Disability Studies Quarterly
Summer 2005, Volume 25, No. 3
<www.dsq-sds.org>
Copyright 2005 by the Society
for Disability Studies


Freakery and Prosthetic Actuality in Joseph Chaikin's Body Pieces

Telory W. Davies
Dept. of Drama
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305
E-mail: telory@stanford.edu

Abstract

Whereas his early exploration of disability issues addressed impairment as a point of departure for non-standard theater, Joseph Chaikin's Body Pieces in 2001 made disability the standard frame of reference. In this workshop production, amputee characters and actors mitigated audience alienation and fear of dismemberment by attaching and detaching their prosthetic limbs both on and off the stage. Chaikin combined humor with actuality in these moments, inviting spectators to contemplate their relation to disability. In his post-stroke aphasic direction of this piece, Chaikin necessitated a similar reconception of mental wholeness. His disabled actors provided a physical model for reassessing ability where cognitive and physical fragmentation replaced wholeness as new actualities: they exposed and detached their prosthetic legs in order to revise audience perceptions of fragmented bodies. Chaikin and his actors used comedy to familiarize the unfamiliarity of amputee bodies and to critique non-disabled responses to disabled difference. Appropriating the traditional freak show premise, Chaikin and disabled playwright John Belluso forged a contemporary meditation on freakery that played with and against sideshow stereotypes.

Keywords: Amputees and performance, Joseph Chaikin, disability and comedy

Freak Shows and Medical Theater

Chaikin's revised freakery in Body Pieces follows a long history of American use and abuse of freak show performers. Rosemarie Garland Thomson (1997) provides a detailed account and critical analysis of this phenomenon in Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. At the heart of her arguments is the kernel of her next book: the stare. What freak show audiences received in exchange for their money was an opportunity to stare—without recrimination or guilt—at bodies that were markedly different. Audiences stared at bodies that managers marketed as deformed, sexually perverse, impossibly twisted, graphically horrific, and valued for their abnormalities. Although U.S. freak shows spanned roughly a century from 1835 to 1940, recorded representations of anomalous creatures were part of much earlier human existence. As Garland Thomson attests, "Stone Age cave drawings record the births of the mysterious and marvelous bodies the Greeks and early scientists would later call 'monsters,' the culture of P.T. Barnum would call 'freaks,' and we now call 'the congenitally physically disabled'" (p. 56). In this historical shift from curiosity to specimen, "...the extraordinary body moved from portent to pathology" (Garland Thomson, 1997, p. 58). While we have generally moved beyond the freak show in contemporary U.S. culture, traces of it remain in medical research practices.

One arena for the display and representational abuse of people with disabilities that continues to this day in subtler forms is what Petra Kuppers (2003) refers to as the medical theater in Disability and Contemporary Performance: Bodies on Edge. Kuppers recounts the 19th-century horrors of phrenology's racial skull mapping and Jean Martin Charcot's publicly-induced female hysteria in ways that link the medical profession to freak show dynamics both in terms of audience response and staged performance. The strongest point of comparison between the medical industry and the performing arts is a reliance on visible signs. Visibility is a fundamental aspect of both scientific research's quest for proof and theater's live presence. One of the hotly debated arguments that recur in discussions of freakery hinges on the question of agency for stage or medical freaks on display.

Scholars such as Garland Thomson, Rachel Adams, and Robert Bogdan argue that traditional freak shows afforded their performers contractual arrangements that guaranteed the terms of their employment and were therefore a means of self-determination. One wonders, at what cost? Although the American Freak Show did offer disabled performers a livelihood, the power relations in these exhibitions did nothing to advance the cultural status of performers. Granted, this is a complicated argument within Disability Studies literature; I offer Chaikin as one current example of how to revise earlier freak show dynamics. Through scripted critiques of abuses inherent to such productions, Chaikin effectively used humor to implicate his audiences in the act of viewing physical difference and encouraged his actors with impairments to break an implied silence as recipients of the audience stare. In effect, Chaikin's anachronistic revival of freak show performance afforded his actors a much broader and less compromised form of empowerment.

