks through the slow, sultry chorus her mother and the Naccarellis sing with a lengthy verse of Latin, performed in a recitative that pushes against the octet’s tempo

(62). On the Broadway cast recording Clara, played by O’Hara, finishes the verse with a triumphant “Ha!”, boasting her accomplishment, but this is interjection is not present in the script or the score. Clarke, O’Hara’s successor, played this interjection as well, which suggests the line read was an intentional addition to convey Clara’s capability for growth even before Margaret suggests its possibility later in the act.

It is tempting to read disability in Piazza as a story solely about the disclosure of cognitive impairment, for Spencer’s novella and Lucas’ libretto hinge on the danger of

Clara’s disability being discovered. This pathway is taken in the few published scholarly works on the Piazza adaptation. Ann M. Fox pairs Clara with Next to Normal’s Diana

Goodman in her chapter “Scene in a New Light: Monstrous Mothers, Disabled

Daughters, and the Performance of Feminism and Disability in The Light in the Piazza

(2005) and Next to Normal (2008),” which considers “monster-majority” representations of disability and its messy familial entanglements. Fox offers a compelling argument that the women “embody a dramatic dilemma: unable to function as disabled women in the real world, they must look to caregivers (usually in the figure of potential spouses) to support or complete them. Without such a hope, their end is colored as tragic; with it,

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they have successfully reinscribed overcoming” (776). I will not consider Next to Normal at length in this chapter because Diana Goodman is fundamentally unlike Clara. Clara’s cognitive disability is the result of a traumatic brain injury—a kick in the head from a horse during her twelfth birthday party. Diana’s is precipitated by the death of her infant son.

Margaret describes Clara as a “special child” but, for all her Southern candor, she never relays her daughter’s explicit diagnosis. Diana, in contrast, is characterized through her multiple diagnoses by several characters: so many that the (re)calibration of treatments and their expected impacts on her wellness and functioning drive much of the plot forward. Fox (785-86) suggests that Clara’s future will be a repetition of Margaret’s own unhappy marriage, a choice Clara makes when faced with the confining options of marriage or medical institutionalization, and praises Diana’s “disabled maternity as a kind of successful motherhood” (786) although she never considers Diana as the more apt template for Clara’s future. This is especially surprising, given Clara’s articulation, “I

THINK IF I HAD A CHILD/ THEN I WOULDN’T FEEL LIKE ONE” during “The

Beauty Is” (Lucas and Guettel 15). Neurotypical Margaret, concerned with “Statues and

Stories” and social graces, is an unsuccessful, “monstrous” mother in Fox’s reading.

Clara’s ability to flexibly meet others regardless of formal conventions, demonstrated by her empathetic plea to “Say It Somehow” works against Fox’s pessimistic reading of disability within marital structures that “cannot truly countenance the presence of disability being part of, or even reshaping what we think of, as a happy ending” (786).

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Fox is not alone in her reading of Piazza’s ending. Leve compares the show’s conclusion to South Pacific (1949), in which Nellie’s racial prejudice is never explicitly resolved with Emile. Leve describes the ending’s “happy façade” thusly:

… the insightful reader understands that the marriage will inevitably lead to disaster, at least for the two young lovers. When Fabrizio’s overbearing father inevitably discovers that Clara is not a fully functioning adult woman, he will surely insinuate himself into his son’s life. Margaret fails to comprehend, or she chooses to ignore, the likely consequences of leaving her daughter in his clutches. Clara will be expected to raise several children, but she will not be able to fulfill her role as mother, for she lacks the emotional maturity to do so. (291)

The possessive pronoun “his” implies that Margaret leaves Clara in Signor Naccarelli’s

“clutches,” eliding the will and agency Fabrizio demonstrates throughout the musical. I am disquieted by Leve’s reading in his textbook, written for musical theatre classrooms, because it fundamentally misreads several characters. Naccarelli may be a philanderer, but he is not cruel; nor is Fabrizio a weak-willed son—he bends Naccarelli to his will through impassioned pleas and threats of self-harm during his demand to marry Clara.

Leve’s framing of Margaret as uncomprehending or ignorant flattens the progressive orientation to disability she explores during the second act. Finally, his using a possible reproductive future to police Clara’s desire is the same ableist argument her father Roy makes during the second act. After all, it is not a foregone conclusion that Clara must have children; Fabrizio’s sister-in-law Franca has been married to Giuseppe for several years and is childless.6

6 While it is never explicitly stated that Franca and Giuseppe are unable to have children, Franca sings about an empty bassinet and bare nursery in her contemplative Act I song “The Joy You Feel” (Lucas and Guettel 34–35). Clara uses this knowledge against Franca during a fight in the second act. When Franca kisses Fabrizio in front of Clara, Clara retaliates, asking, “HERE IS YOUR HUSBAND/ HERE IS YOUR WIFE / YOU SHOULD BE STANDING SIDE BY SIDE / DON’T YOU HAVE A HOUSE? / WHERE ARE YOUR BABIES?” (Lucas and Guettel 64).

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Fox also would find support in Marcuse’s resistance of the happy ending, which he describes as a superimposed, “administered unification” that damages an already synthetic sense of artistic immediacy. Acknowledging the chasm between art and everyday life, art offers the promise of liberation but “the fulfillment of this promise is not within the domain of the art” (46). His argument frames “Authentic” arts as being aware they cannot offer the false promise of the happy end because “such a promise would be refuted by the historical truth” (47). If reality “fractures” artistic mimesis, as

Marcuse suggests, then musicals must necessarily reject the happy end or else reveal to spectators its pretense of accurately reflecting the world.

Piazza models many unhappy marriages that encourage us to retain a degree of skepticism about Clara and Fabrizio’s long-term marital bliss, but these examples elide the particularities of the young couple’s relationship. Fox is correct in that Clara develops in relation to caretakers who offer support (such as her mother, Margaret) or “complete” her (as Fabrizio appears to). Even so, I cannot help but wonder if Fox’s argument that marriage is an “incomplete and unsatisfying [fate] in a world that can brook no other alternatives” is an accidental reiteration of sex-negative responses to the cognitively disabled, given how Fabrizio’s final musical number is a sung response, in English no less, to Clara’s worries that he does not “see” her. (Fox 787; Lucas and Guettel 78–79). Is it possible that Fabrizio does not mind her cognitive disability, or that he finds her neuroatypicality appealing? Or that Clara is more self-aware in performance than the script suggests? Clara shows him her scar during their first meeting; he calms her at her request; and he has seen her have a tempestuous meltdown. We cannot therefore assume the language barrier between Fabrizio and Clara completely covers over his ability to

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understand her as a disabled woman, especially when his receptive English skills are excellent.

Piazza’s curative arc subverts expectations that the character who needs to be restored to wellness is the disabled character. Although Clara is the character with cognitive impairments, the musical’s narrative does not rely on the propulsion towards a

“cure”—a “will she or won’t she become ‘normal’ again” that drives musicals such as

Jeanine Tesori and Brian Crawley’s Violet (1997 Off-Broadway, 2014 Broadway).

Instead, I understand the musical’s structure as a meditation on the after-effects of trauma. Petra Kuppers (2003) argues that, “Trauma refers to a rupture: the word can both pertain to a physical injury, the effects of a blow on soft tissue, for example, and to a psychic phenomenon—the inability to narrativize, to integrate an event into one’s personality, one’s lifestory” (88). Margaret’s desperate attempts to integrate Clara’s acquired disability into her own “lifestory” as a mother, and reckon with guilt, is structured through Clara’s own elliptical “inability to narrativize” through the score.

Clara tells us this frankly in her Act II aria, singing, “I’M NO GOOD AT STATUES

AND STORIES, I’VE TRIED” (Guettel 112–13). Jeffrey C. Alexander describes trauma scripts being “performed in the theatre of everyday collective life” (4).

Given Margaret’s unique relationship with us as the audience, as a narrator in our own time, Piazza arguably reflects collective anxiety about the traumatic loss of ability through a narrative about her individual experience of an event: in this case, Margaret’s experience of Clara’s accident. This thesis rests upon the Lucas and Guettel’s oblique references to trauma, which I understand as a lay sense of trauma in which traumas are

“naturally occurring events that shatter an individual or collective actor’s sense of well-

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being” (Hinds; Alexander 7). Clara’s injury remakes her bodymind, but it “shatters”

Margaret’s “wellbeing” in the sense that she cannot find a way to forgive herself for the accident, thereby moving forward and allowing Clara to grow too. Cathy Caruth argues trauma is “not locatable in the simple violent or original event in an individual’s past, but rather in the way its very unassimilated nature – the way it was precisely not known in the first instance – returns to haunt the survivor later on” (Unclaimed Experience 3–4).

Caruth could be describing how Clara’s injury haunts Margaret throughout the musical, unincorporable and disintegrated.

I am not invested in comparing Margaret’s sense of trauma to Clara’s, partly because this question falls outside of knowable information within the script and score.

Given that a central argument of this dissertation is that a disability aesthetic shapes the execution of the genre, and how the book and musical are split between two characters in this musical, the material impacts of Clara’s traumatic brain injury become easier to apprehend because we see Margaret experiencing them in narrative time while Clara does in lyric time. In this way, Piazza presents a mode of visceral learning—a form of artistic experiences that Mark Johnson argues provide “heightened, intensified, and highly integrated experiences of meaning, using all of our ordinary resources for meaning- making” (xiii).

The “I Want” song: “The Beauty Is”

Wandering alone through the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy, Clara Johnson considers “what the beauty is” in her strange surroundings (Lucas and Guettel 14–15).

Holding key works such as da Vinci’s The Annunciation, Giotto’s Ognissanti Madonna,

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and Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, the Uffizi’s fertile mothers provide the backdrop for

Clara’s first solo number in Light in the Piazza. Clara, Margaret repeatedly reminds the audience, is not “quite as she seems” (12). Instead of being moved by the renowned masterworks Clara is surrounded by, she finds “The Beauty Is” in a sense of shared humanity she feels with people totally unknown to her; this recognition of familiarity gives her occasion to pause and sing. The I Want song is designed to familiarize the audience with a protagonist’s motivations and desires. This serves two key roles: the first being that it establishes a vocabulary for the narrative arc that will unfold onstage, and the second is it emotionally bonds the audience with the protagonist, so they too desire the character’s success. Clara’s I want song, more than any song in Piazza’s score, helps us see how disability inverts traditional components of storytelling in the musical theatre genre, thereby making crip/queer bodyminds more accessible.

There are few unifying characteristics that hold true across all American musicals, as the formal variety between critically acclaimed and commercially successful

Broadway shows demonstrates. Even so, there are some commonalities. In The Secret

Life of the American Musical, Jack Viertel perceives that, “There are no inviolable rules for the creation of enduring, popular musicals, possibly except this one. The hero has to want something that’s hard to get, and to go after it come what may. The sooner the audience understands this, the better. The I Want song is the mark of an active hero” (53).

Most successful tend to follow the conventional structure of rising and falling action punctuated by a climax, a dramatic arc mapped by the German playwright Gustav

Freytag in Die Technik des Dramas (1863) and now more commonly referred to as

“Freytag’s Triangle.” The I Want song incites the rising action and persuades the

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audience to root for the protagonist. Keeping in mind that the score is, by Guettel’s description, “Clara’s,” it is significant to note that only Clara has a proper I Want song in

The Light in the Piazza. By Viertel’s definition, this marks her as the musical’s hero, even if Lucas’ libretto is more closely aligned with Margaret.

Clara’s I Want song, entitled “The Beauty Is,” builds Piazza’s cripistemology in three ways: scripting beauty as a disability aesthetic linking form and content with bodily feeling, precipitating the plot’s inciting incident during the rising action, and offering a grammar of comparison for Margaret to return to late in the musical’s second act. The art critic Clive Bell reasons that “to make ‘beauty” the object of the aesthetic emotion, we must give to the word an over-strict and unfamiliar definition,” namely, its formal characteristics (4). Given Siebers’ articulation of disability aesthetics as a circuit of feeling between bodies, we might think Bell’s concept of “aesthetic emotion” redundant; doing so would elide the careful crafting of the aesthetic circuit itself. Guettel’s score has

Clara articulate three interconnected experiences of “beauty”:

AND THE BEAUTY IS I STILL MEET PEOPLE I KNOW […] AND THE BEAUTY IS I STILL MEET PEOPLE LIKE ME […] AND THE BEAUTY IS WHEN YOU REALIZE WHEN YOU REALIZE SOMEONE COULD BE LOOKING FOR A SOMEONE LIKE YOU (Lucas and Guettel 14–15)

Each time Clara repeats the phrase she draws visual and emotional connections between herself and the tourists that surround her in the Uffizi museum; this imaginative space extends into the audience of the Lincoln Center Vivian Beaumont Theater to include

Broadway’s tourists taking in the show. Clara’s ability to know strangers demonstrates an

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empathetic ability rooted in basic personhood; this is enlarged by her understanding that these strangers, however, different, are “like” herself: she narrates a connection that to the unknown people frozen in the paintings surrounding her in the gallery and their visitors.

Guettel’s lyrics verge on the metatheatrical here, for in Clara’s growing sense of recognition that she might bond with the gallery’s visitors through their shared act of viewing art she obliquely describes the work of her audience.

Clara’s realization that “someone could be looking for someone like you” underscores the formal aesthetic beauty of the musical’s plot structure. This is doubled in the action onstage: as Clara sings the line Fabrizio is scripted to enter upstage, looking for her. In this way, “The Beauty Is” is conflated with the “I Want” of the song: the acknowledgment that Clara is valued and desirable just as she is. This is in line with

Siebers’ observation of how “Disability aesthetics [embrace] beauty that seems by traditional standards to be broken, and yet it is not less beautiful, but more so, as a result”

(Disability Aesthetics 3). Clara receives this acknowledgment from her lover Fabrizio almost instantaneously, but her journey towards receiving a similar recognition from her mother (and realizing this for herself) scaffolds the long dramatic arc of the show.

The enunciating force of Clara’s “I Want” is punctuated throughout the number by Clara’s physical performance. Throughout “The Beauty Is” she mimes the hand- extension gestures in the gallery paintings portraying Mary’s Annunciation, the biblical story detailing a visitation upon Mary in which the angel Gabriel informs her of her divine pregnancy. Following Fox, we must not confuse Mary’s fiat, or accepting celebration of God’s will as a blessing, with Clara’s own desire to be a mother, despite the intense overlay of Christian imagery complicates that readings of the final verse:

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THIS IS WANTING SOMETHING THIS IS PRAYING FOR IT THIS IS HOLDING BREATH AND KEEPING FINGERS CROSSED THIS IS COUNTING BLESSINGS THIS IS WONDERING WHEN I’LL SEE THAT BOY AGAIN (Lucas and Guettel 15)

Since Clara sings these last lines of verse as Fabrizio enters upstage, looking for her in the museum, it is easy to read their reconnection as serendipitous or even fate. What we must remember, however, is that Clara’s expression of wanting throughout her number does not explicitly reveal a desire for a romantic partner. Her articulation of beauty in

“still meet[ing] people like [her],” is immediately qualified by parental and familial relationships: “EVERYONE’S A MOTHER HERE IN ITALY/ EVERYONE’S A

FATHER OR A SON” (14–15). Like the Madonnas painted in the old tradition, Clara’s gestures double the artwork hanging on the museum walls as she sings. She is there,

“wanting,” “praying,” crossing fingers and “counting blessings” to meet someone who understands her. Thus, the “in spite of” catalog Fox uses to describe Clara’s decision to marry mischaracterizes Clara’s central desire in the musical as always having been romantic, when Clara’s given desire is to have “SOMEONE LOOKING FOR A

SOMEONE LIKE YOU” (15, emphasis mine). As I will discuss later, her word selection gains significance at the end of second act, in a scene that follows “Clara’s Interlude.”

Act I Finale: “Say It Somehow”

Despite Margaret’s best attempts to thwart the blossoming romance, Clara and

Fabrizio declare their love for each other at the end of the first act in their finale, “Say It

Somehow.” Functionally, the purpose of an Act I finale is to bring the performance to a new plot and musical height that ends just before a satisfactory resolution: a cliffhanger

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or new inciting incident convinces the audience they must return for the second act. Act I finales are significant narrative moments, but they are usually commercially appealing songs too. Following the tradition of Golden Age musicals, solo or duet finales are designed to have standalone appeal so that they might enter the popular music charts. My informal survey of normatively structured integrated musicals suggests that Act I finale songs have one of three dramaturgical purposes: they help merge separate characters towards a unified narrative, like Les Misérables’ (1987) “One Day More”; offer a commentary on the thematic importance of the plot, as with “Till We Reach That Day” in

Ragtime (1998); or function as a major moment of transformation in which our protagonist experiences an event or revelation that sends them down a different path, like

Effie’s Dreamgirls (1981) powerhouse, “And I Am Telling You.” “Say it Somehow” is a combination that brings together Clara and Fabrizio explicitly as lovers, comments on the theatrical device of bilingualism, and is also the threshold of revelation for Clara. Alone and undressed with Fabrizio, Clara experiences her first kiss and comes to see herself as a woman.

The structure of Act I, scene 9, “The Hotel Room,” is unique in Piazza because it is the only time in the play that Clara and Margaret’s plot arcs are temporally aligned.

The scene is a declaration of love, which fulfils of at least one aspect of her I want song—being “known” by “that boy,” Fabrizio (47–49; 15). If we read “The Beauty Is” as an I want song that expresses desire for a romantic relationship, then this number is plotted as the climax in Clara’s narrative. If, however, we understand her desires as being for recognition, apprehension, and understanding, as I suggest in the previous section, then the number is a moment of transition between the play’s rising action and conflict

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stages in the conventional Aristotelian arc. This pushes Clara’s actual climax into Act II, thus preserving her character’s momentum through the show’s intermission. The dramaturgy of the memory play format discourages reading this number as the apex of

Clara’s storyline because Margaret’s disclosure of Clara’s disability brackets her daughter and Fabrizio’s declaration of love, which immediately gives the audience information about Clara and Fabrizio that neither character possesses.

For Margaret, whose plot arc is predicated on the maintenance or disclosure of

Clara’s secret, the scene presents a partial telling. Throughout the act Margaret suggests in asides that her daughter is “not quite as seems. She’s very young for her age,” and tries repeatedly to tell the Naccarellis but stops herself (12). At the very moment she is about to divulge Clara’s diagnosis, Fabrizio reaches out to touch Margaret’s hand and she wonders, from the stage directions, “How in the world can she hurt these people’s feelings?” (38, emphasis original). This stage direction editorializes her reaction, but the actor playing Margaret must find a way to play the moment as a conscious self-silencing.

Margaret is forced to disclose Clara’s disability in a direct address to the audience immediately following Act I, Scene 8’s number “Hysteria,” when Clara is overwhelmed and has an emotional meltdown in public square:

MARGARET: It’s always so difficult … Roy and I don’t even discuss it anymore, it’s just a fact of life, like the weather … When Clara was twelve, we rented a Shetland pony for her birthday party, and … the pony kicked … her … The doctors told us that she would … her mental and emotional capabilities would not develop normally, and, but her body would continue to develop so … If the Naccarellis find out, she’ll be smashed up for good. We have to get out of here. First thing. (Lucas and Guettel 46-8)

Given Margaret’s control as auteur of the libretto, “Hysteria” reinforces that the score is not controlled by the book—the rupture of Clara’s chromatic high A♭ as she hits the

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second syllable of “MUSEO!” pushes the orchestra out of 4/4 “common time” and into

3/4 “waltz time.” This destabilizes the score’s regular treatment of Clara and Margaret as

Clara echoes the vocal line of Fabrizio’s Act I “Passeggiata” (Guettel 82–83). “Hysteria” presents a tonal problem of imbalance and unrest, which “crips” the principal harmony.

Music theorist Joseph N. Straus describes imbalance and unrest as “disruptive and potentially disabling events that must be contained, abnormalities abnormalities [sic] that must be normalized” (49). When Margaret calms Clara the score and orchestra revert to common time (84, measure 72). Having to acknowledge the public spectacle and dynamic shift in tone, Margaret gives a half-confession, revealing Clara appears twenty- six but is mentally younger, and then escapes to the hotel bar.

