Cripping Broadway: Neoliberal Performances of Disability in the American Musical
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Cripping Broadway: Neoliberal Performances of Disability in the American Musical 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 ii © Copyright 2019 by Samuel R. Yates All Rights Reserved iii 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. iv Dedication To David and Janet, who let me venture into Oz. There’s no place like home. v 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. vi 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. vii 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 viii 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. ix 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 x 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..