Body Pieces

Chaikin selected disabled actors for his 2001 workshop production, Body Pieces, based on a combination of talent and visible disability. He held auditions with a specified call for disabled actors, but some members of the cast were hand picked because he had seen them in other New York City performances. Although the piece is only partially about their personal experiences with disability, the actors' impairments inform the disabled roles they play. This actuality is what distinguishes Chaikin's 2001 work from his earlier exploration of non-realist theater forms. The performance is not an example of realistic theater, but rather a new theater of disabled actualities. Body Pieces strives to move beyond common stereotypes about people with disabilities. Instead, the scenes in this play portray disability in the context of an ableist world that fails to recognize disability as difference rather than lack or deficiency. In other words, non-disabled assumptions about disability are more crippling than the characters' impairments. In The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability, Susan Wendell (1996) recounts a 1994 Burger King lawsuit that clarifies this distinction between disability as personal experience and disability imposed by others:

When deaf actress Terrylene Sacchetti sued Burger King under the [Americans with Disabilities Act] for refusing to serve her when she handed the cashier a written order at the pickup window instead of using the intercom, Stan Kyker, executive vice-president of the California Restaurant Association, said that those 'people [with disabilities] are going to have to accept that they are not 100 percent whole and they can't be made 100 percent whole in everything they do in life' (p. 55).

Technically, the cashier disabled the deaf actress when he refused to acknowledge her written order as a legitimate form of communication. Chaikin staged this sort of scenario in Body Pieces in ways that highlight normative culture's inability to recognize and accommodate difference. Several of Chaikin's actors are "not 100 percent whole," and yet they have adapted to both their physical restrictions and the false assumptions that Stan Kyker and others make on a regular basis about what disabled individuals are capable of doing. Chaikin also questioned Kyker's definition of wholeness by validating a new version of what it means to be 100 percent whole.

Body Pieces presents scenes involving both false societal assumptions and the disabled characters' responses to these perceptions. We see their impairment, but also their adaptation. In their reconceptualization of what disabled bodies can perform, these characters and the actors who play them provide public models of personal physical and intellectual accommodation. As Wendell (1996) attests: "The more a society regards disability as a private matter, and people with disabilities as belonging in the private sphere, the more disability it creates by failing to make the public sphere accessible to a wide range of people" (p. 40). Chaikin's work with disabled actors made disability a public issue and used theater as a forum for these concerns. Body Pieces put disabled performers on stage and started a dialogue about their bodies such that individuals with disabilities made a personal contribution as actors and a public commitment as representatives of a new theater.

Chaikin's production ran from December 19-21, 2001 in the LuEsther Hall at The Joseph Papp Public Theater in New York City. All text segments quoted from this production are by permission of John Belluso and Anita Hollander, and are not in print as of this publication. The set for this piece was minimalist, due in large part to lack of funding. Given the restrictions of time, space, and money, set designer Jun Maeda did much to create a production atmosphere. Gauzy curtains were strung across the upstage and mid-stage widths in ways that recalled both Bertolt Brecht's front curtain hung on a simple cord to change scenery between acts and a Circus tent motif. Actress Anita Hollander began the piece standing on her single leg behind the mid-stage curtain singing a song of her own devising about a crane. A Circus barker then entered as a narrator. This barker was played by one of Chaikin's (apparently) non-disabled actors, Wayne Maugans. He was a throwback to the freak show as a normative introducer of abnormal bodies, but was somewhat re-invented: in the usual heightened vocal volume and tone of a Circus announcer, he called out, "These creatures are not specimens!" And indeed, the freaks of this show were not specimens but rather performers with songs to sing and stories to tell about life inside disabled bodies.

Unlike classic freak show performers, Chaikin's actors played disability from empowered subject positions: These freaks both talked and stared back at their audience. Kuppers expresses a firm belief that all current disability performance cannot help but reference a whole history of freak shows, sideshows, and medical theater events:

No study should discuss disability performance without acknowledging the history of oppression that had for so long kept disabled performers away from the 'aesthetic' stage and its inducements of prestige, potential careers, and professional lives. Since the eighteenth century, disabled people's performances have been historically confined to the sideshow, the freak display...and the medical theater (2003, p. 31).