Margaret’s articulation of Clara “not develop[ing] normally” is significant because it leaves open the possibility of development. At no point in the libretto is Clara described as having an arrested, or stalled development, which would effectively frame her as a perpetual child, a girl of twelve, regardless of how she may appear. Abnormal could mean delayed or slowed, and indeed, an optimistic reading of the libretto presents opportunities for this interpretation. In Act I, scene 6, after Franca upsets Clara by suggesting that Fabrizio will one day be unfaithful to her, Clara demonstrates an awareness that she is beginning to have a—for want of a better word—“meltdown.” She races to Fabrizio’s arms:

FABRIZIO: Are you all right? … What’s the matter? CLARA: Look at me? FABRIZIO: Yes, che bella. CLARA: Just look at me? FABRIZIO: Of course. (Calming her) Shhh, shhh. You are fine. (Lucas and Guettel 38–39)

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In performance, Bartlett Sher directed the actors playing Clara to assertively cross downstage directly to Fabrizio, ignoring Margaret, and assertively cupping her hands around his face, all while maintaining eye-contact (Fig. 4-1). Fabrizio misreads her intention at first, thinking she is looking for a compliment confirming her beauty: Clara’s soft, but insistent correction silences him and instructs him how to help calm her. It is only then that Margaret and the audience sees that Clara is not only learning how to adapt, but also how to build a care network beyond her immediate family.

Figure 4-1. Fabrizio (Aaron Lazaar) calms Clara (Katie Rose Clarke) following an upsetting at the Naccarelli house; still captured from the 15 June 2006 Live at Lincoln Center PBS broadcast.

Margaret’s disclosure invites spectators to skeptically judge the lush romanticism of “Say It Somehow” as a manipulative creative scoring, given that it immediately follows the revelation that Clara has a cognitive impairment. This supposition would be an extension Margaret’s parental ableism. Having just admitted Clara has abnormal

“capabilities” through a direct address, Margaret primes the audience to watch the couple’s first (and only) love duet through her eyes. Indeed, the musical number is

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bookended by Margaret’s direct address and then her reentry following the song, where she discovers Clara in bed with Fabrizio. Given that Clara asks Fabrizio to calm her, which he does without complaint or question, and she then uses his score as a coping mechanism to forestall her “Hysteria,” we cannot assume either lover is completely guileless. Eschewing traditional language, in “Say it Somehow” they use their bodies to convey emotion and make meaning:

CLARA AH, WE’LL PLAY A GAME AND YOU TRACE IT ON MY SKIN FABRIZIO: SAY IT SOMEHOW, SOMEHOW LET’S BEGIN DO IT SOMEHOW SOMEHOW YOU CAN SHOW ME I KNOW THAT YOU KNOW ME AH … (Lucas and Guettel 48–49)

“Say It Somehow” codes the simplicity with which each character approaches their love through significant portions of the song in unison, separated by an octave. In musical comedy the primary couple’s love song often involves contrapuntal harmonies or wordplay to signal characters are figuratively and literally in harmony with each other, but Guettel’s score gives way to long melismas as the couple attempts to “say it somehow.”7

Susan Langer argues that music is the presentation of feeling, which she describes as “everything that can be felt, from physical sensation, pain and comfort, excitement and repose, to the most complex emotions, intellectual tensions, or the steady feeling-tones of human life” (15, emphasis original). Following Langer, when words fail the couple and they begin to sing vowel sounds (“AH”) they provide audiences access to their

7 Classic examples include “Ten Minutes Ago,” “Til There Was You,” “A Heart Full of Love,” “All I Ask of You,” “The Next Ten Minutes,” and “As Long As You’re Mine”; more contemporary examples that play with the form include “Before and After You/One Second and a Million Miles,” “Love is an Open Door,” and “You Matter to Me.”

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sensorium. Mark Johnson describes this mind-body connection of live music thusly:

“When a listener becomes imaginatively engaged in the development of these musical contours, that person’s experience has the felt quality of the music… the engaged listener experiences (in their own feeling body-mind) that dramatic tension” (239). Johnson makes his argument that music is a mind-body experience that connects performer and audience by using Judy Garland’s performance in the famous movie musical, The Wizard of Oz (1939 MGM). Although he does not state it outright, Johnson’s use of “Somewhere

Over the Rainbow” points to the major stumbling block of music-as-embodied knowledge in the musical: audiences tend to read the emotion of the song through given lyrics and character situation. Guettel’s “Say It Somehow” evades this interpretive challenge by only providing elliptical language that evades common, but imprecise, emotion words such as “love,” ultimately breaking free from language altogether. The final twenty-five measures are wordless but move across four tempo changes in rippling arpeggios. Composer Roger Sessions characterizes this kind of rapid musical movement in meter as having “the most obvious and essential of its origins in the movements of breathing … the sense of effort, preparation, suspense, which is the psychological equivalent of the up-beat, finds its prototype in the act of inhalation” (108; qtd. in

Johnson 237). As Clara and Fabrizio learn the physical language of love their breathing changes, impacting the tempo, the musicians playing the score, and the audience receiving the music. Following Sessions, hearing patrons in the theatre are psychologically and physically linked to Clara and Fabrizio as they sing through their melismas. The work of mid-twentieth-century music theorists united musical performance to the body and affect drove the integrated musical, and particularly fostered

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connections between the book and score. We can see its continued effect in contemporary art musicals like Piazza.

Significantly, Guettel’s score deviates from most Golden Age musicals in its lack of a “conditional” or hypothetical love song. Carousel’s “If I Loved You” is described as a “Conditional Love Song” by Viertel (74–79) and as a “Hypothetical” love duet-turned

“Hate Song” by Wolf (Changed for Good 197–98) but both names share a common definition for this conventional song type in the American stage musical, which Wolf describes as a duet “in which two characters who are (or who will be) in love deny it or avoid it, or disagree, argue, or claim to hate each other” (Changed for Good 197). Despite

Piazza’s roots in Golden Age composition, the musical does not have a hypothetical love/hate song between the central couple Clara and Fabrizio. Instead, “Say It Somehow” functions as an unconditional love song in that neither character imposes judgements or requests; they simply acknowledge and accept the other’s way of being in the world. The song uses Fabrizio’s poor English to structure the desire to make their feelings and intentions known to one another.

“The Beauty Is”: A Mother’s Reprise

When “The Beauty Is” is given a full reprisal, Margaret sings the number, not

Clara. Musical reprisals remind audiences of a character’s specific motivating desires, which can triumphantly underscore or ironically undercut the current narrative action. A reprise is a restatement or musical echo of a song later in the score. Dramaturgically, reprises serve a couple of purposes: when sung by a different character than the original number, a reprise links emotional states between the two characters; when the same

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character sings her reprise, it usually signals her transformation by using the same melody but with a different emotion or lyrics. Optimistic Act I songs are commonly reprised in a darker iteration during the second act. Slower tempos, minor keys, and

“opting down” to sing a chord’s root note instead of the note at the top of the rising melody are common signals of a character’s emotional reversal or hard-earned wisdom.

Margaret’s reprisal of “The Beauty Is” is a departure from typical reprisals of I

Want songs, which are almost exclusively tied to the character who first sings the number. Much in the way leitmotifs are linked to individual characters in cinema scores, I

Want songs provide a character shorthand that is reprised either verbally onstage or by the orchestra during significant “book scenes” or scene transitions. It makes little sense, for example, for someone other than My Fair Lady’s Eliza Doolittle to reprise “Wouldn’t

It Be Loverly,” or for another Ozian to appropriate Elphaba’s fantasy of “The Wizard and

I” in Wicked. Even so, The Light in the Piazza deviates from this convention late in the second act, when Margaret reveals the story of how Clara acquires her disability.

Although Margaret spends much of musical trying to disclose Clara’s disability to the Naccarelli family (and the musical’s spectators), the audience does not receive the full tale until Clara frankly asks her mother why people avoid her gaze. Margaret does not answer her daughter directly; instead, she slips out of narrative time and addresses the audience:

“No one with a dream should come to Italy, no matter how dead and buried you think it is—Italy—this is where Italy will get you. You forget. It’s all happening again, I am doing it again, I’ve done it, the same as that day, … Clara and her friends were leading the pony around in the back yard, I was there, and the phone rang, I ran to get it, and then, I heard, I turned, and the pony kicked … her … HERE [sung]. (Guettel and Lucas 68–69)

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The “dream” Margaret describes in this direct address conflates her imagined future with a neurotypical child and a desire to heroically intervene at the moment of trauma, thus preventing Clara’s accident from happening altogether. Margaret, like

Benjamin’s Angel of History, is compelled forward in the musical’s narrative but her eyes are ever-fixed on the past, to the momentous instant she wishes she could alter, change, rescript, or—as she sings in the reprise—“paint it over” (Lucas and Guettel 69).

Her inability to move beyond this moment is an example of the “traumatic repetition”

Pryor describes as a time slip; it is an attempt to repair a moment of harm that unravels the fabric of time (8). As Margaret exclaims to the audience, “It’s all happening again,

I’m doing it again,” Margret and her spectators are beckoned “away from the monolithic experience of time as a machine marching ever forward and into a subaltern landscape of slanted knowledge, where traumatic injury is visible and ‘another world [and another time] is possible” (Pryor 9).

Writing that “crip time is time travel,” Ellen Samuels contends that “Disability and illness have the power to extract us from linear, progressive time with its normative life stages and cast us into a wormhole of backward and forward acceleration, jerky stops and starts, tedious intervals and abrupt endings” (“Six Ways of Looking”). As the orchestra begins to underscore the scene with Clara’s “The Beauty Is,” Margaret is pulled into crip time, in that the clock bends back towards Clara’s body every time her mother relives the moment of injury. Again, we must note that, in this musical about a girl defining herself, Clara does explicitly self-identify as disabled. She makes no mention of the incident either as a story her mother has told her or as a personal memory that might challenge Margaret’s official narrative of the event.

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It is unclear in both the script and live performance if Clara is supposed to “hear”

Margaret’s disclosure of her disability: Margaret’s monologue is technically an answer to

Clara’s direct question, but she delivers it to the audience while other characters are outside of time—“frozen”—onstage. If this time slip back to the moment of Clara’s physical trauma and Margaret’s emotional trauma is predicated on a “subaltern landscape of slanted knowledge,” as Pryor’s work suggests, then Margaret’s reprise of “The Beauty

Is” positions Clara’s I Want song as a subaltern landscape, as slanted knowledge that bridges the divide between normative and neuroatypical characters when the song is reiterated by someone other than Clara (Pryor 9). This repetition draws parallels between

Clara and Margaret through their shared belief that having a child might make them feel more like an adult, and their self-comparisons to the tableaus in paintings depicting subjects who are reaching beyond the frame. Who reach for acceptance. For love. For what Clara describes as “the light in the piazza,” a feeling of compatibility that arises when someone “is looking for a someone like you” (Lucas and Guettel 56; 15).

Margaret leaves the musical phrase “The beauty is” incomplete, indicating that it is still ultimately Clara’s to sing. The reprise compels Margaret to acknowledge that she has unwittingly hindered Clara’s progression due to her own traumatized sense of time: by perpetually reliving Clara’s childhood accident she prevents her daughter from achieving the maturation they both desire. Rather than disavowing Clara’s experience of the world, Piazza scripts Clara’s unique way of being as a valuable tool for evaluating outside of diagnostic labels and developmental expectations. Margaret, making a case as to why Clara and Fabrizio should wed, invites Senior Naccarelli (and the audience) to view her daughter with fresh eyes: “You see her; she is as healthy as she seems. Don’t

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you realize they are in love? Whatever their ages, they are both young. This is a deep thing, a true thing” (Lucas and Guettel 71). Margaret’s arrival at this conclusion completes her role in the narrative arc set by Clara’s I Want song and demonstrates the transformative power of encountering disability in the theatre without giving in to banal disability simulations.

“Clara’s Interlude”: The Next-to-Last-Scene

As Act II progresses, Clara is increasingly independent of her mother and self- aware of how she is different from others. In Act II, scene 6, when Signor Naccarelli wordlessly storms out of the wedding rehearsal after learning that Clara is six years older than Fabrizio, Clara wonders how it is she is different from most people: “Something is wrong … Something is wrong with me … Yes. He couldn’t look me in the eye. None of them could! It’s happened before! Why? Why won’t they look at me?” (Lucas and

Guettel 68). O’Hara played this moment as a confused lover, spurned just before her wedding day. Clutching her breast and holding back tears, O’Hara’s Clara cannot imagine why the Naccarelli family would refuse her as a member. Clarke played the moment nearly opposite: the confusion instigated her Clara’s coping mechanism of self- stimulating gestures—prodding herself on her head, spatially organizing her ideas with hand gestures, and wringing then refolding the pleats of her skirt. The latter was the more effective disability simulation because it at least acknowledges the disability present. The kinesthetic particularities of Clarke’s Clara are not over-stated or specially choreographed to particular beats within the scene.

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When Clara finally receives an answer to her question of why people avoid her gaze, it is secondhand: she overhears her mother arguing with her father on the telephone.

Margaret, having decided to let the marriage proceed without interference, phones her estranged husband to inform him of his daughter’s nuptials. Clara, in the shadows, witnesses the following exchange before slipping from the hotel and into the night:

ROY: She’s handicapped person, Margaret, Jesus, I thought we were through with this. MARGARET: Just because she isn’t normal, Roy, doesn’t mean she’s consigned to a life of loneliness. She mustn’t be made to accept less from life just because she isn’t like you or me. (Lucas and Guettel 76)

Roy exhibits a classic medical model of disability argument. He cannot think beyond the diagnoses from doctors to imagine a future in which his daughter might flourish. After introducing “handicapped” into the vocabulary of the musical, Roy wonders if she might drop or lose any baby that she was to birth, and fears legal retribution from the Naccarelli family if they were ever to discover Clara’s injury (76). Margaret, for her part, exhibits a social model response: “You haven’t been here, honey, you haven’t seen—she’s blossoming. Maybe the doctors were wrong about how much she can develop” (76).

Having returned to the moment of Clara’s accident for the fourth and final time, Margaret understands how she has hindered Clara and rebukes Roy’s argument that her daughter is necessarily limited—and that only people who have made Clara accept less up to this point are herself and her husband. By doing so, Margaret expands her understanding what able-mindedness might mean, imagining how Clara might fit within this new paradigm.

Although Margaret has only just articulated the question of Clara’s capabilities plainly for the first time in the show, “Clara’s Interlude” immediately sets to resolve this issue. It is late in the second act, after all, so Lucas and Guettel must begin resolving

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storylines instead of opening new lines of inquiry. Unlike “Hysteria,” in which lighting designer Christopher Akerlind and scenic designer Michael Yeargan used shadow and rotating set pieces to convey Clara’s mounting confusion and fear, “Clara’s Interlude” is set against the break of dawn on the empty streets of Florence. The back paneling of the set flies away, revealing a large scrim backlit as a yellow-orange sky. It is the first and only time the entire set disappears during the show. Clara, entering upstage right, runs in a wheeling, careening line against the scrim: a dark silhouette against the rising sun. 8

Clara begins a long melisma colla voce, a directive that unbinds the performer from the strict tempo of the orchestra, allowing her to sing in a free manner. Colla voce passages are usually short because they temporarily reverse the control of tempo from conductor to performer; as the only character to perform colla voce, Clara’s interlude solidifies her connection to the score. As in “Hysteria” and “Say It Somehow,” when

Clara is overcome by emotion or finds herself unable to communicate with words, she rejects language until she can articulate herself. More significantly, as she sings her way through measures 10-14, she performs a modulation that merges Fabrizio’s musical motif from “Il Mondo Era Vuoto” with her own (“The Light in the Piazza”)—a musical line first heard by the audience when Clara sings a resolved version alongside the overture in

Act I (Guettel 157). Clara’s realization of her disability, marked as a “tonal problem” by the repetition of her chromatic high A♭ twice during the interlude, is a disability-inflected composition that must be resolved before it can be incorporated into the score’s motion as an aesthetically valuable struggle that then produces a state of rest (measures 10–14,

Guettel 157). Unlike “Hysteria,” however, Clara and the orchestra remain in 4/4

8 See Appendix A for Figures 4-2, 4-3, and 4-4, which capture this progression.

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throughout the interlude. Without anyone on stage to comfort her, this musical clue telegraphs Clara’s newfound adaptability and self-reliance before the actor fully executes the scene. Put another way; the score normalizes Clara’s way of processing her disability by allowing her to set the tempo and coding it as a “common time” experience.

Straus uses Beethoven’s symphonies to persuasively demonstrate that tonal problems are disability narratives that must be overcome.9 Importantly, tonal restoration is not the same as tonal elimination. He contends that the aesthetic value of the solution relies on the tonal problem being musically unsettling or outright disruptive, writing, “As long as a tonal problem can eventually be solved, with balance and rest restored, the piece emerges enriched, its metaphorical body fully intact” (53).10 If we adapt Straus’ reading of Beethoven’s Eroica as having a “metaphorical body” with tonal problems as a form of “disability” to Guettel’s Piazza score, then we can think through disability’s aesthetic impact on two levels: the first is understanding the “body” of the score itself; the second is considering the score as a metaphor for Clara’s bodymind. Musically,

Clara’s interaction with the score, which forces tempo changes, modulations, and even the abandonment of lyrics, is a productive cripping because it is predicated on the purposeful inclusion of disability, qua tonal problems, and also as having been cripped already because the total score reflects Clara’s bodymind as an integrated whole.

9 Straus’ method, a combination of historical context, composer biography, scored content, and reception is a useful model that deserves more attention from performance studies scholars for its path-charting work at the intersection of musicals, musicology, and disability studies. Close readings of every musical score falls outside the parameters of this dissertation, but I would encourage music theatre scholars to adapt his methodology, with appropriate differentiations between composer and character as musical creator. 10 Straus’ anti-elimination rhetoric is muddied by his focus on Beethoven’s “overcoming” deafness, which uses a rhetoric of solution and restoration that sits alongside a conceptual “cure” for the metaphorical “body” of work (53–56).

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Having arrived at this need for tonal resolution, we can now understand the dramatic pivot that occurs during “Clara’s Interlude.” The musical number lasts approximately forty-eight seconds, during which time:

Clara runs across the stage, silhouetted against a vast, yellow sky. She falls to the ground and a sound pours from within: CLARA: AHHHHH! LUCE! (She composes herself, rises, walks the rest of the way to;) [II.11] (Lucas and Guettel 77)

Singing her “Ahs” in cascading sets of tuplets, known as irrational rhythm, in colla voce,

Clara exclaims, “Luce!” Luce, or light, is her first sung word of Italian in the score as an expression of understanding.11 Without the words to understand the revelation of her disability, she is overcome with emotion. Falling to the ground and exclaiming in Italian, the orchestra abruptly silences after Clara finishes the musical phrase. Clarke, whose performance was preserved for Lincoln Center Archives, adlibbed lines that are not in

Lucas’ script. Rapping her head with her knuckles, she breathlessly asks, “What?!

What?!” and then clutches her breast to calm herself (Fig. 4-5).

Figure 4-5. Clara (Katie Rose Clarke) performs "Clara’s Interlude”; still captured from the 15 June 2006 Live at Lincoln Center PBS broadcast.

11 I am not counting when she sings proper nouns or places, including Firenze and the Museo from Act I.

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Clarke’s Clara then calmly rises, and the orchestra begins a soft vamp in pianissimo.

Clara understands herself clearly for the first time, resolutely fulfills her “I want” from

“The Beauty Is”: after looking, she has found herself. In addition to the colla voce styling, the interiority directed for the actor’s sound “[pouring] from within” was visually signaled during performance with gestures that move from the breast outwards. O’Hara performed the role without these additions, and various actors in regional productions since the Broadway run have mixed the two approaches. What is consistent, however, is that the interlude is Clara’s scored reaction to Margaret’s “book” revelation. Neither

Clarke’s additional lines nor the rest marks signaling the orchestra to quiet are in the libretto and score, which suggests the impossibility of scripting Clara’s moment of self- awareness and scoring disability. Disability exists, as Scott McMillin might say, in the space between; in difference.

