Disability and Dramaturgy

Abstract The topic of disability and dramaturgy, broadly understood, separates along a conceptual fault line, with “theater about disability” and “disability theater” marking its most active zones. The boundary-crossing work of the “dramaturg” brings both these theatrically active seismic regions and their questions about representation, identity, material inequality, and access into contact with literature, philosophy, history, music, and—especially during the 20th century—with sociology. The beginning of the 21st century expanded the theater’s points of contact further still, through scholarly ventures bringing Disability Studies, Performance Studies, and Critical Musical Studies together atop an increasingly unstable tectonic system of intersecting and diverging approaches to fundamental questions about the nature and purpose of the theater. As this article shows, the seismic activity around “disability theater,” and “theater about disability” is generated both by their different theoretical and practical commitments, as well as by their historical continuity. Disability has long been a topic for theatrical representation, and dramaturgy has long served as a pedagogical and political medium through which disabled people represent their own stories and experiences on their own terms. To bring disability to the stage in both theory and method, then, is to quicken dramaturgy’s interdisciplinary pulse. The relationship between theatrical fiction and everyday reality, an enduring dramaturgical concern, acquires new urgency in the turmoil that ensues in the presence of corporeal difference, that is, sensory, cognitive, and physical disability on and offstage. Negotiating access in public spaces, for example, invites comparisons to stage performance, transforming the activities of daily life into a spectacle complete with props and heightened public affect. Spurred by a collective turn toward representation, identity, and difference, 21st-century practitioners widen the dramaturgical field while redefining their roles in sites of practice ranging from opera to experimental theater, dance to new media, and enlarging the performative spaces in which disabled and nondisabled bodies assert their individual difference and affirm their shared humanity. By turns literary management, historical research, pedagogy, political activism, and mentorship, dramaturgy, as Shakespeare’s Hamlet knew, suits actions to words and words to actions, giving theatrical life to the history, aesthetics, politics, and economics of disabled embodiment.