Chaikin and Belluso appropriated freak show conventions, but broke traditional rules. The actors and their characters did not perform disability to please a horrifically captivated public. They instead invited audience members to witness talents and physical feats that qualified them as unique (Hollander sang while on one leg, for example), but their acts and the script were created from the standpoint of disability experience rather than from a normative non-disabled perspective that defines and bills physical impairment as non-human. When the actors did take on super-human personalities, they refashioned these images such that a one-legged woman became a mermaid and sang seductively from atop a barroom piano or a disfigured man in a wheelchair with two canes became "Alfonso the human ostrich" and sang about "Bodies Broken/Broke and Open." The images of mystical animals, human and animal combinations, angels and saints, or cyber creatures that abound in current disability performance help to reshape conventional notions of beauty, power, and capability. They invoke states of being slightly outside of societal norms, but still recognizable. Chaikin's use of these extra-human models was both a return to his early work in productions such as The Serpent (1968) and a more comedic look toward the future.

Humor in these Body Pieces scenes was a crip-culture comedy that embraced fragmentation and alternative functionality and allowed actors with disabilities to talk back: to laugh with an audience as opposed to being laughed at by them. Chaikin claimed that Body Pieces was "...eighty percent comedy, twenty percent not comedy," (personal interview, December 19, 2001) and he used this humor as a strategy. It opened what might otherwise be quite heavy material to the possibility of laughter; Chaikin and his collaborators believed that audiences relate better to scenes that are funny and awkward but also cover serious issues. Production dramaturg Bill Hart noted:

The whole idea is to bring a certain buoyancy to a forbidding subject. What you need to do is get beyond the disability-as-sole-definition [of a person], but because this is a piece about disability, we need to keep dealing with it.... It's different when the actors are missing limbs. You need a sense of humor and some grace. I think you just have to take the pressure off the audience. It's not about making fun of disability, but rather to take the heaviness and forbidding nature that we project onto disability off. Comedy is just a door (personal interview, December 20, 2001).

Through the door of comedy, Body Pieces prevented the audience from either pitying or distancing themselves from the disabled actors and the characters they played. Hart felt that disability theater is what some audience members might consider un-presentable material. Comedy is one way to make disability presentable to mainstream viewers and serves as a political strategy for disabled artists as long as they have input as directors, actors, and/or playwrights. Comedy makes disability more recognizable by familiarizing the unfamiliar.

The comedic tone in Chaikin's piece took several different forms. One of these provoked laughter in disbelief at humanity's general rudeness or inability to check gut responses to physical difference. Anita Hollander performed a monologue on her one leg and two crutches about the way people look at her when she passes them on the street with the same three-pronged gait that she displayed for the audience. Hollander walked diagonally across the stage, back and forth with each of these lines. Each new cross and line was accompanied by a different look that illustrated the line:

The "I've seen it all I'm a New Yorker—or have I?" look.
The "Eeewwwww" look.
The "over the shoulder but I'm not really looking" look.
The "OH MY GOD!" look.
The "Tsk, what a shame" look.
The "How dare you pollute our sidewalk" look.
The "She must have used drugs" look.
The "and she has such a pretty face" look.
The "eyes in back of the head" look.
The "move out of my way so I can see" look.
The "I wonder what it looks like" look.
The "I'm too cool to look" look.
The "How about you!" look.