Conclusion

Disability is at the center of The Light in the Piazza’s creative DNA, but Craig

Lucas and Adam Guettel do not try to “repair” or eradicate it. Instead, the musical presents reactions to disability that resist the medical model and offer Clara as a character for whom disablement is an everyday fact of life instead of something to be cured or eliminated. Eudora Welty, in a 1972 book review of Lehman Engel’s Words with Music, writes that for a musical “To attain its best, the show must have its roots in feeling, and through its performance the audience must be caught up in that feeling and become involved” (“Everything writers …”). Piazza’s unique interpretation of the integrated musical encapsulates all three of Welty’s components for a successful Broadway show:

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material rooted in feeling, a performance of the material that adequately reflects the material’s feeling, and an audience receptive to undertaking this emotional journey with the performers. By organizing the book and score around different characters, Lucas and

Guettel were able to use different representations of disability to generate dramatic tension without the emotional or social network of characters “short-circuiting,” as is so often the case when the narrative depicts only a singular individual’s experience. In the following, final chapter, I move from an “art” musical that integrates disability into its dramaturgical structure to “blockbuster” compassion musicals that have mutant protagonists with extraordinary bodily capabilities. Whereas Piazza thrives in the careful, slow disclosure of Clara’s diagnosis, these next works revel in the genetic particularity of their non-normative, different, “freakish” protagonists. Wicked and Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark are musicals that no longer rely on songs and the spoken word to convey nonnormative embodiment; they require expansive stage technologies that augment the triple-threat actor’s physical capacities to realize the world of the play.

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Chapter 5

Hypercapacity and the Freak: Flights of Fancy in the Blockbuster Musical

“Now, the Wicked Witch of the West had but one eye, yet that was as powerful as a telescope, and could see everywhere.” — L.F. Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

“It’s the spider! It has to be! Somehow—in some miraculous way, his bite has transferred his own power—to me!” — Peter Parker, Amazing Fantasy #15

Adrenaline pumping, Elphaba enchants an old broom in a storage room at the Wizard’s palace in the Emerald City. Now known as a “wicked witch,” she must flee or else be captured by the Wizard’s guard. The music pulses as the guards open the trapdoor leading to the stage area. Glinda distracts the audience by shooing away the guards while

Elphaba crosses upstage into a darkened playing space, draping her cape over a mechanic arm as she steps on her lift platform. On cue, the orchestra begins a crescendo mounting to the bridge of “Defying Gravity” as Elphaba presses her back into a locking mechanism and feels a security harness snap around her waist. The audience begins to roar when she cries to the guards that she is the one they want, not Glinda. Taking a deep breath, she belts “IT’S ME,” and prepares to fly. Only, Elphaba does not move. Thinking quickly, she presses her back off of the locking mechanism, pries open her safety belt, and struts downstage center. The ensemble quickly lower themselves to the ground in a tableau around her feet to imply that she is soaring high above them. Elphaba finishes with a riff and then blackout. The end of Act I.

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Broadway’s hit musical Wicked (2003) is best-known for its powerhouse Act I finale “Defying Gravity,” but some nights Elphaba does not take to the western sky.

When the custom hydraulic lift malfunctions or the harness is unable to pass an internal security check, Elphaba is grounded and the cast and crew switch to their “No Fly” Plan

B: the actor playing Elphaba walks downstage, and everyone continues with the number as though this was the intended effect all along (Rudetsky). Audiences, of course, know better. Every Wicked press packet and advertisement campaign features a photo of a triumphant Elphaba defying gravity. Technically, the fly sequence is the most complex feat of the show, and after over 6000 performances the spectacle remains a primary draw for spectators. “No Fly” audiences are quick to express their disappointment to box office managers and on social media.1 Still, Wicked set designer Eugene Lee’s safety protocols have worked: in over fifteen years since Elphaba started flying at the Gershwin Theater, no actor has ever fallen from the rafters.

I begin this final chapter with Wicked's "No Fly" protocol because it is moment onstage that captures the central idea of this dissertation: bodily capacity shapes the execution of the genre. In the carefully choreographed operations of a Broadway theatre, this safety protocol breaches the world of the play, layering concerns about actor safety and the actor’s body over a character’s narrative concerns and physical affectations. It also presents a moment of ability failure; paying audiences already know Elphaba can fly, anticipate her doing so again, and therefore are disappointed when she is grounded.

1 The Gershwin has an unofficial no-refund policy following “No Fly” incidents because the show is otherwise able to continue. Off-record conversations with their box office staff reveal unfavorable behavior by patrons who do not anticipate unplanned issues arising during a live performance. No large-scale study on refund policies concerning show halts, cancellations, or stage accidents has been conducted, although many houses will refund patrons in the event of a mid-performance cancellation. A separate reception study about audiences’ expectations from live theatre may yield insight about the influx of movie musicals on Broadway.

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“No Fly" nights are rare (I have never witnessed one live myself), but they are a significant counterpoint the other musicals in this project because they create opportunities for conceptualizing how we perceive characters with abilities beyond the normal scope of human capacity, the bodies of the actors employed to play these roles, and the stage technology that supports the triple-threat performers playing these unconventional characters.

Thus far I have demonstrated how disability impacts Broadway musicals by charting disability simulations for visible and nonvisible conditions such as chronic illness and cognitive disabilities. Diegetic disabilities, disabilities scripted into the plot, compelled artists in these musicals to craft new theatrical elements: conjoinment necessitated innovative staging and costume design in Side Show; the creators of AIDS musicals had to devise novel narrative treatments for HIV/AIDS to stay current with the dominant cultural response to the epidemic; and a traumatic brain injury in The Light in the Piazza challenged the dramaturgical limits of the integrated musical’s standard elements like the “I Want” song. In this final chapter, I turn away from compassion musicals with more typically disabled subjects to consider two musicals with less obvious disability narratives: Wicked and Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark (2011).

Elphaba and Spider-Man, the protagonists of these musicals, are not conventional musical leads. Both characters come from media franchises with fanbases of their own, so the creative teams for these musicals had to conceptualize how these familiar characters think, move, talk, and sing in ways that would translate to the stage. Moreover,

Elphaba and Spider-Man have extraordinary skills that demand a thoughtful adaptation

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through the libretto, score, and available stage technology. As I will demonstrate, productions that depict hypercapacitated bodies have had uneven success.

In this chapter, I examine how hypercapable bodies are scripted in Broadway musicals to expand frameworks of disability and institutionalization through the fantastic and supernatural. Western culture figures disability through able-bodied anxieties of vicissitudes of vulnerability. Disability functions as a social consignment of an unlivable form of embodiment—one that often prematurely truncates a life through chronic illness or physical impairment. Thus, able embodiment requires a certain level of repression to perform a fiction of cognitive mastery over the material world in which one finds oneself.

Wicked and Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark supersede these repressions through projections of genetic mastery that are nonetheless pathologized in the show. Rather than proffering a meta-narrative for disability, these musicals give viewers a fantastical realm of agency, a re-reading of afflicted bodies traditionally figured as devoid of agency in

Western culture. For these reasons, I use Wicked and Turn Off the Dark as a departure point to problematize the function of disability as a narrative prosthesis in musicals with hypercapacitated bodies. By viewing the genetic basis of Elphaba’s witchcraft and

Spider-Man’s genetic mutation as an alternative policing of biopower in theatrical performances, I ask if hypercapacity displaces disability-as-tragedy narratives with more universal paradigms of an impaired embodiment.

This chapter is divided into three parts. In the first section, I develop a working theory of hypercapacity, which is a form of embodiment characterized by abilities beyond the scope of normal bodily function. Hypercapacity shares roots with the supercrip, a familiar figure in disability studies, and disability simulations but it is

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fundamentally different because an actor playing a hypercapacitated character is not simulating a known (i.e., “real”) embodiment. I then move to two case studies to demonstrate hypercapacity’s impact on the execution of the musical. I have chosen two

“blockbuster” musicals—musicals with high budgets and grand designs that utilize special effects elements from Hollywood—so that readers can see how even this popular sub-genre intersects with the compassion musical. The second section takes in the surprise hit Wicked, a stage adaptation combining a difficult novel about the political machinations of the land of Oz with recognizable elements from L. Frank Baum’s Oz series and its 1939 MGM film adaptation. The third section considers Spider-Man: Turn

Off the Dark, a musical engineered to splice together the most successful aspects of other media to create a blockbuster theatrical event.

Wicked and Turn Off the Dark are set at counterpoint in several ways. Winnie

Holtzman and Stephen Schwartz developed Wicked as a passion project in comparative artistic isolation from big-company investors until funding became imperative. The original Broadway production is still running strong with over 6,200 performances as of this writing. Wicked spawned two North American tours, a West End transfer, and two corresponding UK/Ireland tours, as well as profitable replica productions in Chicago and

San Francisco. Turn Off the Dark was written with a large (and ever-changing) creative team in a collective artistic effort, and the show was well-funded by enthusiastic producers who exercised a degree of creative control. The production itself, as the most expensive Broadway show ever produced, is remembered by most as a disastrous flop.

Turn Off the Dark famously prompted New York theatre critics to break precedent and

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release their reviews of the show early because feared it would never officially “open”

(Berger 247–49).

Despite these differences, both Wicked and Turn Off the Dark convey fantasies of a hypercapable body according to specific understandings of a normal, natural order. In

Wicked the battle between normality and difference is played through Elphaba’s green skin and magical abilities, and for Turn Off the Dark, the drama is found in challenging the essential biological functions of the human body. Since the former veers more into fantasy and the latter science fiction, I will consider them separately, although I do not think these genre distinctions much matter given the suspension of disbelief already required by musical theatre performance. In flagging these peculiarities, however, I hope to make apparent how fantasies of hypercapacity prove lucrative in blockbuster

Broadway musicals. The plot and production elements push a body's capabilities to its limits and we, the spectators, pay top dollar to see the results.

Hypercapacity and the Compassion Musical

Hypercapacity has two sides: the body with extraordinary capacities within the diegetic world and the assumed hypercapacity of the triple-threat actor tasked with portraying that body. In other words, a musical’s hypercapacitated body does not exist as such; she is the amalgamation of the actor’s body, prosthetic stage technologies that yield spectacular abilities (usually flight), and diegetic responses that model ways an audience might apprehend the body. Spectators willingly suspend their disbelief to engage in the prosthetic fiction of a story, thereby choosing to think of the hypercapacitated body as a coherent, stable, and knowable. While arguing for materialist methodologies for studying

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art and its means of productions, Siebers characterizes art as “materialist in its obsession with the embodiment of the new conception of the human” (Disability Aesthetics 10).

This “obsession” with technological updates and advancements will increasingly overlap with the human body as biotechnologies advance during the twenty-first century, which leads to the question, Is the genetic pursuit of physical advancement vis-à-vis eugenic processes an aspect of disability in modern aesthetics? Disentangling hypercapacity from disability in the compassion musical is a challenge because they stem from the same appetites and desires to know, and thereby, control, the body.

If disability is taken as “the master trope of human disqualification,” as Mitchell and Snyder argue in Narrative Prosthesis, then hypercapacity might be considered as a new level of eligibility for racial mattering. Hypercapacity reworks what was previously a disqualification or inferiority as into a site for spectacle of extraordinary embodiment.

Siebers describes “disqualification” as a “symbolic process removing individuals from the ranks of quality human beings, putting them at risk of unequal treatment, bodily harm, and death” (Disability Aesthetics 23). Hypercapacity redraws the boundaries of who or what constitutes “quality human beings,” which puts previously average normate bodies “at risk” for comparatively unequal treatment. The transformation from an

“inferior” life to a presumably “superior” existence in these productions is not as simple as discovering the narrative prosthesis—the faithful representation of embodiment glossed as a metaphor for morality, society, or character—because the protagonist never truly has a disability. It is the phantom threat of a disability occurring that constitutes the reason for creating hypercapacitated bodies in shows such as Turn Off the Dark.

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To understand how hypercapacity signals disabled/not-disabled simultaneously we must first separate hypercapacity from the supercrip, especially given the latter’s proximity to performance studies and freak show discourses throughout the twentieth century. Rosemarie Garland Thomson describes interactions between nondisabled spectators and the supercrip as a form of “wonder rhetoric,” writing:

Modernity secularized wonder into the stereotype of the supercrip, who amazes and inspires the viewer by performing feats that the nondisabled viewer cannot imagine doing. Contemporary wonder rhetoric emphasizes admiration rather than amazement, in part because bourgeois respectability now deems it inappropriate to delight in staring at disabled people. (“The Politics of Staring” 60–61)

The supercrip is a body that presents as disabled, but whose wondrous ability develops after or because of an acquired disability. Moreover, the “inspirational” quality of the supercrip is indexed through sympathy for the individual not envy of them. Eli Clare opens Exile and Pride (1999) with an ironic list of supercrips, including a limb-different man running the length of Canada on his one leg, a girl with Downs syndrome getting a boyfriend, and a boy without hands that manages to bat a .486 on his Little League team

(2). These images, of heroic, of athletic, of miraculous, of super-people, all fall within

Joseph Shapiro’s definition of the supercrip as an “inspirational disabled person” in public spaces, which further reveals the crucial role of the nondisabled spectator in deciding who is a pitiable crip, a normal crip, or a supercrip who is worthy of celebration because of her adaptive abilities (16). Meanwhile, a disabled individual with

“superpowers” is not a threat to biological superiority; she is an iteration of what Sami

Schalk calls the “superpowered supercrip” (“Reevaluating the Supercrip” 81). Schalk’s typology presents the supercrip’s powers and abilities as resulting from “accident or luck,” and therefore “operate in direct relationship with or contrast their disability” (81).

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While Spider-Man may have received his power by accident or luck, he was not, nor becomes, “disabled” in the conventional way Schalk describes.

Literature is rife with examples of audiences who seem to demand greater inferiority from superpowered supercrips precisely because of their extraordinary noncompliance to the embodied norm: a character’s excess in one area must necessarily manifest as a deficiency in another way. This tradeoff is a well-worn plot in Western narratives. Greek mythology, for example, contains several competing stories about how the oracle Tiresias is blinded (usually as a divine punishment) but his ability to See, to prophesy, is always figured through his lack of common sight. Such disabilities are not used as a justification for oppression within the narrative, rather, they function as an emotional and intellectual prosthesis for audiences comparing their own bodyminds to that of the character. José Alaniz argues in Death, Disability, and the Superhero (2014) that superpowers “‘overcompensate’ for a perceived physical defect, difference, or outright disability. Often, the super-power will erase the disability, banishing it to the realm of the invisible, replacing it with raw power and heroic acts of derring-do in a hyper-masculine fashion” (307). Again, the division between hypercapacity and the superpowered supercrip is that the hypercapacitated body is not disabled, although it is often regarded as such by other characters in the narrative. The hypercapable body disrupts oppositional paradigms of able/disabled and normate/Other despite it being a maximal symbol of Otherness. Theatrical performances of hypercapacity, is therefore similar to Alaniz’s formulation in that they are embodied disability (over)compensations, simulated for the benefit of the audience.

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In “Seeing the Disabled: Visual Rhetorics of Disability in Popular Photography,”

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson presents a the wondrous, the sentimental, the exotic, and the realistic as a “taxonomy of four primary visual rhetorics of disability” (339). She models each as a means of spectatorship, with the acknowledgment that although the performer may shape the spectator’s response, she cannot control it. According to

Garland-Thomson, “the wondrous mode directs the viewer to look up in awe of difference; the sentimental mode instructs the spectator to look down with benevolence; the exotic mode coaches the observer to look across a wide expanse toward an alien object; and the realistic mode suggests that the onlooker align with the object of scrutiny”

(346). Hypercapacity invites each version of spectatorship simultaneously: we are in awe of Elphaba’s powers, benevolently critiquing how she is socially ostracized even as we understand her body to be fundamentally alien to our own, and align with her through the course the musical. The effect is that hypercapacity, rather than estranging spectators, cultivates an intimacy typical of compassion musicals.

Hypercapacity and Genetics

Tobin Siebers makes the case that “disability often come to stand in for the precariousness of the human condition,” given that disability conceptually signals the loss of able-bodiedness (Disability Theory 5). If we focus only this “stand-in” construction of disablement, we efface cultural anxieties the inflexibility of able-bodiedness itself.

Disability, rather than framed as a given norm because humans are “susceptible to change, decline over time, and die,” is seen as an extraordinary wrong or perversion of the able body (5). Throughout this project, I have argued that Broadway musicals are a

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location at which the expectations of able-bodiedness are what signal bodily precarity. In the actors’ approximation of the ideal (perfectly executed musical and dance routines layered over an affectively nuanced portrayal of one’s inner life), it is the impossibility of ideality in the musical that is cruelly optimistic.

Without attention to the diegetic responses to hypercapacities in both musicals, we lose the investiture of social, aesthetic, and political implications of hypercapacity as a compensatory practice that shores up able-bodied anxiety. Abnormal magical or

“super” abilities, marked as chronic and undesirable for the maintenance of a normative body, come at the expense of a normal life yet they remain functional objects of fantasy and desire. Both musicals downplay disability as a primary pillar constituting the category of Elphaba or Spider-Man's "Otherness" even though they rely on a disability- oriented vocabulary to resolve the tensions between the normative (and perhaps aspiring bodies) watching the musical and the extraordinary bodies performing within it. It is necessary, then, to mark disability as central to the generic work of these musicals by demonstrating how each show presents genetic variation that yields hypercapable bodies.

How does genetic knowledge complicate, enrich, and enmesh into disability aesthetics? The genetic imagination pressures the political commitments of a disability aesthetic as compared to a crip aesthetic. If “aesthetics is the human activity most identifiable with the human because it defines the process by which human beings attempt to modify themselves, by which they imagine their feelings, forms, and futures in radically different ways, and by which they bestow upon these new feelings, forms and futures real appearances in the world,” can we not use the same definition for genetic augmentation and modifications (Disability Aesthetics 3)? Our genetic imagination is, by

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Siebers’ definition, an aesthetic project—albeit one grounded in a neo-eugenic biomedical complex rather than art as such. Much like traditional forms of art, however, attempts to (re)define the human by way of the genome are ever-experimental.

The beginning of Broadway’s compassion musicals roughly coincides with the

1988 U.S. National Academy of Sciences’ announcement inaugurating the international

Human Genome Project, which sought a complete and high-quality version of the human sequence. The National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy and International Human Genome Sequencing

Consortium, formally announced that the project was completed on 14 April 2003, although new initiatives in genetic sequencing and physical mapping continue to expand our biomolecular and genetic knowledge ("International Consortium Completes Human

Genome Project”). In a statement included in the official press release announcing the successful sequencing of the human genome, former NHGRI Director Francis S. Collins declared, "The completion of the Human Genome Project should not be viewed as an end in itself. Rather, it marks the start of an exciting new era - the era of the genome in medicine and health” (“International Consortium Completes…”). Later that month

Nature published “A vision for the future of genomics research” with an infographic depicting the Human Genome Project as the foundation for a three-story mid-century modern house, with each successive floor labeled as a dissemination of genomic knowledge: “Genomics to Biology” on the ground level, “Genomics to Health” on the second, and “Genomics to Society” on the third (Figure 5-1). Each floor is interconnected by vertical support structures: resources, technology development,

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computational biology, training, ELSI (Ethical, Legal, and Social Impacts), and education

(Collins et al.).

Figure 5-1. The architecture of genomics research; from "A vision for the future of genomics research” (Collins et al.).

Nature’s illustration depicts a stone pathway leading to the front door with no steps required for entry, so the pastoral house appears accessible to wheelchair-users and those who utilize other assistive mobility devices. The building’s transparent glass walls, which showcases each support pillar’s rootedness in the foundation (the Human Genome

Project) clear, make clear the house is otherwise inaccessible. While disabled persons may enter “the future of genomics” at the genomics-to-biology level, they are otherwise unable to transcend biology, moving upwards to “health” and “society.” Thus, at this critical moment when researchers rhetorically scaffold genomic science towards a social benefit, disability is stuck as a physical, biological impairment that must first pass through “health” before social integration. Compassion musicals offer an analogous

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structure, whereby disabled characters are integrated into society through a narrative arc that presents the character as “healthy” even if they are not physically cured. In musicals, hypercapacity reverses this trajectory, working top-down from social anxieties about health and wellness to implement change on a biological level. As artistic cultural products, musicals reveal a silent C(ultural impact) in ELSI, and offer sites of betwixt- and-betweenness that are subversive, perhaps radically, in their aim, yet increasingly supported by scientific research.

In Cultural Locations of Disability (2006), Snyder and Mitchell persuasively argue how disability has become synonymous with sites of oppression but subversively functions as a site of flourishing. In their words, disability is an “interactional space between embodiment and social ideology” (7). This “interactional space” allows us to apprehend the materiality of both physical bodies and ideas as things with material impact in areas such as medicine and law. When we interact with this space, we produce new actions, which may or may not follow scripted cultural norms. The possibility of resisting exclusionary dismissals of the disabled body is present in every encounter, even if a single interaction does not yield adaptive change. If we allow that the stage is a shared “interactional space between embodiment and social ideology,” then it offers us the potential for new empathic alliances and modes of relationality between all participants.

Much like Snyder and Mitchell’s suggestions that disability reflects back the normate figure at “twice their normal size,” so too does the hypercapacitated body

(Cultural Locations 21). This reflection, however, does not shore up the various congruities between the body and its environment. Instead, it undoes them. Rather than

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the hypercapacitated body appearing as warped or twisted, the normal body is the fun- home reflection: made weak, freakish, and strange compared to the extraordinary abilities reflected in the hypercapacitated subject. This complicates Adorno’s position in Dialectic of Enlightenment that art’s genuine (“true”) value is wholly compromised by its market value:

Everything has value only in so far as it can be exchanged, not in so far as it is something in itself. For consumers the use value of art, its essence, is a fetish, and the fetish—the social valuation [gesellschaftliche Schätzung] which they mistake for the merit [Rang] of works of art— becomes its only use value, the only quality they enjoy. (128)

Hypercapacitated subjects are at the edge of (un)knowability. Our lack of scientific mastery over the genome gives us insufficient tools to imagine art’s possibilities beyond the fantasy, which in turn makes it difficult—if not impossible—to replace with an exchange value. Moreover, we are ill-equipped to consciously introduce another bio- social category of social stratification, especially one that moves us from categories of race and ethnicity to categories of species race beyond the human. The plays in this chapter, Wicked and Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, reveal how even in these fantasy spaces of interaction, which feminist film theorist Jackie Stacey calls the “genetic imaginary,” we fall back on familiar disability tropes designed to bolster the able-body

(8).

Samuels links this concept of the fantasy landscape, which is inherently marked by concerns of the natural and authentic material because of its invisibility to the unseen eye, to Le Breton’s social effects of genetics because “the fantastical value of the gene has considerable impact upon the way that difference, or even social relations, are understood” (qtd. in Fantasies of Identification 186). Using the protocols of blood

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quantum testing of Native populations and genetic sex testing of female athletes,

Samuels’ demonstrates how the genetic imaginary is used to police gender and ethnicity in medical genetic tests and with normative physiognomic markers of sex and race. In cultural productions where hypercapacitated bodies are imaginative constructions, however, the “fantasy of identification” spreads beyond medical, cultural, and political spheres, although they rely on aspects of each. This bares how many cultural productions advance what Le Breton calls an “ideology of reductive genetics,” which casts the body as a discrete, knowable form—a tool to reveal the “truth of bodies and keep them in their proper places” (191). The hypercapacitated body projects the inversion of our contemporary scientific inquiry: we seek to understand the genetic underpinnings by scaling down from the already-formed body, but hypercapacity is a fantastic construct that professes mastery of genetic knowledge and the skill to manipulate it in determined ways. Samuels gives a shorthand for this circuit: “Desire drives fantasy; fantasy demands realization; realization produces material effects” (Fantasies of Identification 186).

Integrating Hypercapacity

The narrative shift towards hypercapacity is not a curative arc towards a repaired world, but rather, a response to the crisis of bodily decay. Audiences empathize with a show’s characters through what Raymond Williams named a shared “structure of feeling,” a quality of life in the historical present: “it is in art, primarily, that the effect of the totality, the dominant structure of feeling, is expressed and embodied" (21). For

Broadway spectators, the hypercapacity of superheroes and witches function as a type cruel optimism, or as Berlant writes, “a kind of relation in which one depends on objects

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that block the very thriving that motivates our attachment in the first place” (“On Cruel

Optimism”). Searching for a way to narrate a “good life,” spectators existing in a precarious public sphere have a difficult time imagining a genre that accurately reflects their experiences; this leads to investments fantasies of bodily coherence and potential intended to lessen worry but may propagate anxiety instead.

Hypercapacity is an alternative to disability as a form of biological plasticity that pressures constructions of normative. Departing from the oppositional binary categories of normal and abnormal, as proposed by disability scholars in a range of academic disciplines, such as Robert Bogden, Michael Oliver, and Martin F. Norden, Henri-

Jacques Stiker proposes that twentieth and twenty-first-century disability politics move along a continuum between natural and aberrant as conceptual opposites. The discrepancy between abnormal and aberrant, Stiker argues, is a social argument dislocated from biology that nevertheless uses a pathologizing tone to demarcate the marginal. If normality is “natural,” then abnormality “is not integralness but the fact of being integrable” (emphasis original, Stiker 181). Integrability is the goal of medical and therapeutic responses to disability, whereby the body can be rehabilitated towards an approximation of normality, and therefore present at “natural.” Stiker’s theorization of integrability reveals how humans desire sameness even when they work to advance diversity, but he also uses aberrancy to argue some bodies are marked as unsavable, toxic, potentially even harmful to others in his exploration (181-83). Yet, in our attempts to template hypercapable bodies we find ourselves unable to integrate them; we script the

“better” bodies we thought would be desirable as abnormal and reject them. However

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well Wicked is selling, we are paying to see a narrative that ends with her ejection from

Oz.

The plasticity of hypercapacity offers capacious modes for thinking about queer, crip, feminist, and racial critiques of a nonnormative crip/queer materialism that, as

David T. Mitchell writes in The Biopolitics of Disability, “provides opportunities for unique combinations of social becoming” (16). In this chapter, I understand hypercapacitated figures such as Elphaba and Peter Parker to be examples of the emerging crip/queer subjectivities Mitchell describes:

The designation ‘crip/queer’ recognizes that all bodies identified as excessively deviant are ‘queer’ in the sense that they represent discordant functionalities and outlaw sexualities. Thus, crip/queer forms of embodiment contest their consignment to illegitimacy because sexual prohibition has proved one of the most historically salient forms of exclusion within Biopolitics since the late nineteenth century. (3)

As a crip/queer embodiment, hypercapacity offers us alternatives ways of being-in-the- world; moreover, it offers a promise of reproductive impact as biological traits are passed to future generations. Thus, the hypercapable character is idealized and punished for the ways they exceed the normate body. To be hypercapable is not to be “disabled” as such through frameworks of incapacity, although musicals like Wicked and Spider-Man make an incomplete move toward an argument that is something akin to the “able-disabled”— the sense of disablement through the possession of too many capacities.

Hypercapacity and the Freak

Writing on how freaks are socially constructed, or “manufactured,” Robert

Bogden (1988) makes an important distinction between the arrangement of a people as

“freaks” and the people themselves: “The onstage freak is something else offstage” (3).

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As I have stressed throughout this dissertation, it is difficult (and dangerous) to claim concrete knowledge about who or what a performer may be offstage; what we can know for sure in musicals are that the majority of performers pass as able-bodied through their presentation of acting, song, and dance. Whatever else the “something else” may be is beyond our scope of perception, and it is necessarily so: Broadway musicals are commercial ventures that require iterability for success and recoupment.2 A character may be crafted around a specific actors’ skill set, but the cumulative scope of the role must be wide enough for another actor to step in throughout a production’s run.3

This compels us to as if triple-threat performers are manufactured “freaks” in

Bodgen’s sense. Straus argues that musical performers are “prodigious figures,” working close to the form of the superscrip without naming it as such. Although he is describing the performances of instrumentalists specifically, I would argue Straus’ description is even more applicable to the triple-threat actor working in a Broadway show:

2 Recoupment is when a producer is able to fully repay a show’s investors the capital of developing, mounting, and producing a show. Once a show recoups its profits are redistributed; lead producers are often not paid until after a production recoups. His or her paycheck comes from either office fees, royalties, or profit pools. Broadway producer Ken Davenport (2009) has argued lead producers should receive a cut of future production royalties for shows that never recoup, claiming their production helped “brand” future iterations. Davenport’s logic makes sense given how many regional and community theater companies imitate traditional aspects of a Broadway production audiences have come to expect, such as vocal arrangements, costume and set design, and marketing images. Davenport claims this secure revenue stream would actually embolden Broadway producers to take more risks when developing new content. Presumably this kind of “risk taking,” coupled with Julie Taymor’s vision, emboldened concert promoter and theatrical producer Michael Cohl to take the lead on Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. There is no standard formula for determining how long a show takes to recoup. John Breglio, a Broadway producer and lawyer who has represented Stephen Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd-Webber, decouples start-up costs from weekly expenses when estimating recoupment: "A lot of people focus on how much the show cost, and they go, 'Oh my God, the show cost $20 million.' Yes, it's important. But the key to successful shows is what your weekly expenses are, not your capitalization. Because if your weekly expenses are reasonable, and you keep them down, you have a shot at making money” (Pincus-Roth). Regardless of production costs, a show must run for a reasonable length to cross into the black. 3 For example: Lloyd-Webber wrote role of Christine Daaé in The Phantom of the Opera for his then-wife Sarah Brightman, who originated the role in the West End and on Broadway. Twenty-four actors have succeeded Brightman in those two companies during Phantom’s thirty-plus year history.

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If musical performers have extraordinary, prodigious, even monstrous bodies, then musical performances have an aspect of the freak show: audiences pay to see and hear unusual figures whose appearance and ability deviate far from the norm. In exchange for the price of a ticket, audience members can stare (and listen intently), indulging in the simultaneously disquieting and reassuring contemplation of a human embodiment so like and yet unlike their own. (125)

Having “extraordinary bodies, capable of supranormal skill, dexterity, strength, and memory” the musical performer is “a shocking deviation from normal embodiment”

(Straus 125). The worlds of Wicked and Spider-Man are ones in which Elphaba and

Spider-Man (and their actors) both exercise and are bound by powerful bodily abilities.

Both shows complicate the rhetoric of the “freak” in their material reality and the able imaginary by recognizing that “freak is an inherent quality but an identity realized through gesture, costume, and staging,” as Rachel Adams writes in Sideshow U.S.A (6).

Telekinesis, clairvoyance, flying, super-strength, and spider-like reflexes—and many other abilities—are all naturalized through character action. This denies “freak” as a performative identity vis-à-vis Judith Butler's composition of repetition and iteration.

And yet, the spectator cannot deny these musicals operate in a similar way to traditional freak shows, which are, as Robin Blyn writes, mass entertainments that feature “a complex orchestration of conflicting ideologies, libidinal displacements, and anxious flirtations with an otherness from which the viewer can always safely retreat” (Blyn xviii).

In the sections that follow I use Wicked and Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark as case studies to explore hypercapacity in the compassion musical, although doing so presents two significant challenges. The first hurdle is accessing production archives themselves because a full public archive does not exist for either production. Although

Wicked has been on Broadway for fifteen years, the musical is technically still its original

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production run and therefore ineligible for admission to the Billy Rose Theatre Collection at the New York Public Library of the Performing Arts.4 Turn Off the Dark, meanwhile, has been so heavily litigated that its materials have remained private. All that exists in the

Billy Rose archives are a few press clippings readily available elsewhere, the published

“selected songs” vocal/piano arrangement and audio record, and the musical’s four- minute promotional video reel. As such, this chapter’s archive relies on personal memories of performances more than any other musicals in this project, unpublished script materials loaned by artists, and an assemblage of bootleg recordings from online fan communities who have generously contributed their files. These recordings have proved especially helpful for gauging the stability of performance elements in Wicked throughout its fifteen-plus year run.5

The second difficulty is locating hypercapacity itself. It is a materiality that subsists within only within the fictive space of a musical and also an attitude towards the bodies of the triple-threat actors performing the role. Put another way; we cannot understand hypercapacity without parsing how it exists through the body in performance.

When discussing Wicked's hypercapable bodies, I model their relationship to disability as a cultural construction rather than as a medical pathology, whereas I assess hypercapacity in Turn Off the Dark through materialist methods that position Spider-Man’s body alongside the transhuman and posthuman subject. In crafting hypercapacity as a paradigm

4 The collection’s policy is to not make research collections accessible if the show is currently running on Broadway; this is intended to help these shows maintain box-office sales. Although well-intentioned, the policy prompts questions about archival formation and access for long-running or exceptionally popular open-ended productions, such as Wicked and Hamilton, primarily because it stymies the ability to produce critical scholarship contemporaneously with a production’s run. 5 Many of these materials were shared on the condition of anonymity from artists and fans who feared legal redress for circulating these scripts and recordings. With the exception of using the rehearsal script of Wicked for citation purposes (see fn8 below) I have made the conscious decision to not circulate fan- generated content.

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for neoliberal performances of disability in contemporary musicals, I am influenced by

Donna Haraway and Banu Subramaniam’s articulation of natureculture, which rejects easy binaries between nature and culture by attending to how their discourses are enmeshed—entangled ideas, cross-germinating, shaping each other. A naturecultural analysis, Subramaniam writes, “reveals that the question of valuation is fundamentally about power—the politics of life and death” (7, emphasis original). As we will see, these musicals script advancements in genetic engineering through disability aesthetics— transforming medical diagnosis and social recognition of disablement into fantasies of a hypercapable body. Put another way, hypercapacity in Broadway musicals presents ethical questions about personal wellness and quality of life, autonomy in medical care, cultural expectations of idealized bodies and their labor capacity, as well as about the category of “disability” itself.

Unlimited (I’m Limited): Impairment, Disability, and Hypercapacity in Wicked

For Elphaba Thropp, the heroine of the Broadway blockbuster Wicked (2003), it is not easy being green. While is she recognizable by her verdant skin and the magical powers she can never quite control; the infamous Wicked Witch of the West is best- known for her nightly flight into the rafters as she “defies gravity” and the Wizard of

Oz’s oppressive authoritarian political regime. Wicked: The Untold Story of the Witches of Oz, with a book by Winnie Holzman, music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz, and direction by Joe Mantello, revises the orthodoxy of Frank Baum’s 1900 novel The

Wonderful Wizard of Oz and MGM’s 1939 film adaptation by centering on what

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happened “before Dorothy dropped in.”6 This narrative shift to the perspectives of Glinda the Good, the Wicked Witch of the West, and the Wicked Witch of the East unravels the original fable’s moral dualism and expands the body politics in Oz.7 Oz is full of characters we might critically understand as crip/queer: the little people of

Munchkinland, the green-skinned Witch of the West, and Dorothy’s traveling companions who have lost their brains, heart, and nerve—body parts more critical for survival than as metaphors for intelligence, love, and courage.

In this section I argue Wicked rhetorically manages Elphaba’s skin mutation and extraordinary abilities as disabilities, although her excess embodiment is structured as a kind of hypercapacity that is compensatory performance instead of a simulation of disability as a restriction or lack. This is because Elphaba is positioned as a green-skinned

“child of both worlds” with an extraordinary gift for sorcery in ways that render the normate body disabled in comparison to the genetic alternative Elphaba offers. When we script and perform hypercapacitated bodies, normative bodies become comparatively insufficient; this recasting of “ability” further exacerbates concerns about disability as an undesirable mutation while seeming to reference disability as an expansion of neoliberal diversity initiatives. Thus, we can expand frameworks of disability through hypercapacity by examining how the body of the witch is scripted in Wicked.

6 The Schwartz/Holzman version of Wicked is a loose adaptation of Gregory Maguire’s Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch (1996). I focus primarily on the musical, which also makes significant use of Baum’s novel and the 1939 film starring Judy Garland. Promotional materials for Wicked marketed the show with the tagline “So much happened before Dorothy dropped in,” establishing the well-known book and film as a departure point for the audience’s engagement with the musical. While viewers do not need to have read Baum’s book or watched the film, Wicked trades on references to both in its text, blocking tableaus, and score. 7 The “good” witch’s name changes from Galinda to Glinda through the course of musical. I use whichever spelling is accurate for the scene at hand, but readers should note both spellings refer to the same character.

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Wicked’s Disability Aesthetic

In Wicked, Elphaba’s excess embodiment is figured through the expansion of

“abilities” that ruptures the homogeneity of the sapient skill set. Questioning how and where boundary lines between hypercapable bodies and the constructed "normal body" are formed, we can “diagnose” the ways in which Elphaba’s genetically “superior” body is a prophylactic construct against the flagging consumptive capacities of normative embodiment, and disability itself. Although Holzman and Schwartz present disability as a cultural construction, which somewhat rescues Elphaba from traditional portrayals of witches as disabled or mad, the writers are unable to do so without deploying the pathologizing rhetoric common to musical theatre performance. In her 2004 review of the musical for Disability Studies Quarterly, Beth Haller takes note of this issue, writing:

It’s ironic that a musical whose theme is social construction labels people with disabilities in some of the worst ways. For all the forward movement of disability rights in America, a top Broadway musical in 2004 still perpetuating the same old negative stereotypes of people with disabilities doesn’t bode well for how far we have come in popular representations. Images have incredible power, and daily, audiences at the Gershwin Theatre are asked to embrace wicked representations of people with disabilities. (“‘Wicked’ gives disability an evil name”)

Haller worried in February 2004, just over two months after the show opened, that

Wicked’s disability politics were outdated. I agree and would add that the intervening fifteen years have only exacerbated this issue. Perhaps one reason why so little has been written about the disability narrative in the musical is that no one wants to by the Wicked killjoy, especially after the show’s financial success?

However, I believe Haller misses the opportunity think of Elphaba through constructions of disability rather than separating Elphaba’s color and magical embodiment from disability altogether. Haller’s reading of Elphaba as a “character of a

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different color” who is “masterfully handled” while Nessarose “sinks into negative stereotypes” fails to articulate Elphaba’s hypercapacity as a narrative inversion of her sister’s disability (Haller). Colorism (if not outright racism) and ableism intersect to create a unique form of inequity in Wicked: Elphaba’s green pallor is not an outright analogy for disability but it is entwined with her unique bodily capacities. For example: in Elphaba’s “I Want” song, “The Wizard and I,” she links her powers to her skin color in a prophecy of being with the Wizard, who “won’t be blinded” by or be “small-minded” about her appearance:

AND ONE DAY, HE’LL SAY TO ME: “ELPHABA, A GIRL WHO IS SO SUPERIOR SHOULDN’T A GIRL WHO’S SO GOOD INSIDE HAVE A MATCHING EXTERIOR? (I-2-16)

Instead, the Wizard diagnoses her “verdigris” and offers to “de-greenify” her so that her outside appearance matches her “superior” and “good” interior (I-2-16).8 These curative fantasies demonstrate how hypercapacity in Wicked is raced, and also about life at categorical border of the human race.9

8 There is no published version of the Wicked script. All citations for this chapter reference an unpublished rehearsal draft which is dated 10/23/2004. This draft was the working version of the script “frozen” after opening night on 30 October 2004. Citations match the script’s pagination of Act-Scene-Page. 9 Elphaba is not the first hypercapable witch on Broadway. One of the earliest examples in commercial theatre is John Van Druten’s 1950 play Bell, Book, and Candle, a romantic comedy that hinges on the hijinks of New York City witch Gillian Holfroyd, who casts a love spell on her dashing neighbor Shep Henderson. Bell, Book, and Candle relies on the old fear of being “bewitched,” or literally hoodwinked, into love and the new idea that there is a subversive magical counterculture teeming below New York City’s social veneer, although the figure of the suppressed witch is often seen as an analog for Van Druten’s own closeted homosexuality. This is a convincing argument when we consider how Gillian’s Aunt Queenie describes witches as “passing” for normal in plain sight and that witches are allowed to be sexual but are discouraged from openly, truly loving a partner. For Van Druten, witches are a cipher that reveal how queer cosmopolitanism is rigidly checked by the normal. Gillian and Queenie are crip/queer in the sense that their bodies are literally atypical, although these differences are masked by the panoply of New York City residence and the women’s own clandestine bodily practices. Van Druten’s use of the city to obscure non-normative bodies is not unlike “One Short Day” in Wicked, a standard “exploring the big city” musical sequence in which the star moves from their humble social location into the opulent consumer- oriented city life—as Galinda exclaims: “The nightlife! The hustle and bustle! It’s all so … Ozmopolitan!” (Holtz and Schawrtz I-12-57). Donning green glasses, Elphaba and Galinda take in the hoi polloi of the

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This construction of Elphaba’s difference-in-comparison leads Stacy Wolf to argue Changed for Good (2011) that Wicked “discourages a reading of Elphaba's difference as disability” by pointing to Nessarose’s paraplegia and Dr. Dillamond’s

Animality as narrative displacements of Elphaba’s difference (204–05). Nessarose is a wheelchair user who spends much of the show pining for her unrequited love Boq, who becomes the Tin Man after a spell goes awry and he loses his heart.10 Dillamond is an anthropomorphized goat, styled Goat, who is one of the Animals in Oz who have higher reasoning abilities and is capable of speech. Wolf’s position compliments the production’s marketing, which stresses Elphaba’s universality; producer Mark Platt’s frequent pitch—“We all have a green girl in us!”—demonstrates how Elphaba’s green skin rhetorically oscillates between race and disability. I agree with Wolf that Dr.