These are presumably all looks that Hollander herself has received and interpreted on the streets of New York City and elsewhere, so her personal experience fed this monologue that she wrote for Belluso and Chaikin. And yet, these are looks that everyone, disabled and non-disabled alike, is familiar with. They are a version of Garland Thomson's stare. Their general familiarity depends on people either having given one of these looks at some point or having received one. Although these are visual responses to physical difference that could extend beyond disability to include any number of situations, there is one major factor that sets these looks apart as disability-specific: the deep-seated fear of becoming disabled often overrides the politically correct impulse to avert the eyes or pretend that nothing is unusual. This list of looks—specific to disability in its shameless, unprotected honesty—prompted incredulous laughter and guilty recognition. This comedic scene introduced both the lighter side of general spectatorship and the more serious side of how it feels to be the recipient of these looks. Hollander's performance showcased the daily negotiation people with physical disabilities face in public environments. The looks were a source of humor in a relatively controlled theater setting where actors could send them back out at the audience with less fear of recrimination, but the reality of their stereotyped quality in off-stage situations no doubt leads to less empowering results. For the space of the show at least, the audience was held responsible for their spectatorship. Outside the theater, we need to recognize and evaluate our own versions of Hollander's look list.

Other scenes in Body Pieces used comedy to reveal and critique stereotypical behavior of non-disabled people in response to people with disabilities. Many of them confronted situations where non-disabled individuals make social faux pas that they would never make in any other scenario. Two people on a bus talked about the theatrics of wheelchair lifts now common to at least urban bussing. The question of why this man was in a wheelchair established the inevitable expectation that every disabled person should want to disclose "what happened." This is a false assumption, and was followed in Chaikin's scene by a refusal to answer. Having failed to secure a response, the non-disabled woman said to the disabled man, "Can I put my hand on your face?" His response again was "no." He never did give her his diagnostic story, but she continued to invade his privacy on the bus, spurred on to further intrusive behavior until they came to his stop. Her actions were inappropriate in serious ways, and yet she was so extraordinarily rude that the audience laughed. They were laughing not at the man in the wheelchair but at the non-disabled woman whose curiosity knew no bounds.

A later scene that made fun of non-disabled responses to disabled individuals was more layered; it mocked the stereotypical assumption that all disabled people are the same. The scene took place between Chaikin's two actors who were each missing part of a leg. Hollander played the woman and approached actor Ray Robertson who played a panhandling male character. Robertson sat on the floor with his prosthetic limb detached from the knee down. His pant leg's emptiness marked the removed artifice, which lay separately with sock and shoe still attached to it. Hollander made her way over with crutches and her character refused to feel sorry for this bum. He offered to perform tricks for her such as one-legged cartwheels because this is what he does for a living. She declined, and begrudgingly offered him the small amount of money she had. He explained that he uses his detached limb and one-legged antics to elicit money from passersby, and the two argued about the ethics of this practice. He told her that others would think the two of them a match made in heaven because of their missing limbs, and she laughed at this gross generalization saying she had no interest in him with or without his limb.

Although the Civil Rights Movement and the fight for disability rights in the United States differ in contextual and substantial ways, theory that addresses racial identity issues provides a useful resource for Disability Studies scholars. In his article, "New Ethnicities," race theorist Stuart Hall (1995) comments on coalition politics in ways that shed light on Chaikin's amputee scene. Hall wonders,

...how a politics can be constructed which works with and through difference, which is able to build those forms of solidarity and identification which make common struggle and resistance possible but without suppressing the real heterogeneity of interests and identities, and which can effectively draw the political boundary lines without which political contestation is impossible, without fixing those boundaries for eternity (1995, p. 225).

For a politics—be it based on race, gender, sexuality, or disability—to be effective, individuals coalesce through commonalities to form a group identity, and yet this group mentality may not, in its cohesion, assume a uniformity that erases individual difference. There is a way to maintain difference within solidarity. In Chaikin's exchange between two actors missing parts of limbs, disability was an identity marker that did not necessarily lead to social bonding.