Dillamond and Nessarose are obvious targets for discussion of race and dehumanization, in the case of Dr. Dillamond, or disability and discrimination, as with Nessarose, but it is precisely because Elphaba jettisons between these markers that Wicked does not

“emphatically foreclose” crip readings of Elphaba’s bodymind, as Wolf contends (204).

What happens if Elphaba’s status as a minority is not sublimated to construct her as “a unique and special individual, the presumed subject of the audience’s identification and attachment” (205)? How does taking her material difference as a serious object of consideration work with or against the musical’s desire for the audience’s affective

Emerald City. Elphaba’s green skin is effaced by the green tint of their spectacles; everyone is green in Oz’s capital. 10 Nessarose’s paraplegia is congenital, although we learn during the Act I song “Popular” that her impairment is the result of her mother eating too much milkflower weed during her pregnancy. She was afraid her second child would also be green. Elphaba carries the blame for Nessarose’s disability through her adult life. The musical’s Nessarose deviates from her incarnation in Maguire’s novel. Maguire’s Nessarose is also described there as “gorgeous, pink, slender as a wheat stalk, and armless” (131). Nessarose’s disability was shifted for easier casting purposes, and it also conveniently allowed Holzman to write Nessarose’s gilded shoes as a prosthetic device.

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investment? Wolf simultaneously tries to deploy medical model and social model of disability readings by articulating Elphaba’s skin color “not simply as different, but as disfigurement” while maintaining that “wheel-chair bound” Nessarose is the really disabled character (205).

Elphaba is not called a witch until late in Act I, when she rejects the Wizard’s fascist gag order on Oz’s Animals. Madame Morrible, now the Wizard’s Press Secretary, attempts to turn the citizens of Oz on Elphaba by inciting fear of her physical difference, screeching, “Her green skin is but an outward manifestorium of her twisted nature. This-- distortion, this-- repulsion, this-- Wicked Witch!” (I-14-68). Curiously, Morrible does not explicitly mention Elphaba’s powers in the catalogue of her physical abnormalities— perhaps because she herself is a practicing sorcerer of small talent. By characterizing

Elphaba’s skin as a repulsive distortion and reflection of her “true” nature, Morrible executes what Jay Dolmage calls the myth of “Physical Deformity as Sign of Internal

Flaw,” in which a character is understood as disabled through descriptions of the body

“accentuating its foreignness, abnormality, or exoticness allow for insinuations of internal deviance or lack” (35). Morrible’s citation of Elphaba’s skin complicates Wolf’s reading because it uses their shared, contested term—disfigurement—to execute a conventional disability trope. For Wolf, investing in social and medical models of disability is an ontological bind: Elphaba’s reception as “disfigured” by the public is a conventional social model orientation but comparing her able-body to Nessarose’s physical impairment relies on a diagnostic model that privileges particular bodies over others. Elphaba is either disabled or not disabled enough.

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Wolf takes up the issue of disability and race primarily through Elphaba’s skin color; she does not consider how Elphaba’s magical abilities are textually managed as a proxy for disablement. When taken together, the conflation of Elphaba’s greenness and powers emerges as bodily difference emerges as the slanderous category “Wicked

Witch.” Significantly, Glinda and Madame Morrible are never called “witch”—only

“Glinda the Good” and “sorceress.” The phrase “witch” is reserved specifically for

Elphaba and Nessarose, who both have apparent nonnormative embodiments, and

“wicked” is a wry commentary of their presumed morality. This demonstrates how a compulsory able-bodiedness is embedded even in the biologically non-normative; witches with green skin and paraplegia are passed over in favor of Glinda and Morrible, whose magic is embraced primarily because of their conformity to conventional aesthetic beauty and proximity to political power.

“A Child of Both Worlds”

Elphaba’s skin and powers are not biologically linked (one does not beget the other) but, together, they challenge normalcy in Oz. As the central protagonist, Elphaba is the access point for the audience’s knowledge about Oz; viewers cannot watch her progression through the musical without attending to the ways in which she is marked as different, queer, freakish, Other. Astute theatregoers will recall Wicked is technically a memory play. The only event unfolding in “real time” is Glinda’s interaction with the munchkins in the song “No One Mourns the Wicked,” which opens and closes the musical. Glinda’s account, however, is not continually present throughout the book and score, which both pivot to Elphaba’s perspective once she arrives onstage. Readers

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comparing Margaret’s memory structure in The Light in the Piazza might argue the framing of Glinda’s memory works against a cripistemological approach, but the execution in these musicals is fundamentally different. Margaret continues to directly address the audience throughout the show, demonstrating that her character is self- consciously narrating our experience within the musical. Glinda, by contrast, never speaks to the audience directly, and she is presented in a third-person perspective throughout the show. Every solo musical number she delivers is during a public-facing event (where we are all presumably spectators) or else Elphaba is onstage, save for

Glinda’s one-verse reprise of Elphaba’s Act I song “I’m Not That Girl” during the second act.11 When audiences return to “No One Mourns the Wicked” as the second act finale it is with the knowledge that Glinda is delivering a message on Elphaba’s orders—so again, the words and key of the message are not Glinda’s own. Together this creates a convincing argument the script and score are structured around Elphaba’s embodied experiences in Wicked.12

As Glinda begins to tell the story of Elphaba’s birth, a pantomimed dance interlude during “No One Mourns The Wicked” provides the musical’s eugenic argument of Elphaba’s defection as being the result of bad breeding. Audiences watch as Elphaba’s mother takes a swig from a mysterious green bottle before cheating on her husband, Frex, with an anonymous man we later learn is the Wizard. The Wizard’s green elixir

11 Even here, Glinda’s inner life is structured by a motif originally set by Elphaba. Glindas are traditionally cast as high sopranos, while Elphabas are most often mezzo-soprano belters with a significantly lower range. “I’m Not That Girl” ends with a low E3, which is well-outside a Glinda’s range. This creates a productive tension in the reprise; audiences hear Glinda move through a vocal line ill-suited to her voice as she repeats another character’s motif. 12 Following Wolf’s arguments, Glinda would be unable to tell her story to the Munchkins (and the audience) truthfully without a genuine understanding of Elphaba and being “changed for good” by the encounter; see Wolf, Changed For Good, pp. 197–236.

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apparently impacted Elphaba in utero, and she is born green. Frex and the midwife stopper their joyous announcement of the arrival of a “healthy, perfect, lovely little—” girl to lament how “different” the child is, likening her to a “froggy, ferny cabbage” (I-1-

5). Although Elphaba appears to be otherwise able-bodied, their reversal of “healthy, perfect, [and] lovely” frames the newborn as unhealthy, imperfect, unpleasant. Her father ultimately denounces her for having an “obscene” and “unnatural” skin color (I-1-6).

Frex’s rejection makes the revelation of Elphaba’s true parentage late in Act II all the more poignant. As the daughter of an Ozian and a man from Earth, Elphaba is materially unlike anyone else in Oz; Madame Morrible hypothesizes, “So that’s it. That’s why she had such power! She was a child of -- both worlds!” (II-8-119).

Elphaba’s inbetweeness is refracted through her character arc, which places her in a constant state of becoming in nearly every scene: becoming a student of sorcery, becoming a best friend, becoming a lover, becoming a witch. She does not begin and ends a single scene in the show without learning information or having an interaction that fundamentally alters her sense of self—and she measures every new role against her experience of social ostracism.13 As the Wizard’s daughter and a witch, Elphaba constitutes and inhabits a complex crip/queer subjectivity in relation to the State’s authoritarian policing of “unnatural” Animal biology. Neither “Human” nor “Animal,” strictly speaking, Elphaba is a social nomad in Oz. Characterized by movements across space that defy, ignore, erase rigid boundaries instituted by the State, nomadism is a way

13 This habit is explicitly addressed in the Act I tent-pole sequence “One Short Day,” where Elphaba finds herself surrounded by the tinted spectacle of the Emerald City and she freezes, exclaiming, “I want to remember this moment. Always. Nobody’s staring. Nobody’s pointing. For the first time, I’m somewhere… where I belong” (I-12-57).

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of life that flourishes outside of the State’s organizational structure. Deleuze and Guattari explain:

The nomad has a territory; he follows customary paths; he goes from one point to another; he is not ignorant of points (water points, dwelling points, assembly points, etc.). But the question is what in nomad life is a principle and what is only a consequence …. A path is always between two points, but the in-between has taken on all the consistency and enjoys both an autonomy and a direction of its own. The life of the nomad is the intermezzo. (380)

Deleuzian nomadism is a way of being in the middle or between points—expressed through continual movement and change, and unencumbered by organizational systems.

The goal of the nomad is only to continue to move on, alongside, and between customary paths. Elphaba’s first act is spent treading the “customary” paths in Oz (daughter and sister, student, sorceress, and politician), measuring her principles against the expectations of each role, and finding them unequal to her ethical standards. Excluded because of her bodily appearance and abilities, she chooses autonomy and is therefore chastised as “Wicked” by those on conventional pathways. Elphaba’s magic-as- hypercapacity, then, is synonymous with nomadism insofar as they both occupy interstitial spaces, the in-between, in Oz. Being intermezzo—of Oz, but also apart— suggests her body may be an irrevocable split from the homo sapiens Ozian—to homo lamia, or maybe homo incantatrix.

Holzman and Schwartz seem to understand this given how they script Elphaba’s diagnostic “disclosure.” Early in Act I Nessarose embarrassedly chastises her elder sister for losing control and publicly exposing her powers. Elphaba, having just arrived at Shiz

University, is distraught to learn that she will not be rooming with her sister, as her

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caretaker, but with Galinda instead. When Morrible attempts to wheel Nessa offstage,

Elphaba screams “LET HER GO!!”:

And suddenly THE WHEELCHAIR PULLS ITSELF OUT OF MORRIBLE’S GRASP, The students GASP. THE CHAIR SPINS, RISES INTO THE AIR, AND THEN LANDS GENTLY IN FRONT OF ELPHABA. Morrible stares at Elphaba. The other students and faculty stare, dumbfounded, then BUZZ AMONGST THEMSELVES... (I-2-14)

Holzman’s stage direction presents a more spectacular bit of stage business than executed in the stage performance. Nessarose’s wheelchair springs to life in a gasp of hisses and fog, spins around, and wheels itself back into Elphaba’s hands but it stays firmly on the ground. The effect is achieved by an engine beneath the chair; a stagehand working in the wings uses a remote-control to drive the chair into Elphaba’s arms (“Schwartz

Answers…”). 14 For Elphaba’s part, she describes the incident as a bodily compulsion, saying, “Something just comes over me sometimes. Something I—can’t describe. But I’ll try to control myself.” (I-2-14). Although Elphaba thinks of herself as a caretaker for her more visibly disabled sister, she is ashamed of her powers as a nonnormative bodily excess.

After Elphaba rejects an offer to help the Wizard suppress political dissenters,

Madame Morrible proclaims to Ozians that “[Elphaba’s] green skin is but an outward manifestation of her twisted nature!” and calls her skin a “distortion” and “repulsion” before naming her the “Wicked Witch” (I-14-68). If the story of Elphaba’s birth is colored by the common disability myth of disfigurement-as-punishment for her mother’s moral transgression, then Madame Morrible’s invective recasts Elphaba’s skin as a sign

14 Nessarose’s wheelchair has gone through a few incarnations in Eugene Lee’s set, including both manual and (subtly) motorized chairs. Several actors who played Nessarose have commented on the level of physical exertion required to manually use the chair on the raked stage at the Gershwin (Artavia).

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of an internal flaw, deviance, or lack. This narrative of Elphaba’s body continues throughout “Thank Goodness,” during which ensemble Ozians share rumors about the extent of her deformity:

I HEAR SHE HAS AN EXTRA EYE THAT ALWAYS REMAINS AWAKE! I HEAR THAT SHE CAN SHED HER SKIN AS EASILY AS A SNAKE! … I HEAR HER SOUL IS SO UNCLEAN PURE WATER CAN MELT HER! (II-1-76)

These comments offer a shorthand for how disablement is treated in Oz: as a freakish object of curiosity, as an animalistic subhuman characteristic, and as an impurity that must be cleansed. It is clear the Ozians, rather than looking to Elphaba with envy for her capabilities or as a site for aspiration, see her as a body to be eradicated. This places specatators familiar with the world of Oz in an compromising position: they have likely shared this attitude towards the Wicked Witch of the West in the past, but now they are more likely to empathize with Elphaba, because they have witnessed how the label

“Wicked” was constructed as a smear campaign.

Kafer writes that the cyborg may be used to imagine alternative futures, beyond the feminist, queer, and crip, but I am unsure the hypercapable subject position of witch in Wicked can be similarly operationalized. Although green, Elphaba is otherwise middle- to-upper class, female, and scripted by a white cisgendered gay composer; Wicked’s witches are only citational quotes of Haraway’s subject (Kafer 24). As a Broadway diva character created by a gay man and a straight white woman, Elphaba’s supposed universality reminds me of Susan Sontag’s thesis that, “Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It's not a lamp, but a ‘lamp’; not a woman, but a ‘woman” (“Notes on

Camp” 56). Marked as “different” Elphaba is like “us,” yet we are not like her. We

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cannot project ourselves back across the able imaginary without hypercapacitating our bodies. Yet, in Haraway’s claim that “cyborgs are the people who refuse to disappear on cue,” we can see the hypercapable Elphaba as a noncompliant figure refusing the “erasure of disability from our present and futures” (Haraway 177; Kafer 128). The generative potential of cripping witchcraft in Wicked is that the witch-as-disabled, or “Being-as-

Playing-a-Role,” demands we take up the embodied work of hypercapacity as impairment

(“Notes on Camp”).

Glossing witch to cyborg is untenable in its required conflations, but by asking how we might begin to read witch into this formation provocatively positions magic as a hypercapacity that buttresses boundary lines between able and disabled, serving “as an interruptive force that confronts cultural truisms” (Narrative Prosthesis 44). Mitchell and

Snyder demonstrate in Narrative Prosthesis how fictional dependencies upon the disabled body at illusorily locate “abstract knowledge within a body materiality” across a variety of textual media (64). By doing so, they identify four separate “poses” of the relation between the body and word in David Wills’ Prosthesis underscoring the tensions between the use of language and the complexly embodied experience of living: “The inability of the body to possess, via the word, that which is external it grounds Willis’

(and thus our own) more varied and less singular idea of prosthesis” (8). The configuration of the word as attempted corporealization, material augmentation, constitutive of possession, and illusory colonization of the Other gives us a platform for the word’s prosthetic failure as a means of achieving a normal body. This linguistic failure productively democratizes disability by extending Lennard Davis’ premise that all bodies fail in comparison to a normative ideal, but it becomes a site of trouble when we

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consider the construction of Elphaba as a biological Other. The hybridity that manifests as seemingly magical abilities demands an alternative framework that is based, in part, on the deployment of language, or spellcraft.

Hypercapacity, when figured as “magic” or some other “power,” enables a different level of access to individual materiality as a speech act. The performative speech act is fraught in that the illocutionary act does not always yield the desired perlocutionary results.15 It follows, then, that hypercapacity approaches narrative prostheses in a way that Mitchell and Snyder do not consider. Their argument is tightly bound to a literary narrative that fails to apprehend full embodiment due to the metaphorical burdens disabled subjectivities are made to bear in the texts they analyze; the disabled subject’s materiality is shuttled to ensure that the narrative compensates for limitation or reigns in excess (Narrative Prosthesis 53). Perhaps it is the inevitable failures of literature’s promise of delivering a materiality of the hypercapable body that makes Baum’s Wicked Witch rich for adaptations. After all, “the anonymity of normalcy is no story at all. Deviance serves as the basis and common denominator of all narratives” (Narrative Prosthesis 55).

In Wicked, Elphaba’s pathologized skin condition and powers function as a form of narrative prosthesis, yet her hypercapacity does not fit within Mitchell and Snyder’s matrix because it enables the body’s expansion of ownership via language, breaking down the central positional relationships between body and word at the core of narrative prosthesis. Elphaba uses language and spellcraft to shape the bodies of Boq, Fieyro, and the monkey Chistery—performative acts that simultaneously demonstrate the

15 This is a common trope about witches, especially Oz’s Wicked Witch of the East, who bookends the twentieth century with The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Baum, 1900) and Wicked (Maguire, 1995).

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internalization of social desire for normativity and the incommensurability of using

“magic” to possess a normal body. Every spell Elphaba casts hypercapacitates a body:

Chistery the monkey grows wings and the ability to fly; Boq becomes a man made of tin, and Fieyro’s body transmogrifies to straw—enabling all three able to cheat death and evade bodily harm; and Nessarose walks with the assistance of her spelled slippers. In this way, Elphaba’s hypercapacity becomes a compensatory measure, prophylaxis, against disability. Wicked’s successful exposure of witchcraft’s prosthetic relation to the idealized norm opens it towards legibility within a disability studies discourse through the frame of performance; performativity as such means the normal body does not pre-exist but is constituted through—spoken into being by—a compulsory biological expression of power.

Actor Considerations

Actors playing Elphaba during “No Fly” performances use the mishap as an excuse to sing every “unauthorized” modulation of the song they have ever wanted in an attempt to amp up the drama during a moment of technological failure and disappointment (pOZcast). Broadway music directors police the execution of the score throughout a run to ensure standardization and preserve the intention of the score. There are only a few “approved” riffs, runs, and option-ups in Wicked, with most being in

Elphaba’s lesser-known numbers “The Wizard and I” and “No Good Deed.” But when the hydraulic lift fails to take Elphaba into the rafters, all bets are off. Shoshana Bean, the first Broadway Elphaba to have a No Fly night, described the performance in an interview for Playbill:

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In the unlikely event that you do not rise, just unhook yourself and walk downstage and finish the song. Because I am not a master of subtlety, I get myself out and I march downstage and I use it as the opportunity to put every riff I have ever wanted to put into “Defying Gravity,” because I think, What is going to make this exciting.? I’m not flying. The lights, if they’re happening at all, is happening on a black curtain up there [above me] …. I sang my guts for blood. (Rudestsky)

Riffs and runs are usually discouraged by musical directors because they are moments of actor stylizations that are not in direct service of storytelling. But on No Fly nights,

Elphaba’s failure becomes a moment of virtuosic hypercapacity for the actor playing her.

No longer performing the rote version of the role, actors like Bean, Jennifer DiNoia, Zoe

Jarrett, and others, sing alternate melodies and runs to give the audience spectacle. The effect is that the patron witnesses the actor’s skill set rapidly expand beyond the carefully scripted world of the play, which in turn further distances the triple-threat body from the average patron. Put another way, even when Elphaba fails to perform in hypercapable ways, the actor’s technical skill and vocal control temporarily support and maintain the character’s diegetic hypercapacity.