This scene raised another crucial issue that explores a performer's assumptions about his audience in relation to disability. One character with a disability performed his impairment for a disabled audience, and did not succeed in this performance. Hollander's character dismissed Robertson's character as someone who extorts sympathy money from passersby through his display of disabled feats. Robertson's panhandler appropriated what Garland Thomson (1997) refers to as the freak show "pitchman's oral spiel" (p. 61). The difference here is that the impaired performer—in Robertson's case, both the character's impairment and the actor's impairment—was the same person selling the pitch. This simple conflation of pitchman and freak complicates the subject/object division inherent to the standard freak show pitch. The actuality of Robertson's prosthesis further troubled this assumed divide. In other words, the audience sees a disabled actor playing a disabled character who sells his own disability pitch for expected financial returns. In Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse, David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder (2000) describe a similar layered effect in performances of Shakespeare's character, Richard III. They argue that not only the actor's performance of Richard's deformity varies from one show to another, "...the extent to which the character partakes of the social scripts he performs receives variant emphasis from production to production" (p. 106). How much an actor manipulates his audience in the performance of disability for this role is therefore a question of degree; a choice determined by both director and actor. Apparently, "Shakespeare's 'original' Richard, in a perverse adoption of courtly dissimulation, sets upon his physical aberrancy with performative glee" (p. 115). In early productions of this show, both the actor and the character may have taken more advantage of Richard's "uncanny ability to manipulate the contempt brought about by his physical person" (p. 115). Mitchell and Snyder contend that contemporary productions often lack a comparable ability to critique social perceptions of disability. In this respect, Chaikin's choice to switch disabled actors between characters with and without impairments served as a critical tool of social intervention that rivaled Shakespeare's early performance of disability.

In a scene that directly followed the Robertson/Hollander interaction, another layer of disabled/non-disabled actor/character interaction occurred. The scene involved a documentary filmmaker who wanted to make a film about disability and a disabled man he had chosen as his subject. The interview progressed and the impaired man began to moan in pain. The non-disabled character helped him to a couch and tended to his needs. The disabled character continued to complain and then released noxious flatulence that caused the non-disabled filmmaker to think twice about this film and its subject. The disabled character asked, "What do you really want to put in your disability documentary?" This apt and political question about representational rights referenced the countless Hollywood films that glamorize and glorify disabled existence. Films such as Forrest Gump (1994) or I am Sam (2001) provide good examples of disabled characters who are heroes but not fully functioning human beings. In contrast, the actuality of Chaikin's disabled performers broke away from the classic image of disability as simultaneously sub-human and super-human. This documentary scene in Body Pieces humanized individuals with disabilities, addressing what films about them should show, and why.

Chaikin's filmmaker in Body Pieces appeared to be more interested in the Hollywood version of disability, and yet his identity was complicated by the fact that the actor playing this character was physically disabled. The audience had already seen Robertson, the panhandler from the earlier scene, and witnessed him on stage with his prosthetic limb removed. He was marked as physically disabled prior to this scene. However, before he entered this interview scenario as the filmmaker, Robertson attached his artificial leg under his pants and proceeded to play a character we assume to be non-disabled given the context and the premise of the scene. This transition from detached leg to prosthetically whole leg and from disabled to apparently non-disabled character forced the audience to question the conceptual leap from fragmented body to whole body and also raised the complication of an invisible disability. Did Robertson count as disabled in this scene if the audience could not see his prosthesis? Did prior knowledge of his disability prevent us from seeing his new character as non-disabled? Did his body become whole with that prosthetic addition? Or did audience members automatically fill the empty space of the missing limb, making the prosthesis a return to an artificial but normative reality when attached and covered?

Chaikin took these questions one step further in a bar scene between a different Hollander character (Sammy) dressed in slinky clothes and the actor who first played the barker, Wayne Maugans (Frank). These two actors were now part of a split scene where two couples comprised each of one disabled and one non-disabled character meet their respective partners in a bar and try to pick each other up. Whereas we had seen Hollander thus far standing on one leg or using crutches, she entered for this scene walking on her prosthesis. The man her character tries to attract, Frank, does not know her leg is prosthetic:

FRANK: ...(to Sammy) (indicating her leg) There's something strange about your leg, it feels kinda strange....
SAMMY: It's fake, it's a prosthetic leg.
FRANK: Oh! That's it! It looked kinda like a mannequin leg. And now I see why it looked that way. (beat.) You only got one leg?
SAMMY: Yes.
...
FRANK: Can you "do it" with your leg on?
SAMMY: I suppose I could.
FRANK: But you usually take it off?
SAMMY: (smiling seductively) Yes, I do.
...
FRANK: Let's go up to your room.
SAMMY: I'm not sure. I don't usually do this. Not with a stranger.
FRANK: It'll be good. I'm very good.
...
SAMMY: Y'know, the last time I took a guy home, it turned out that he was attracted to me because I only have one leg; it turned him on.
FRANK: Really?
SAMMY: Yeah, he said my stump, it was like, it was a fetish to him, it made him hot.
FRANK: It doesn't make me hot at all. Not at all.
...
SAMMY: So, it doesn't turn you on, but does it turn you off?
FRANK: A little, yeah, it does...other than that, you're real sexy.
SAMMY: Gee, thanks.
...
SAMMY: Maybe you should just leave.
FRANK: I'm sorry, you're really hot and all, it's just, I can't, I can't do it, unless you leave the leg on maybe.
SAMMY: As I told you, I prefer to take it off.
...
FRANK: I'm sorry.
SAMMY: Too bad, we could have had some fun.

For Frank, sex with Sammy would necessitate use of the prosthesis. It would not matter to this character—as it did not when he originally sat by her in the bar and tried to pick her up—if the leg were prosthetic, as long as she kept it attached. The illusion of wholeness is what matters to him, and "...in a literal sense a prosthesis seeks to accomplish an illusion" (Mitchell & Snyder, 2000, p. 6). Frank's need to complete Sammy's body prosthetically and return it to an original wholeness is already a faulty assumption. As Mitchell and Snyder (2000) argue, "To prostheticize, in this sense, is to institute a notion of the body within a regime of tolerable deviance [...where] the minimal goal is to return one to an acceptable degree of difference" (pp. 6–7). What is acceptably different in bed for Frank is not so for Sammy; her body without the prosthesis is what feels whole for her. This was true for both Hollander's character and for herself. After the show, she spoke to audience members with her prosthetic leg slung over her shoulder.

Hollander's character, Sammy, recalls a previous lover who was turned on by her stump and treated it like a fetish object. This past lover's erotic fantasies about Sammy's remaining stump reflect a growing subculture that has emerged "...around the sensualised and sexualised absence/presence of a limb" (Kuppers, 2000) In her article, "Addenda? Contemporary Cyborgs and the Mediation of Embodiment," Petra Kuppers (2000) refers to "accounts of amputee fetishism" whereby an amputee's prostheses can serve as "seductive invitations into a different form of embodiment," (n.p.) and by extension, a different form of sexual experience. Kuppers goes so far as to suggest that amputees need to campaign for "more desirable prostheses" (Ibid.). This revision of prosthetics to include the possibility of aesthetic and seductive body part attachments stretches the boundaries not just of sexuality, but also of the body as sexually enhanced by prostheses. This radical approach to prosthetic body parts for women in particular flies in the face of previous judgments that "the disabled woman's body is asexual and unfeminine" (Garland Thomson, 1997, p. 25). Garland Thomson (1997) explains that women with disabilities have been shunted into a sort of "'rolelessness,' a social invisibility and cancellation of femininity. ...Seen as the opposite of the masculine figure, but also imagined as the antithesis of the normal woman, the figure of the disabled female is thus ambiguously positioned both inside and outside the category of woman" (pp. 25, 29). Whereas this position could be considered abnormal and for that reason not desirable, it could also offer new definitions of female sexual identity that allow women such as the character Sammy or the actress Anita Hollander to feel fully embodied without a prosthetic illusion of wholeness. In this case, prosthetic attachments could essentially become sexy accessories rather than sexual necessities, as Frank would have them be. The female disabled body might then be sexually appealing with or without the addition of her prosthesis, and sexuality would not rely on corporeal wholeness for success.