The actor playing Elphaba is not explicitly prostheticized elsewhere in the musical, but she is completely covered in green every performance: a green body suit, grease paint, nails, and makeup (Fig. 5-2).

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Figure 5-2. Lindsay Mendez prepares to take the stage as Elphaba; still captured from Playbill vlog "Fly Girl" on Youtube.

Elphaba’s costumes are relatively modest, although her Act I dress for “Dancing Through

Life” is sleeveless, which requires the verdigris be seamless to the spectator’s eye. In addition to the actor playing the role and her standby, realizing Elphaba nightly requires a large production staff that includes a dedicated makeup artist, a hairdresser, costume change assistant, and the hydraulic lift operator, among other assistant stage managers and company members who assist with prop handoffs, notifications, and onstage mishaps. Conservatively, then, it takes six individuals to create the illusion of one hypercapable character. Glinda, who is pointedly scripted as not possessing special powers, has half the number (“Fly Girl”).

A Wicked cultural location of disability

Without attention to the rhetorical work marking difference performs throughout the musical, we lose the investiture of social, aesthetic, and political implications

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hypercapacity presents as a disability marker. At every turn, Wicked downplays disability as a primary pillar constituting the category of “witch” even as it rests on a disability- oriented vocabulary to resolve the tensions between the normative (and perhaps aspiring bodies) watching the musical and the extraordinary bodies performing within it.

Disability aesthetics are central to Wicked’s version of Oz: a place where bodily or nonapparent impairments are equally enriching as other forms of physical or cultural differences, and disabled individuals are compelled to “pass” as able-bodied.

While Elphaba’s marginal status as a hybrid person opens spaces for the articulation of alienation along aesthetic, racial, and gendered terms, Rachel Adams suggests attempting to incorporate her Otherness would result in a rejection of difference: the status of “afflicted,” or even “disabled” has little potency if we are all impaired

(Sideshow USA 6). This is the conundrum in Wicked. Schwartz and Holzman attempt to forward a relational model of disability, one in which nonnormative embodiments are democratically “experienced in and through relationships [that do] not occur in isolation,” but Wicked’s creators are unable to realize nonnormativity onstage without a pathologic vocabulary that reifies difference as disability (Kafer 7).

Wicked’s resolution, then, ultimately lies in its treatment of ability. Audiences understand the show’s plot as an investigation into the bodily ability and conventions that constitute normativity. At the same time, the world of the play is not accommodating of

Elphaba’s difference: magic is only ever an aspirational anchor—as an object of desire it is merely a placeholder for a desire to “more-than-survive” (Berlant “Without

Exception”). By comparing one’s own life to Elphaba’s as the ensemble members instruct in “No One Mourns the Wicked,” the spectator creates a fictitious narrative of

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personal mastery, a presumably stable orientation to life that enables a flourishing.

Pathologizing deviations from normalcy is problematic because the functioning of hypercapable bodies are prophylactic constructs against normative embodiment. The normal body has to be comparatively vulnerable, fragile, mortal for these extraordinary bodies to exist. So, there’s an ideological impasse between the creation of hypercapable bodies and the labor we ask them to perform.16

In taking Wicked as an otherworldly archive, we begin to see the negotiation of an embodiment of anxieties in a contemporary space that takes hypercapacity as more than a simple narrative prosthesis. The Wicked Witch’s slippery evasion of traditional medical or social models of disability pushes the boundaries of categorization and requires the development of an alternative framework for considering overcompensation, a vocabulary for understanding expanded bodily capacities, and the inclusion of the supernatural as a meaningful intersection of critical disability studies and popular culture.

Spider-Man’s Designer Genes: Hypercapacity and Transhumanism

In the 2010 Broadway production Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark Peter Parker and Norman Osborn are transformed into hypercapable subjects—Spider-Man and the

Green Goblin, respectively—through a series of accidents in the genetics laboratories at

Oscorp Industries. When Stan Lee beckoned Marvel Comics readers in Amazing Fantasy, volume 1, issue 15, writing, “Like costumed heroes? Confidentially, we in the comic mag business refer to them as ‘Long Underwear Characters’! And, as you know, they’re a dime a dozen! But, we think you may find our Spiderman just a bit . . . different,” little

16 Yet, the various, extraordinary natures of these bodies compel audiences to reconcile their own being against the superlative—a process enabled by pathology.

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did he realize he was setting the stage for one of the most popular icons of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (Duncan and Smith 180).17 Lee’s promise of something

“different” in the introduction of Peter Parker and his alter ego Spider-Man intimately shaped the production aesthetics structuring the Broadway performance of the mutant hero. Presentations of the Spider-Man universe are tightly controlled by Marvel Comics, with the aim of standardizing and protecting depictions of the material. While the onstage treatment of the comic’s canon in the Julie Taymor–led Turn Off the Dark is rather traditional in its approach to mutation and desirability, the musical offers novel depictions of the Green Goblin—Spider-Man’s infamous nemesis—and rhetoric of mutation.18

Despite genetic enhancement’s centrality to the Spider-Man mythology, serious meditations on its material and ethical impact are missing in the multiple performance- oriented film franchises. In this section, I complicate the Broadway musical’s characterization of mutation by proposing its transhumanist performance as a step toward the posthuman, as a way of apprehending the hypercapable 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

17. This direct address is discussed in Randy Duncan and Matthew J. Smith’s The Power of Comics: History, Form and Culture (2009); the original issue is Marvel Comics’ “Amazing Fantasy #15,” by Stan Lee (w), Steve Ditko (i), and Jack Kirby (i), published August 10, 1962. 18. The extensive legal battle following writer-director Julie Taymor’s ousting from the production in March 2011, and the subsequent direction by Philip William McKinley that culminated in the “Version Two” performed for the official Broadway opening on June 14, 2011, make creative and authorship credits to Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark difficult to parse. In this chapter, all music and lyrics are credited to Bono and The Edge. The book was written by Julie Taymor, Glen Berger, and Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa.

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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 (Bono and The Edge 7). For these reasons, we must work through how Turn Off the Dark frames the hypercapable mutant body as an imperative next step for the human race.

Norman Osborn’s project of engineering human bodies to stave off hurt, disease, and death in Turn Off the Dark demonstrates how a transhuman logic for evolutionary

“progress” is faulty. Transhumanism’s central argument is for a human-directed escape from the miscoding errors in our genetic material, reifying man as both the baseline and the benchmark in our search for the next stage in man’s progress. In other words, transhumanism aims to move the body beyond its biology in search of an “ideal” materiality. Posthumanism, by contrast, helps us oppose the premise of erroneous materialities by appreciating the ways different embodiments flourish: “Many invocations of posthumanism,” Alexander Weheliye contends, “whether in antihumanist post-structuralist theorizing or in current considerations of technology and animality, reinscribe the humanist subject (Man) as the personification of the human by insisting that this is the category to be overcome, rarely considering cultural and political formations outside the world of Man that might offer alternative visions of humanity” (9–

10).

Following Weheliye, I understand genetic enhancements of the ostensibly healthy neoliberal subject as producing the very “exceptional” nonhuman populations used as the impetus for enhancement itself. Thus, we cannot use posthumanism as the analytic tool to

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understand the representations of disability and cultures of ableism in Turn Off the Dark because a posthumanism attempting to “overcome” man is actually engaged in a transhumanist discourse. To become posthuman is to dwell in a mode of humanity that does not rely on social contracts; it is a way of being that revels in corporeal difference rather than denying or erasing biological divergences. Posthumanism dwells in abject, risky, and vulnerable states without presumptions of change or sociopolitical valuation.

Posthumanism signals the death of the humanist subject by understanding the limits of human as a conceptual category instead of a designation or destination.

Osborn imagines himself capable of shaping natural selection, “the process by which life-forms change to suit the myriad opportunities afforded by the physical environment and by other life-forms,” but evolution is a creative adaptation between the material body and biospheres that either preserve or end life—a process of chance, not design (Ridley 24). If progress as such does not exist, then humanity’s attempts to control our own evolution are necessarily futile. Accordingly, Osborn’s fantasy of scripting regulatory control over the human gene pool is a transhumanist response to failed eugenic fantasies of eliminating illness, disability, and death itself as conditions of life. Through genetic manipulation, precarious humanist subjects in Turn Off the Dark can be recuperated into late capitalist popular culture as one of what David Mitchell and Sharon

Snyder call the “‘able-disabled’—those who exceed their disability limitations through forms of administrative ‘creaming’ or hyper-prostheticization but leave the vast majority of disabled people behind” (12).

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

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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 will first contextualize the musical’s introduction of eugenic logic through Norman Osborn’s seemingly benign humanitarian project, which I understand to be a guise for a more insidious commodification of the human genome by

Oscorp Industries, notwithstanding its displacement of the normate body. Then I examine

Norman Osborn’s transformation into the Green Goblin, and the forced mutation of his lab workers into the Sinister Six, to theorize Turn Off the Dark’s genetic manipulation as a transhumanist project. I argue that despite the lyric’s rhetorical invocation of a posthuman condition, genetic hypercapacity is still deeply invested in the human body through mutation; this inability to decenter the human necessitates that we view the musical’s mutants as transhuman rather than posthuman. Having established this context,

I then consider Turn Off the Dark as an addition to the freak show canon. Here I examine the song “A Freak Like Me” to unpack the musical’s bid to connote every body in the theater as a “freak” through the shared performance. 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.

Engineering a “D.I.Y. World”

There are multiple layers to Turn Off the Dark’s engineering of hypercapable bodies in performance. With twenty-seven aerial flight sequences and an additional four aerial combat sequences—to say nothing of the immense set changes—it was, as Patrick

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Healy writes, “the most technically complex show ever on Broadway” (2010). Actors performing the roles of Spider-Man, the Green Goblin, and Arachne used an intricate harness system to “fly” across the stage and into the theater’s house, providing a spectacle not unlike the stage magic of Mary Martin flying off to Neverland in the 1954

Broadway production of Peter Pan. The language of the music and lyrics, which script eugenic fantasies of better bodies, compounds these flying effects. Just as the unsavory strings attached to eugenics were frequently erased by the blinding promise of biological perfection, so too were the harness wires forgiven to aid the biological narrative of Turn

Off the Dark. What do audiences make of this site at which hypercapacity not only proliferates, but is the new normal? Turn Off the Dark opened for previews in November

2010 and concluded its run on January 4, 2014; despite whatever troubles the production encountered, a three-year run indicates a viable commercial interest in the transhuman subject. If the show’s “legs” are any indicator, audiences were keen to experience a staging of what Roy Ascott calls “the post-biological era”—“the site of bionic transformation at which we can recreate ourselves and redefine what it is to be human”

(376). The expansion of bodily ability afforded by the musical’s intricate rigging system and the narrative of genetic enhancement encoded in the book and lyrics recreate the human onstage in order to playact recreations of the human species.

Norman Osborn first introduces genetic enhancement in the musical during Peter

Parker’s school trip to Oscorp Industries. The science magnate uses experimental technologies to advance cross-species integration. In various comic and film series

Norman Osborn is presented as a hardened amoral industrialist, but the musical rewrites his character as a humanitarian scientist. Instead of making money, Osborn is interested

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in harnessing animal capabilities for humans (such as devising a way for humans to replicate their own limbs as a starfish would). Although this shift is, in part, due to the introduction of his oft-absent wife, Emily, Osborn’s good intentions reveal the moral framework structuring the script’s approach to genetic manipulation. As geneticists

Norman and Emily Osborn sing to a group of high school students visiting at Oscorp in

“DIY World,” their work centers on shoring up the sustainability of the human race:

THE HUMAN RACE CAN TAKE A HIT WE’RE GONNA SINK BUT YOU CAN SWIM IF YOU DON’T MIND A LITTLE CHANGE OF SKIN DESIGNER GENES ARE A BETTER FIT (Bono and The Edge 7)

Their good-natured goal of saving the human race is consumed by capitalism in one quick stanza, moving from species sustainability to consumable designer models in two sung lines. This “DIY World” echoes plainly what Garland-Thomson calls “Eugenic

World Building,” or the “ideology and practice of controlling who reproduces, how they reproduce, and what they reproduce in the interest of shaping the composition of a particular population” (2015). The Osborns’ bleak projection that humanity is “gonna sink” is countered by their estimation that humans have only one alternative for survival—changing their “skin,” or bodily capacities.

Oscorp is experimenting on augmenting the human genome in an attempt to create the next iteration of human: hypercapacitated, or “supered,” bodies. Norman

Osborn creates a new hierarchical structure that is reflective of a biopolitical economy within neoliberalism: affluent humans unsatisfied with swimming in the public gene pool can opt for “designer” genetic modifications, reinscribing linkages between class divisions and natural order. Neoliberalism, as described by Mitchell and Snyder,

“involves strategies of the seizure of the very materiality of life at the level of the

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individual” (8). If so, then Oscorp Corporation is invested in the biopolitical project of norming alternative corporealities; the engineered bodies onstage represent hyperprostheticized bodies as productive difference in order to reveal ways to approach transhuman peripheral embodiment. Taken collectively, the repertoire of augmented bodies displaces hegemonic able-bodied norms, emerging as a “fetishized product of

‘bare life’ while referencing disability as the dissonant expression of a distant kinship”

(Mitchell and Snyder 181). Singing, “’Cause we can be what we gotta be / And we need to be what we gotta be,” Osborn’s simultaneously eugenic and agentic worldview reifies the anthropocentrism situated at the heart of genetic research, in which human-animals become the standard unit of measurement against all other life.

Proclaiming, “DNA is the way, now that evolution’s had its day,” Osborn attempts to establish mutation as an adaptation necessary for survival, instead of aberrant.

This is complicated, however, by his change of vocabulary after his transformation into the Green Goblin. When Osborn was conceptually homo sapient, he imagined a “DIY

World” that links humans and animals together in a coalition of bodies benefiting from each other’s capacities; after mutating into a monstrous goblin, he changes his tune, singing, “A freak like me needs company” (Bono and The Edge 11). Through his transition from a global humanity to a solitary “freak,” we see the Green Goblin fall on his own imagined animacy scale: Osborn rejects his human name and takes up the monstrous moniker “Goblin” in its stead. This plunge moves counter to Spider-Man’s ascent. Parker’s “productive” mutation gifts spider-like abilities while still allowing him to maintain his status as “man.” As Spider-Man, Parker is the superhuman of Osborn’s imagination made manifest, the body beyond (but not post-) human. And perhaps it is this

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tempered change that makes Parker’s mutation desirable, while the Goblin is rendered freakish.

When the Green Goblin calls himself a freak, he actively acknowledges his own hand in the process—as Norman Osborn he purposefully manipulated his genetic makeup to effect change and, in doing so, engaged in a process of enfreakment. “Enfreakment,” as Ellen Samuels describes, is the “process by which individual difference becomes stylized as cultural otherness” (“Examining Millie and Christine McKoy” 56). A keyword to Samuels’s enfreakment is “stylized,” which opens up the choices of production, of making, of styling—a purposeful fashioning of a subject into a “freak” identity, as

Garland-Thomson argues in Freakery. To style takes an explicit performative action, a narrative spiel, a doing. In theatrical contexts, stylizations include scripted remarks, scene blocking and choreography, and costume changes. Although Samuels cites Garland-

Thomson’s “array of corporeal wonders,” like the morbidly obese midgets and Siamese twins, this process array often requires an aesthetic of normate able-bodiedness to constitute its center (56). Spider-Man, having been transformed and still appearing

“normal” (if not ostensibly better, by conventional standards of male beauty), escapes the title “freak,” while Norman Osborn’s skin is transfigured into a green, misshapen approximation of his previous flesh.

The Green Goblin uses genetic mutations to make a case for victimization of

“freaks” and coalition-building with the audience—creating a conflict of interest for audiences who may well empathize with Patrick Page’s campy Green Goblin more than

Reeve Carney’s angsty Spider-Man. There’s more to be said here about the link between morality and aesthetics of the hypercapable subject—specifically regarding physical

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deformity. Across town, another green-skinned mutant flies above the Gershwin Theatre eight performances a week—Wicked’s protagonist Elphaba is cast as a “Wicked” witch and colored a sickly green. Turn Off the Dark enacts a similar aesthetic coding for

Norman Osborn / Green Goblin, linking greenness to sickly pallor, wickedness, evil.

Meanwhile, Peter Parker’s need to wear a masked costume while exploring the full potential of his alternative embodiment demonstrates one way in which the mutant body is tyrannized by ideological constructs of the “normal” body, as Lennard Davis theorizes in Enforcing Normalcy: “In fact, the very concept of normalcy by which most people (by definition) shape their existence is in fact tied inexorably to the concept of disability, or rather, the concept of disability is a function of the concept of normalcy” (2). If disability is brought into being as the necessary opposition of “normal” (or, tautologically, able- bodied/minded), as Davis suggests, then mutants are forced into a subordinate biological status despite their remarkable capabilities.19 Further, since existence within a normed society is shaped by a supposition that mutants do not exist or are the subjects of fantasy, the genetic differences yielding hypercapacity are doubly erased from consideration or concern: once by a disbelieving public, and again by a policing of able- bodied/mindedness by the mutant him- or herself. The mutant, then, is analogous to

Haraway’s cyborg in that she operates from multiple positions simultaneously, with every perspective “reveal[ing] both dominations and possibilities unimaginable from the other vantage point” (154).

Stacy Alaimo refigures the boundaries of human as such in Bodily Natures by

19. Sadly, Turn Off the Dark misses an even greater opportunity here to play with the fantastic. Each mutation in the show is represented as a bipedal humanoid, demonstrating how a compulsory able- bodiedness is embedded even in the biologically nonnormative space.

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arguing that the “‘outside’ is already within, inhabiting and transforming that which may or may not be ‘human’ through continual intra-actions” (154). In thinking through how transhumanism functions alongside (or as a product) of Alaimo’s philosophy of transcorporeality, Turn Off the Dark positions these intra-actions as dependent on the surrounding environment, but precoded within the genome: bodily responses, adaptation, or mutations are catalyzed by environmental interactions, but the blueprint for such change is always already within the human-animal. We can see this most clearly in the

Green Goblin’s plan to genetically alter other humans as he did himself in the number “A

Freak Like Me Needs Company.” Through his experiments on former employees, the

Green Goblin manages to create six different villains from the same experiment; the

Sinister Six—Carnage, Electro, Kraven the Hunter, Lizard, Swarm, and Swiss Miss— exemplify how different genetic coding yields a variety of reactions to the same catalyst.20 What Elizabeth Grosz says of Darwin’s concept of variation might also be said of the mutations in Spider-Man: “The continuity of life through time . . . is not the transmission of invariable or clearly defined characteristics over regular, measured periods of time (as various essentialisms imply), but the generation of endless variation, endless openness to the accidental, the random, the unexpected” (7). This precondition for mutation troubles our ability to fully render mutation as a posthuman condition, but it productively points to the interrelation of human change and technology in modern culture. The generative affordances of the serum’s toxicity refigure the forms of being

20. Turn Off the Dark’s version of the Sinister Six is a marked departure from the mythology of Spider- Man universe. In the theatrical version the Sinister Six have mutation thrust upon them by the Green Goblin as punishment for abandoning Osborn and Oscorp industries. The original Sinister Six included Doctor Octopus, Electro, Kraven the Hunter, Mysterio, Sandman, and Vulture; they first appeared in The Amazing Spider-Man Annual 1, 1964, with art by Steve Ditko. The character Swiss Miss is wholly original to Turn Off the Dark.

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and relation in common with the human and the (im)material. Moreover, Mel Y. Chen advocates for “the queer productivity of toxins and toxicity, a productivity that extends beyond an enumerable set of addictive or pleasure-inducing substances,” provocatively suggesting that toxins induce pleasure, love, rehabilitation, affectations, and assets

(Animacies 211). In other words, while the scientific leaps Osborn suggests may sound far-fetched, the more-than-human trajectory humorously cushioned in Bono’s high- energy pop score are on-trend with discourses in contemporary transhumanism.