The Open Theater

Before Chaikin began his disability project in theater, he experimented with various societal themes such as fear of death, incarceration, biblical myths, and national identity with an ensemble he dubbed the Open Theater. He worked with these actors over 10 years' time from the early 1960s to the early 1970s. At times this group took finished work by playwrights and staged these texts in unconventional ways. At other times, Chaikin worked collaboratively with playwrights such as Jean-Claude van Itallie (e.g. America Hurrah, 1966). His best-known works from the sixties include The Serpent: A Ceremony (1968) with a text written by van Itallie, and Terminal (1969), which was a collaborative piece. The company used non-naturalistic material for these works with the intention of bringing about what Chaikin referred to as a theater of immediacy and presence. Chaikin's search for difference produced new practices that challenged the definitions of traditional theater.

In the early 1970s, Chaikin reduced the Open Theater's initial size of eighteen actors to a group of six because he wanted to work on a smaller scale. This tighter ensemble produced two new pieces: The Mutation Show (1971) and Nightwalk (1972). The first of these dealt with aspects of freak shows and would later be revisited in one freak show scene of Body Pieces (2001). Chaikin instituted the 1973 demise of the Open Theater because this group had gained more recognition than was appropriate for its initial mission to produce experimental work that did not cater to mainstream economics. In place of the Open Theater, he created the Other Theater. This new group was a means to start over again, to recapture the innovative energy of the Open Theater's early years but with a different focus, or rather, a different set of differences.

Theater of Otherness

From its inception in 1973, the Other Theater provided Chaikin a forum for addressing human difference. His stroke in 1984 pushed him toward disability aesthetics in his own solo performances and later as ensemble director with other disabled actors. Chaikin explored the social role of disability in workshops with a changing group of mixed-ability actors and playwrights from 1992 to 2001. December 2001 was the first public showing of Body Pieces under Chaikin's direction using John Belluso's script. Chaikin selected Belluso both because of his growing notoriety as a disabled playwright in the Mark Taper Forum's Other Voices Project in Los Angeles and his talent for adapting actors' improvisations. Just as Chaikin's 1973 Other Theater developed out of his earlier Open Theater, this 2001 disability project emerged as a more current version of the Other Theater. The new group fought against preconceptions and stereotypes, acknowledging social limitations and offering a critique as well as suggestions for change. Chaikin tackled disabled/non-disabled interaction and disabled/disabled interaction to illustrate that even within disabled communities, hierarchies and social differences abound.

Chaikin's disability theater benefited from his career-long commitment to the socially impossible. In many ways, this term echoes what I like to call the "impossible possible" in relation to disability. It is a phrase that resembles Carrie Sandahl's "impossible ideal" in her article, "Black Man, Blind Man: Disability Identity Politics and Performance" in Theatre Journal (2004). Sandahl uses this notion to describe the work of theater scholars Jill Dolan and Paula Moya: Dolan's "utopian performative" and Moya's "postpositivist realist reconceptualization of objective knowledge" (p. 595) offer rehearsals for new social structures in ways that parallel my project as well as those of Sandahl and Kuppers. Imagining the possible is what enables impossibilities to become realities.

Chaikin's (1972) focus changed with each new exploration of what he found socially impossible. He argued in Presence of the Actor, "...when the theater is limited to the socially possible, it is confined by the same forces which limit society" (p. 23). By extension, when theater is not limited to the socially possible it may create new perspectives and responses, making it an important vehicle for social change. In his early work, Chaikin used Brecht's epic theater as a means to explain this concept with regards to audience pity:

It should be restated at once that the premise at the center of Brecht's work is that people can change. Things could be different. The epic theater, as he came to define and redefine it, asks for a removal of pity by the performers and audience, since pity is a response to that which cannot be changed.... (Chaikin, 1972, p. 35)

Brecht's demand for the removal of pity was a precursor to the disability rights movement, though Brecht would not have made this connection himself. Although the material realities of physical disability may not be able to change at the level of the body, what can be altered is audience perception of disability. As with Brecht's theater for social change, the audience for disability performance learns that pity is not the only possible social response.

One potential criticism of Chaikin's disability representation in Body Pieces is his use of conventional humor that plays to a predominantly non-disabled clientele. Chaikin's mix of freak show elements with sit-com humor and musical interludes made his piece inviting to audiences who may or may not have been familiar with crip humor's darker satire. He played it safe for valid reasons: the comfort of familiar forms afforded him a broader audience and a critique of freak show culture that represented disability-as-freakery without reinscribing actors with disabilities as freaks, and without freaking out his novice crip-culture audiences.

Conclusion

Disabled actors playing disabled roles make the clear statement that disability is never just a metaphor. For non-disabled actors playing disabled roles, the metaphor of disability is applied much like special effects make-up or costumed deformity; it is just another acting gimmick or exercise in character study. Disabled actors do not have the option of stepping out of disabled character to quite the same extent as those who are non-disabled, and this changes the way they play disabled roles. One would imagine that after an initial phase of self-representation and self-definition, theatrical work on disability would move past this to a different level where actual disability is not so crucial, but the early work needs to be about getting the bodies and the concepts on stage.

Chaikin made space for disabled actors, playwrights, and directors, and was thus a pioneer in the struggle for actual disability representation in theater. According to Paul K. Longmore (2002) in his article, "The Second Phase: From Disability Rights to Disability Culture," the first step toward validating disability culture is to gain "equal access and opportunity and inclusion in mainstream society. The second phase will entail the process of self-representation and definition, based on the values and beliefs of people with disabilities and not on the expectations and norms of the nondisabled majority" (pp. 393–94). Disability rights activists have done for disability culture what Chaikin did for disability theater: namely, assure equal representational access. Self-representation in theater is one major goal for disability artists; input into scripts and character definitions is key to revising cultural misconceptions about impaired bodies. Chaikin technically achieved more under the rubric of the second phase of this movement; he employed disability artists to write about and perform disability issues. Lack of mainstream support for his work is part of the reason why Body Pieces was ten years in the making. Chaikin was basically in search of what Eileen Blumenthal (1984) once referred to in Directors in Perspective: Joseph Chaikin as a "theater that does not yet exist" (p. 37). Although Chaikin made great efforts in this quest, it is an ever-changing task. As each new project takes hold within the mainstream, it becomes a theater that does exist, and had Chaikin lived beyond his June 2003 death, he would have gone right back to the drawing board to start on something as of yet undiscovered.

Disabled performers are no longer freaks or medical specimens unless they make a conscious choice to use and critique these old models, or unless art critics and audiences refuse to see them any other way. Even this denial is an empty backlash at this point though, given the last decade's history of victim art debates. No audience is ever unanimous in its response to art of any kind, and there will always be disagreement about standards and approaches within disability art circles. What is new is that audiences have more opportunities to view critically conscious disability performances that question what it means to look at difference with a difference. Whereas educated audiences might identify theatrical stereotypes of other minority groups (blackface minstrelsy for example), contemporary spectators may not be so able to recognize disability stereotypes. If disability performance challenges old stereotypes and presents new images that defy these stereotypes, audiences will at least be given the chance to witness this change. Chaikin's Body Pieces invited such witness with a gentle humor about the politics of prosthetics.

References

Blumenthal, E. (1984). Directors in Perspective: Joseph Chaikin. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Chaikin, J. (1972). Presence of the Actor. New York: Theatre Communications Group.

Thomson, R. (1997). Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press.

Hall, S. (1995). "New Ethnicities," The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. New York: Routledge.

Kuppers, P. (2000). "Addenda: Contemporary Cyborgs and the Mediation of Embodiment," Body, Space, and Technology, 1:1 (refereed e-journal).

Kuppers, P. (2003). Disability and Contemporary Performance: Bodies on Edge. New York and London: Routledge.

Longmore. P. (2002). "The Second Phase: From Disability Rights to Disability Culture," in In Context: Participating in Cultural Conversations, Nancy Downs, Ann Merle Feldman and Ellen McManus (eds.) New York: Addison Wesley Longman.

Mitchell, D. & Snyder, S. (2000). Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Sandahl, C. (2004). "Black Man, Blind Man: Disability Identity Politics and Performance." Theatre Journal 56: 579–602.

Wendell, S. (1996). The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability. New York: Routledge.

Acknowledgements

The research for this essay was generously supported by the Ed Roberts Postdoctoral Fellowship (NIDRR grant number H133p020009).