The publication h+ magazine indexes the broader growth of transhumanism in popular culture. Read as “h-plus,” where letter h signifies human, the magazine defines the bodily modifications that promise and threaten to radically alter human life as including longevity, self-modification and performance enhancement, virtual reality, and

NBIC (nano-bio-info-cog). In “Nano-Bio-Info-Cogno: Paradigm for the Future,” h+ writer Surfdaddy Orca argues:

Just as we battle over the right to life today, it’s almost a given that we will battle in the future over the right to personal enhancement. New and radical choices will be available to parents who want certain characteristics for their unborn children— for example, augmentation of intelligence or corrective genetic procedures. Improvement and human performance enhancing drugs and neurotechnological devices are already entering the global marketplace. (Surfdaddy Orca)

Transhumanism seeks improvement upon man’s natural human abilities; Oscorp, being committed to augmenting the human race, positions itself to sell these enhancements as

“designer genes” on the global marketplace. Designer genetics hinges on the eradication of disability, illness, and aesthetic “imperfections”—biological preconditions that inhibit a full flourishing of life. Because the genome is both the baseline and the benchmark against which change is measured, Osborn’s project should not be described as posthumanist; his investment in preserving human life and positioning genetic

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augmentation as a marketplace choice directly contradicts the conceptual posthumanisms of Lyotard and Habermas. The genetic augmentation in Turn Off the Dark is, if anything, an aggrandizement of anthropocentrism given that its predicated entirely on hypercapacitating the human body.

In the song “Pull the Trigger,” Osborn knows his secrets to enhanced genetics, superhuman kinetics, and muscle augmentation are the key to financial success: “AND

LOOK AT THAT, WEB BIO-GENERATION. / YOUR SECRETS. GETTING SOLD.

GETTING BOUGHT. / . . . GET FUNDED! OR YOUR BABY WON’T LIVE!” (Bono and The Edge 7). Osborn’s ascription of “life” to his technological project animates transhuman technologies as a living force capable of growth. Yet transhumanism in philosophical practice and theatrical performance is counterproductive when it limits the perspective of human ability and denies the very precariousness that links humans with other animals. Concerned with the “human race [taking] a hit,” Osborn resists pain, aging, and death in his promise that “we could live a thousand years” (Bono and The

Edge 9). Oscorp, then, presents technology as the answer to the natural “disability” shared by all humans: mortality. Moreover, there is also a less universal eradication of disability at stake here, in that mortality’s erasure covers over disability as a shorthand for truncated life.

Performers’ bodies are technologically transformed through an intricate theatrical design and, indeed, it is the blatant transparency of spectacle that enables the hero’s story to be acted onstage at all. The seemingly superhuman ability of the actor playing Spider-

Man is characterized by his acrobatic ability to appear and disappear across the stage in mere seconds and “web-sling” through the theater, traveling by a visible harness system.

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Instead of a single, virtuosic performer navigating the aerial choreography, audiences see multiple ensemble actors switching off the role of Spider-Man in order to create the superhero’s omnipresence within the theater. This company of ten Spider-Men visually indexes a creative anxiety about the commoditization of the superhero, as well as broader concerns about the collapse of unique identity into consumption and transhuman self- interest.

As audiences watch the musical unfold, they temporarily become hypercapacitated themselves; the spectators’ investment in the premium ticket prices at the Foxwoods Theatre gives them a designer “change of skin” by augmenting their capacity for sight. In the performance venue, the spectator’s perception is morphed to supered specificity: the production design isolates the audience’s capacity for sight through focused lighting and a harness system that exaggerates the onstage actor’s physical movement. By creating tight fields of vision with ever-moving points of interest, the direction emulates a cinematic effect through a pointedly guided optical experience that stifles the eye’s ability to wander freely within the world of the play. In this way, the audience eye is aesthetically standardized, much like a movie guiding audiences through scenic editing and focus shots, even as it is super-ed to a greater capacity for attention to detail. The precarious politic is all the more perilous through its innocuous presentation: audiences enjoy their heightened sight and tap their fingers along to the pop stylizations of Bono and The Edge, applauding the message of DNA modification as the “Solution” to human death at the end of a rousing musical chorus. Turn Off the Dark’s success relies on the explicit performance and tacit acceptance of the transhuman body’s changing materiality upon interaction with new technologies.

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Toward a Transhuman “Freak Show”

Turn Off the Dark’s fetishization of corporeal and ontological difference situates the production beyond the Great White Way; the transhuman bodies populating the theater and the mutant-freak rhetoric scripting their participation asks that we imaginatively place this musical in the tradition of the freak show. By recapitulating the

Peter Parker origin story already told in comic books, television cartoons, and three popular film franchises, Taymor’s blockbuster musical typifies a cultural implosion born from an artistic commoditization and also creates a “freak discourse” that interconnects these disparate media forms and resists critique. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson describes the freak discourse as a specific narrative form that entwines a spiel (show advertisement), the freak’s extraordinary identity, a specific staging, and ancillary media that confirms the staged freakishness (film representations) (“Introduction” 6–7). It also cultivates identification with the mutant Spider-Man through the audiences’ experiencing the narrative from Spider-Man’s point of view. This perspective accelerates a desire for futurity as the audiences experience the fantasy of productive, nonharmful, genetic mutation that refigures the limits of the human without violating the aesthetic normate.

Thus, audience interaction and contemporary media extend the performance beyond the stage, becoming co-constitutive aesthetic elements that generate a larger commercial success. Such an expansion, however, necessitates that we more carefully attend to positive rendering and circulation of genetic modification in pop culture. Unlike freak shows of the late nineteenth century, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark is able to promulgate its narrative through a worldwide web, if you will, of media forms.

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Freak shows, Robin Blyn argues, are theaters of mass entertainment that feature

“a complex orchestration of conflicting ideologies, libidinal displacements, and anxious flirtations with an otherness from which the viewer can always safely retreat” (xviii).

Parker, Osborne, and the audience begin the show in a normal, or perhaps more appropriately neutral, state. Portrayed by actors without spectacle or extra theatrics, each character is ostensibly like any audience member—average in bodily ability. Much like the enacted transformations into Spider-Man and the Green Goblin, the musical maps freakishness onto the audiences’ otherwise unremarkable bodies through their spectatorship:

I SAID GOODBYE TO MY STRAIGHT LIFE CUZ I LOVE A FREAK (A FREAK LIKE ME NEEDS COMPANY)

ALL THE WEIRDOS IN THE WORLD ARE RIGHT HERE NOW IN NEW YORK CITY ALL THE BRAZEN BOYS AND GIRLS (Bono and The Edge 11)

The “brazen” freakishness the Green Goblin sings about opens itself to multiple readings of otherness: the embrace of queerness by abandoning one’s “straight life”; the coalition politic and transhuman utopia of identifying other self-described freaks; the abject weirdness of life in the musical’s version of a technologically saturated New York City; the brazenness of returning to or achieving perpetual childhood youth through mutation.

Unlike the traditional freak show Blyn maps, however, there is no safe retreat from the transhuman otherness in Turn Off the Dark. Every body in the Foxwoods Theatre is physically augmented for the duration of the musical, and mentally altered afterward through the consideration and experience of the augmented bodies.

Watching Spider-Man proclaim, “AND YOU CAN RISE ABOVE (FREE YOUR

SOUL) / OPEN YOUR EYES UP (RISE ABOVE YOURSELF AND TAKE

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CONTROL),” the public buys into self-actualization of the “DIY World” Osborn articulates (Bono and The Edge 12). In this way, Spider-Man the Musical positions the human body at what David Savran describes as a “site of struggle between economic and symbolic capital on the one hand, and cultural capital, on the other” (277–78).21 Although

C. B. Macpherson and Blyn remind us that self-ownership and escaping death in a capitalist market are an illusion, the ideology of the self-determined freak subject enables the chimera of freedom onstage and elides contradictions between precarious life and capitalism (Blyn xxix).

Actor Implications

Broadway is metonymic with the commercial theater industry and it has long served as a litmus test for the political passions and social appetites of American culture.

Accordingly, we must pay attention to bodily configurations on the Broadway stage to better understand how disability is leveraged against the American imaginary’s normate body. Given that Turn Off the Dark is also a superhero myth, the musical provides a particularly worthwhile site for exploration. Superhero genres, as José Alaniz writes, provide “a rich ‘mirror universe’ of American society” (8). This production provides the dire warning that the space between our reality and the “mirror universe” Alainz invokes is rapidly collapsing. At this point, it is worth considering the material impact of the eugenic logic and the resulting fantasy of hypercapacity at play in Turn Off the Dark.

21. When using terms associated with Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark in the Google search engine, the common misnomer “Spider-Man the Musical” is the first suggested search item, an aggregate result based on popular searches of all Google users and purchased search terms. This is partially because the production’s website did not market itself by its proper name as most musicals do. Instead, its web domain was http://spidermanonbroadway.com.

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Although there are several directions this exploration could take, I address two effects here: the preclusion of disability and the simultaneous disablement of actors.

Disability inclusion is already forgone in Turn Off the Dark—the normate body, for all its constructedness, is taken as the body in need of rehabilitation. It follows, then, that in performances of crip and queer bodies we are not only entertained by the everyday management of peripheral embodiments (while still maintaining distance enough for a

“safe retreat,” as Blyn describes), we entertain these same events as an operative mode for present or future action. In Turn Off the Dark Norman Osborn preys on a fear of disability by refiguring the normate body as the body already in decline. The musical never quite delves into the disability terms of its argument in that disability subjectivity is always intertwined with performance. Turn Off the Dark requires additional capacities, accommodations, and modes of embodiment to render its hypercapable subject significant. In this way, disability and hypercapacity become counterpoints to each other as strategic executions against the normate body. Rather than partaking in a “disability masquerade” in order to look “disabled enough” to require help, as Ellen Samuels writes, the production’s hypercapacity demands the failure of a “normalcy masquerade” to reveal itself to the spectator (Fantasies of Identification 137). The hypercapable body waits in the wings, ready to facilitate and liberate the imagination of the paying spectator.

Turn Off the Dark’s erasure of disabled bodies is complicated by the musical’s production history, in which eight highly publicized accidents highlight the precarity of able-bodiedness.22 Between 1997 and 2007, the US Department of Labor’s Occupational

22. I am only tracing a brief history of the significant legal response to the dubious workplace safety standards during the run of Turn Off the Dark. For a more thorough inquiry and legal recommendations, see Day (2013).

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Safety and Health Hazard Administration (OSHA) investigated thirty-five incidents in live shows, twenty-five of which involved stagehands and technicians, ten involving performers.

After in-theater rehearsals (the show had no out-of-town tryouts due to the intricacy of the production’s fly system) and the first full month of previews, OSHA had investigated violations of workplace safety standards regarding four separate incidents

(Hosier). This means that Turn Off the Dark’s initial stages of production (rehearsals and first month of previews) alone prompted nearly half as many performer-related investigations into violations of workplace safety standards as the past decade of all

Broadway productions. In a March 2011 press release OSHA reported issuing 8 Legged

Productions three “serious citations,”23 due to the “substantial probability that death or serious physical harm could result from a hazard about which the employer knew or should have known” (Fitzgerald). Two weeks after OSHA issued its citations, T. V.

Carpio, the actress playing Arachne, sustained a neck injury; three more serious injuries followed during the production. Neither OSHA nor the New York State Department of

Labor (NYDOL) cited Turn Off the Dark beyond the first three injuries, but the effect is clear: the show’s aim of performing hypercapacity comes at the expense of the performer’s able body.24

23. 8 Legged Productions is a subcompany of Foresight Theatrical, a general management company for big-budget Broadway musicals. Other Foresight productions include Les Misérables, Miss Saigon, The Phantom of the Opera, Side Show, and Kinky Boots. 24. Regarding actual expense, OSHA cited 8 Legged Productions a proposed $12,600 in proposed fines for “serious citations.” The inspection detail released after the case closed in January 2012 reported that the penalty paid was $10,630. The smaller amount is accounted for by a reduction of two violations from “Serious” to “Other.” Interestingly, OSHA has a “repeat” category for safety violations, but this does not appear to have been invoked at any point after the initial citations. See United States Department of Labor, OSHA, Inspection: 314883919-8 LEGGED PRODUCTIONS, LLC, available at http://www.osha.gov/pls/imis/establishment.inspection_detail?id=314883919. NYDOL issued nonmonetary citations that subjected the production to unannounced safety inspections to ensure

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The acting president of Actors Equity Association (AEA), Nick Wyman, responded to mounting calls for accountability following Christopher Tierney’s serious injuries, stating: “I have been very disturbed and distraught by the serious injuries sustained by our member Chris Tierney at the December 20th performance of SPIDER-

MAN: TURN OFF THE DARK” (“Spider-Man and Equity”). But “Part of the joy of live theatre—for both the audience and the performers,” Wyman argued, “is its immediacy and its vitality.” This advocacy for “immediacy” and “vitality” hinges on the able- bodiedness assumed of triple-threat Broadway performers, whose multiple skills in singing, acting, and dancing approximate a different kind of hypercapacity. “A ‘boy in the bubble’ strategy of taking everything down to half speed, of wrapping everyone and everything in cotton wool, obviously will not work. Live theatre, exciting theatre involves risk,” Wyman emphasized. Wyman not only uses the disabled condition of severe combined immunodeficiency as a metaphorical straw man, but also succinctly argues against any notion of crip time on the Broadway stage. Although Wyman speaks of a commitment to safety and minimizing risk in the theater, the way in which he articulates actor performance echoes the neoliberal desires to become more that we see throughout the script of Turn Off the Dark. A desire for safety ensconces the normate actor in a protective bubble or cotton wool, rhetorically suggesting ailment and deficiency. My argument is not that the narrative’s expendable treatment of the normate body directly caused the lax regulations and responses guaranteeing actor safety, but rather that the musical’s precarious framing of the human body clearly did not facilitate greater care structures ensuring the actors’ well-being in the production.

compliance. See Healy, “New York Issues.”

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Boy Falls From The Sky: A Show in Trouble

In this section, I have demonstrated how Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark uses a hybridized theatrical design and pseudoscientific plots to create hypercapacitated bodies, and that this production situates these hypercapable performers and spectators as transhuman. The transhuman subjects in Turn Off the Dark explicitly reject humankind’s vulnerable embodiments; Spider-Man’s altered, amazing body is a prophylactic narrative against the specters of disease, disability, and death. As the first superhero musical since

It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s Superman (1966) to appear on Broadway, it signals a reemergence of the superhero in the American imaginary, in an important departure into the realm of possibility for the generation and purchase of extrahuman capabilities. The stagecraft and public fetishization of mutation engendered by this production has allowed the musical to reenter the twenty-first century as a more accessible, flexible form in popular culture. While the democratization of superhero materials and the accompanying expansions of bodily capacity ultimately bring a diversity of backgrounds into the theater,

Turn Off the Dark is unable to critically assess and structure a moral value system around the establishment of a transhuman body through theatrical production. The musical was slated to undergo a creative overhaul before relaunching as an “arena spectacular” designed to tour across the United States by winter 2016, but as of this writing, such a tour has not opened (Cohen). Regardless of Turn Off the Dark’s future, its Broadway production ushered in a new moment for the commercial theater industry—one requiring new questions concerning the limits of bodily capacity, the representation of ability and disability, and our valuation of the boundary between the actor as a sensate human body and as an objectified material means of production. Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark is

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caught in a web of adaptation as it makes a case for its own scientific relevance, even though it is unable to unharness itself from its theatrical trappings. Suspended somewhere between science and spectacle, the musical itself enacts the lines of the aptly named opening ballad, “Boy Falls from the Sky”: “I’d be myself, if I knew who I’d become”

(Bono and The Edge 2).

Conclusion

Hypercapacity is deeply implicated in most ability-oriented fantasy imaginable: the evasion of death. Therefore, we must not forget how these musicals drive audiences towards a form of able-bodiedness. Turn Off the Dark is so bold as to have explicit lyrics concerning the use of biogenetic technologies to engineer immortality. Immortality as such is not an outright concern Wicked, although Elphaba uses magic to make Fiyero immune to pain during the number “No Good Deed” in Act II. The spell turns Fiyero into a scarecrow: immune to pain, yes, but no longer human and therefore unable to age. The question for the hypercapacitated characters in Wicked and Turn Off the Dark is how to shape a “better life,” as Kafer imagines, using their particular embodiment (88–91). I suggest that the fantasy of hypercapacity allows us to playact versions of a crip/queer future; they forestall the slow death of our being, “the physical wearing out of a population in a way that points to its deterioration as a defining condition of its experience and historical existence” (95). These narratives offer a small pleasure that relieves some pressure of living in a contemporary capitalist culture that prizes our ability as a labor commodity. Attending to these patterns of attachment helps us better learn our cultural processes of identity formation, but at a cost: as a disability compensation,

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performances of hypercapacity degrade the bodies of triple-threat performers in these musicals.

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Conclusion

Equity Ten, or, How to Crip Broadway

“... after all, theories must from time to time be tested through practical experience.” — Martin Esslin, An Anatomy of Drama

“One cannot change anything without changing everything.” — Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic.

During a production rehearsal, a stage manager’s call for “Ten!” signals to the cast, crew, and creative team that the acting company has been working for eighty minutes successively and, per union rules, must take a break. This care mechanism is an acknowledgment that rehearsing is actual work. Actors are physical, manual laborers.

Taking an “equity ten,” as its called, is taking time to nourish, to recharge, to slow down or take a brisk walk, to relieve oneself and to find relief. The equity ten is an important dividing line between working conditions in union and non-union companies. Although the Actors’ Equity Association’s (AEA) responses to workplace conditions in specific productions, like Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, are concerning, their primary goal is to champion labor rights and secure benefits for principal stage actors, chorus members, and production stage managers in the United States—and the Actors Equity Association is, on the whole, successful in this mission. As a way of concluding this dissertation project, I want to reiterate my key claims through action items, or my own “equity ten.” What follows are ten accessible takeaways from this dissertation that I hope will prove useful for the practicing theatre producer, casting agent, director, designer, or actor as she works

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to diversify musical theatre, increase disability representation, and create more equitable art:

1. Before we can change the genre, we must first alter our expectations about musical theatre performers.

Contemporary theatre artists have been taught to anticipate able-bodied, triple-threat performers and so they write shows, direct scenes, and design productions that can only be performed by nondisabled performers. This leads to the casting of nondisabled performers in roles that might otherwise be conceptualized for a disabled performer, such as Passion’s Fosca and The Secret Garden’s Archibald Craven. When nondisabled librettists write scripts without material knowledge of the mechanics of disabled embodiment, and able-bodied actors are cast to as disabled characters, they exacerbate the conceptual gap between disability and able-bodiedness through disability simulations.

These simulations emphasize a negative understanding of disability as bodily impairment and restriction, which prompts sympathy rather than empathy or compassion. For productions in which there is a hypercapacitated character, her abilities are rhetorically managed as a compensation against her “true” disability or freak-nature.

Theatre artists should always consider the aesthetic relationship bodies have to the world around them. So, if we start thinking about how integral access is to our experience of how we feel—or are made to feel—in public spaces, it comes down to two things: a sense of belonging to and participation in the public sphere. If there are no visibly disabled persons in the room—wheelchair users, blind, or Deaf persons, or more besides—it may not be because they simply were not interested in attending; there may literally be structural barriers preventing their presence and participation. The disabled

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actor, if she is cast, must then work in an industry that does not anticipate her body in the performance hall. But access is not just about getting different bodies in the room; it is prioritizing disabled persons’ participation in creative work. The presence of disabled artists and audiences in the theater changes the experience for everyone.

2. The lack of disability accessibility is an industry-wide problem that begins in education.

The accidental discovery of Broadway’s next “It Girl” ingenue is rare. Even when the understudy Sutton Foster infamously took over the titular role in Thoroughly Modern

Millie (Original Broadway Company 2002) from Erin Dilly, she was already a seasoned performer with training from Carnegie Mellon University and Broadway credits in

Grease (1996), The Scarlet Pimpernel (1997), Annie (1997), and Les Misérables (2000).

Conservatory-style music theatre programs at universities such as Carnegie Mellon, Elon,

University of Michigan, and New York University are widely seen as pipelines to regional and national touring productions and, in turn, Broadway. Just as playwrights must acknowledge the ableism implicit in the genre before they can (re)conceive new expressions of the form that de-center the able body, so too must we educate more theatremakers that look more like “us.” Training a more representative set of performers is the only way to ensure actors of all races, genders, sexuality, sizes, and ability have the training and opportunities to appear onstage. As theater scholar Roger Grainger acknowledges, “Looking at them [onstage], we look at ourselves too, seeing ourselves involved in the business of working together, us with them and them with us, as we re- discover ourselves in the action of sharing” (5).

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Formal requests for disability statistics to the nation’s top drama programs went unanswered, but an informal survey of the 329 videos of the University of Michigan’s

School of Music, Theatre, and Dance program’s popular YouTube channel, where they advertise their students’ skills to casting directors and prospective students, indicates their classes are comprised only of actors with non-apparent disabilities. Only recently has the

Ruderman Family Foundation, a champion for disability representation and access in cinema and television, created an annual scholarship for a disabled actor at Yale School of Drama, hoping to redress the unequal representation. But one scholarship per school per year is not enough. Educators in theatre and conservatory programs must begin admitting cohorts that reflect all types of bodies. Otherwise, wondering why Broadway is growing more diverse with regards to race and gender, but not disability, is a moot point because education programs are the predominant provider of new talent for the industry.

3. Write more disabled characters, and with greater accuracy …

As this project has demonstrated, there’s no dearth of disabled characters on Broadway: the larger issue is that these characters are scripted in such a way that perpetuates damaging stereotypes and necessitates disability simulations to produce the work. Able- bodied librettists and composers might practice alternative suggestions to disability simulations, such as interviewing disabled persons or following them through “a day in the life” to gain first-hand knowledge about disability experience. These measures will not only help playwrights understand how to script bodies that have different ways of being in the world than their own, but also increase their ability to communicate a story through a disabled character with cultural competency. Integrating a disabled person’s

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experiences early in the writing process will help ensure that, when the work is realized in production, disabled people are not simply “guarantors of authenticity, without choices, not artful shapers who put on shows” (Theatre & Disability 77–78). Moreover, producers should actively seek the work from disabled playwrights and composers; companies should look to models like the Apothaetae and Lark Playwriting Fellowship to offer targeted support for disabled playwrights and equitable producing opportunities.

4. … then cast disabled actors to play them.

To achieve disability parity in commercial theatre productions we must alter the terms of traditional casting in the Actor’s Equity Association Rulebook. Actors Equity’s

Agreement and Rules Governing Employment Under The Equity/League Production

Contract (Effective Date: September 28, 2015; Expiration Date: September 29, 2019) is the official rulebook governing all Broadway productions. Disability is directly named thirty-two times throughout the one hundred and eighty-five-page document, usually in reference to general non-discrimination or accommodation policies, such as “If an Actor with a physical disability is employed, reasonable accommodations, as defined by the

ADA, shall be provided” (96).

Rule 5 has fairly robust language concerning disability accommodation during the casting process, although it places the onus on a disabled person to discern the accessibility of a casting location and then notify a producer or the union in advance of an open call to secure auditions at an alternate location. Rule 5 states: “When auditions are held in premises which are not accessible, as defined by Federal law, the Producer, upon timely notification, by either the Equity Audition Center or by a performer with a

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disability who wishes to audition, will arrange accessible audition facilities to accommodate equal access casting for performers with disabilities” (14, emphasis mine).

New York’s subway system, although more robust than many in the U.S., is inhospitable for wheelchair users; many stops are without elevator access or working elevators.

Disabled actor Jessy Yates chronicles her challenges navigating the MTA’s inaccessibility on multiple social media platforms, using photos, videos, and ironic praise such as “luv you mta bb girl”; this labor exposes MTA’s failure to support accommodations even where the infrastructure to do so exist (@jessyyates). Detailing the length of time and physical effort required to navigate New York as an ambulatory wheelchair user, Yates highlights how Actor Equity’s accommodation places undue burdens on disabled actors. The rule’s use of “either” alleviates Actors Equity from policing the use of accessible audition locations under the logic that if an actor requires accommodation, they should request for it themselves. Unless Actors Equity does not receive a complaint, their operational logic is that no disabled artist must have needed accommodation. A rule preventing producers from using spaces that are not ADA- compliant would solve this problem.

Subsection 5.2.iii clarifies the Producer’s labor when a role depicts a specific disability; she “agrees to include this information in the casting specifications and, at the same time, to notify Equity of such specifications so that performers with similar disabilities may be informed and given an opportunity to audition for the role” (9). A casting call issued by Telsey + Company for Wicked’s Broadway and First National Tour suggests Actors Equity does not aggressively police this rule. In the character breakdown,

Nessarose is described as “Elphaba’s ‘tragically beautiful,’ lonely, compassionate

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younger sister, was favored by their father, spent her life crippled in a wheelchair, becomes obsessively attached to Boq and become the Wicked Witch of the East; commanding actress with a stunning face and a confident belt singing voice” (“Wicked”

Backstage). The ableist usage of “crippled,” combined with its past-tense, clearly telegraphs a desire for an able-bodied actor. There is no additional information regarding casting for ambulatory wheelchair or cane-users who might reasonably be able to perform the role as written.

Actors Equity’s inconsistent commitment to disability accommodation is symptomatic of the organization’s rule for “Non-traditional casting,” which is surprisingly narrow in its construction of “traditional.” Rule 44 defines non-traditional casting as “the casting of Actors with disabilities, ethnic minorities (including but not limited to African-American, Asian/Asian-Pacific American, Hispanic-American,

Native-American, multicultural), seniors and women in roles where race, gender, age or the presence or absence of a disability is not germane” (Actors Equity 68). After this extensive list of “non-traditional” choices, the only “traditional” casting option seems to be the white, cisgender (and probably heterosexual) male. Positioning difference in this way frames all non-white, non-disabled, non-male actors as unconventional exceptions. It is hard, then, to imagine building an equitable industry on such a conservative foundation.

On 8 February 2019 Actor’s Equity renegotiated actor contracts with the producer’s trade organization, the Broadway League, to compensate actors for their “lab” work in developing musicals (“Landmark Broadway Deal”). New musical development often occurs in experimental lab rehearsals to help shape a project before marketing the

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work to new investors or scaling the project up to a full production.The new deal ended a five-week strike by Equity actors aiming to increase weekly lab pay, which has remained at one thousand dollars for nearly ten years, and also split one percent of a production’s weekly profits after the show recoups. Functionally, this addressed a longstanding hurt among lab actors who felt their role in shaping a musical’s evolution was not being

(monetarily) valued—especially for hits like Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton. Michael

Paulson’s observation that negotiations for profit-sharing acknowledge that actors meaningly contribute to the form and content of an original musical leads to the question:

How might a new musical develop if there is a disabled actor in the lab?

5. Stop using outdated disability metaphors.

Truly, writers: stop. Although various characters in Finn’s Falsettos sing the looping musical motif, “LOVE IS BLIND” throughout the show, the audience understands clearly that Trina and Marvin’s respective attractions to Mendel and Whizzer are anything but blind. Finn’s lyric achieves its intended ironic effect but normalizes a citation of disability that is unfounded in any lived experience of blindness; if Trina and

Marvin’s were experiencing something akin to blindness, they might be more perceptive to the nuances of personality, space, and interpersonal communication that otherwise plague their relationships. Thus, disability metaphors and similes reinforce the logic of disability simulations even in the absence of a physical disability onstage.

Directors and casting agents must similarly retire the phrase “color-blind” casting, which uses disability to perpetuate the fantasy of “not seeing” color in the audition room or on stage, usually to the mutual damage of the actor of color, the production, and the

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audience. Scholars and practitioners have advocated for shifting language towards “color- conscious” casting, which acknowledges that race indubitably shifts how individual characters are perceived and their role within the social network of the play. While the invocation of “consciousness” as an opposite to blindness is troubling in that it positions blind persons as unconscious and unknowing, this rhetorical shift helps us move away from the ableist language that is pervasive in industry casting calls.

6. Design the world of the play with disability in mind.

In September 2018 I attended the first preview of Daniel Fish’s production of Oklahoma! at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, which will begin previews in Broadway’s Circle in the Square Theatre on 19 March 2019. Ali Stroker, a wheelchair user, plays Ado Annie.

Stroker’s presence highlighted functional elements of Laura Jellinek’s set design, which then coded a specific perception about disability itself. Given that the set was as a unilevel promenade, and all patrons and actors used a ramp to access the playing space,

Stroker was not disadvantaged in her participation. Indeed, since every character is level onstage and frequently makes use of prop chairs, the environment not only accommodates Stroker’s needs as a wheelchair user, it also visually normalizes the wheelchair itself. When Stroker is onstage, there is at least one other actor who is always at eye level. The set’s normalization of disability supports Stroker’s casting in the role of the comedic lover and then reinforces a message that disability can be a site of desire and physical intimacy. Oklahoma! approaches disability as disability gain, a transformative, positive experience instead of a loss, and this shift applies to audience spaces in the

“house” too. These productions move accessibility away from an “accommodation”

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mindset by integrating disability into the functional expression of the production, and compel us to ask: how can we use a “standardized” commercial theatrical space to create unique and worthwhile individual experiences within the panoply of universal design? If a central message from Oklahoma!’s design is the normalization of disability instead of a more basic accommodation of disability, what is your production’s thesis about the bodies inhabiting it? Is this message clear? How do you know?

7. Purposefully make your Broadway show accessible.

Deaf West’s revival of Spring Awakening (2015) was lauded for breaking boundaries by featuring Deaf performers and American Sign Language as an integral part of the Sater and Sheik musical, lending new depth to the show’s themes of intergenerational

(mis)communication, gatekeeping access to education and language, and conservatism’s fault lines about sex and gender expression. None of the major theater review channels

(New York Times, LA Times, Washington Post, Variety, and Playbill, among them) employed a Deaf critic to write their review, but the production was generally well- received by Hearing reviewers. I attended the production several times during its run, and during every visit a Hearing spectator would remark upon the beauty of the

"choreography," by which they meant the ASL. Some sign-fluent spectators critiqued its at-times confusing use of simultaneous communication (sim-com), characterizing the show as being designed for a hearing audience with a secondary intention of Deaf accessibility. I am not invested in arguments about sim-comming or instances of Sign-

Supported English in Deaf West’s Spring Awakening because I do not think Deaf accessibility is a secondary intention of that production or the theatre company more

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generally. Deaf accessibility and representation— art that is ”By, For, and About”—is the foundation of the LA-Based company's work.

However, if we take these ASL-as-choreography responses to Deaf West's production as a parallel example for the built environment, how might designers avoid the pitfalls of designing through the lens of being abled? It is important to remember that ASL is not choreography, but that is how it may appear to the non-fluent Hearing viewer. Hearing spectators see movement accompanying music in a conventional

Broadway production and call it choreography or “dance,” understanding it is a form that is usually in service of the plot and score in the integrated musical. For Deaf viewers, however, ASL integration was not secondary; it was the primary mode of storytelling.

The character of Wendla (Sandra Mae Frank) is a Deaf girl who communicates in Sign.

Deaf audiences do not need the accommodation in the musical's opening number, which begins with an extended solo verse of "Mama who bore me." Director Michael Arden gives Hearing viewers a speaking “voice” actress (Katie Boeck) who translates for

Frank's Wendla. Any casual gloss of ASL as choreography reveals the hierarchical bias towards our own experience. If you are an able-bodied designer, de-centering your physicality is perhaps the first and most useful tool for being an ally in creating accessible experiences. Remember, Spring Awakening was a production for Deaf West’s local audiences before it transferred to Broadway. Considering whom an environment is designed and built for, and engaging with that community to address their needs, is an imperative step towards recognizing our own biases about how to create or occupy any given space.

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Theater Development Fund (TDF) is making headway with providing accessible performances for Autistic visitors, d/Deaf or hard-of-hearing spectators, blind and low- vision audiences, and patrons with mobility impairments. The current portfolio includes sensory-friendly performances, open captions, Sign-interpreters, and audio description, although TDF offers each only on certain evenings (“Accessibility Programs”). Most

Broadway shows do not develop accessibility programs until they have recouped and are years into their run, claiming they are otherwise too costly, and when companies do implement access technologies, it is clear they are an afterthought.

I attended a TDF-open caption performance of The Book of Mormon in September

2018 without my hearing aids to test the efficacy of this system. Sitting in the nearest-to- center orchestra seat I could purchase, I found that it was nearly impossible to catch the onstage physical action and the open captions, which were scrolling in red block letters on an LED board set offstage. While the captioning was incredibly accurate, and admirably in-sync with the performers onstage, the spatial distance between the caption system mounted in the house-right corner and the central playing area forced Deaf/HOH spectators to choose between stage action and dialogue. To watch the show's impressive choreography and slapstick comedy was to miss the verbal wordplay; to focus the text stroll was to miss comedy’s physical elements. It was clear that the set and theatre space were not designed with these accommodation technologies in mind; the muddled execution resulted in a confusing theatrical experience.

Approaching accessibility as a tool that can promote storytelling and as a functional element of design give us ways to think about how to crip Broadway for our patrons, communicating we see and value their bodyminds in our creative space. I have

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commented on audio-accessibility issues predominantly because those are tools I use most as deaf hearing-aid user; my low-vision and blind friends have anecdotally shared similarly frustrating experiences, particularly with syncing audio-description to live performance. All Broadway houses now have at wheelchair-accessible spaces on the orchestra level, although users with mobility impairments may still need to use a ramp or climb a small step to enter the building.

8. Don’t be afraid of using the conventions of the musical to experiment with the genre.

In the Broadway-bound production of Henry David Hwang's Soft Power (2018), a metatheatrical “play with a musical” about American politics in our Trumpian era, the character DHH extolls the praises of musical theatre as the most powerful “delivery system” for conveying cultural information and politics, emotion, and reflections on contemporary life: “Musicals are maybe the best system ever. I mean, once those violins start playing, we are gone. Whatever they feed us goes straight to our hearts in the rush of a big sugar high" (Hwang). Hwang observes how musicals overwhelm our senses; he argues that we are physically captive to—and apparently passive receptacles for—the music, which offers us an emotional rush to our heart not unlike a dose of epinephrine following cardiac arrest. This sense of emotional surrender to the experience of a musical is echoed in Andrew Sean Greer's Less (2017), when the bumbling protagonist Arthur

Less decides to take in a Broadway musical:

You could instead sneak off to a terrible, treacly Broadway show that you will never admit you paid two hundred dollars to see. This is what Less does on his first night, eating a hot dog dinner to make up for the extravagance. You cannot call it a guilty pleasure when the lights go down and the curtain goes up, when the adolescent heart begins to beat along with the orchestra, not when you feel no guilt. And he feels none; he feels only the shiver of delight when there is nobody

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around to judge you. It is a bad musical, but, like a bad lay, a bad musical can still do its job perfectly well. By the end, Arthur Less is in tears, sobbing in his seat, and he thinks he has been sobbing quietly until the lights come up and the woman seated beside him turns and says, “Honey, I don’t know what happened in your life, but I am so so sorry,” and gives me a lilac-scented embrace. Nothing happened to me, he wants to say to her. Nothing happened to me. I’m just a homosexual at a Broadway show. (Greer 22-23, emphasis original)

Less experiences exactly what DHH describes during his visit to a “terrible” Broadway musical—an involuntary physical reaction and heart-rending tears. The common language of "sugar high" and "terrible, treacly" connotes a production style and content that is assuredly pedestrian but is deliciously enjoyable for its fluffy content all the same.

Less' comparison of musicals to sex suggests that the former is a necessary, even natural activity for emotional release; Soft Power redoubles this thesis about the musical's cathartic power, an Aristotelian marker of artistic quality and worth. Hwang and Greer's reflections on the efficacy of musicals are analogs of each other in the sense that they are both pitched with the flamboyant delivery of gay characters written by gay writers who love a Broadway musical. I do too. But behind DHH and Less is a singular argument about compassion musicals as a subgenre, and Broadway as an industry: despite the gimmicky spectacle and the exorbitant ticket costs, musical theatre is a moving art form.

Using disabled embodiment as a site of knowledge for a system an effective

“delivery” system helps tell stories through the lens of disability culture, which in turn educates disabled and nondisabled spectators by normalizing crip/queer bodies on stage.

Cripping Broadway also means cripping the tools with which Broadway is built. A host of new musicals, such as Sam’s Room (Book by Dale Sampson with Trey-Coates-

Mitchell, music by Caitlin Marie Bell and Marc Campbell, and lyrics by Bell, Campbell, and Sampson) and Scott Evan Davis’ Indigo, are pushing the boundaries of what

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disabilities belong on stage, and how to tell their stories. Sam’s Room and Indigo, both about nonverbal autistics, are consulting with autistic adults and children to create expansive internal worlds instead of reiterating tired tropes of nonverbal communicators being “trapped” in their bodies.

9. Acknowledge and work with the limits of the human body, not against them. The triple-threat performer has her limits.

The triple-threat actor is, if anything, the able body par excellence—but she is not a hypercapable body. As Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark demonstrated, there are limits to what you can safely achieve with a live body in performance. Attending to Broadway accessibility also means valuing the limits of the bodies already playing Broadway and taking measures to safeguard their health and wellbeing. Rather than trying to suppress the limits of the body through a variety of technological prosthetics, what would happen if writers, directors, and designers worked with the body’s limits? Broadway is just now beginning to explore the full storytelling possibilities of digital projection and puppetry in musicals like Anastasia, Beetlejuice and King Kong. Pursuing these technologies will inevitably expand the kind of stories we put onstage, and hopefully the bodies we see there too. Moreover, hiring disabled directors and designers will help diversify the way we build theatrical worlds, and perhaps make them more inhabitable for the actors too.

10. You are curious about cripping Broadway but don’t know where to begin? Just ask for help.

Throughout this project I have met many artists who are surprised by its subject, and even more astonished by the number of musicals it contains. Cripping Broadway is first step in forming a canon of compassion musicals grounded in a disability aesthetic, but our goals

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should not stop at musicals with explicit disabilities. The response I received, time and again, from theatre artists considering disability’s relationship to musical theatre is, “I don’t know—and I never thought to ask.” If you are unsure where to begin, look in your regional theatre networks—to the prolific companies like Deaf West, Phamaly, and

Apostate to begin learning best practices. Hire a disability consultant who is comfortable fielding questions about disability culture, access issues, and embodiment. Search for your actors in unlikely places, and keep a check on your preconceived notions about how a character “has” to be. By modeling disability as a productive inclusion, disability-as- gain, theatremakers can begin to widen their scope of what is possible on stage and create space for new artists to tell their stories.

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Appendix A

Figure 4.2. Clara (Katie Rose Clarke) flees into the streets of Florence during "Clara's Interlude"; still captured from the 15 June 2006 Live at Lincoln Center PBS broadcast.

Figure 4-3. Clara (Katie Rose Clarke) runs in silhouette against the scrim during "Clara's Interlude”; still captured from the 15 June 2006 Live at Lincoln Center PBS broadcast.

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Figure 4-4. Clara (Katie Rose Clarke) pauses as the orchestra slows, preparing to double the violin line in “Clara’s Interlude”; still captured from the 15 June 2006 Live at Lincoln Center PBS broadcast.

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Appendix B

Appendix B-1. Permissions have been secured for use of material in chapter two that was originally published as: Yates, Samuel. “Choreographing conjoinment: Side Show’s fleshly fixations and disability simulation.” Studies in Musical Theatre, vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 67–78, doi: 10.1386/smt.13.1.67_1

Permissions have been secured for use of material in chapter five that is forthcoming as:

Appendix B-2. Figure 5-1, originally published as “Figure 2: The future of genomics rests on the foundation of the Human Genome Project” in Nature 422:24. Reprinted by permission from Springer Nature: Springer Nature, Nature, “A vision for the future of genomics research,” by Collins, Francis S., Eric D. Green, Alan E. Guttmacher and Mark S. Guyer. Nature, vol. 422, no. 24, April 2003, pp. 835-47.

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