Deabler, Justin (Writer). Kreith, Ari Laura (Director). Contracts. [Play]. Lynx Ensemble Theater, New York City, October 29 through November 20, 2004.

Reviewed by David Kornhaber, Columbia University

There is an awkward moment towards the beginning of Contracts that has a ring of truth to it. When the wheelchair-using law student Daniel meets the mother of his friend Jason, she immediately and inappropriately focuses on his disability, saying how hard it must be to live life in such a condition and asking if he has been this way from birth. Daniel and his mother are duly taken aback by such aggressive questioning, and Daniel offers only brief, civil answers. At first, the incident seems indicative of the problems Daniel has faced his whole life—being pitied and prejudged for his physical condition before he is even given a chance to introduce himself. Indeed, much of Contracts revolves around the damaging effects of prejudice: the lesbian law student Sarah is unable to tell her parents that she is gay even though she's been in a committed relationship for years; Jason, who comes from an impoverished family, must fight against the preconceptions of his elite Harvard Law School colleagues. But with Daniel, we later learn, prejudice is not the source of his frustration at all. Daniel's disability was not acquired at birth but was the result of an injury inflicted by his mother: it is the history of his condition and not the way the people around him perceive it that is the problem.

Contracts, written by Harvard Law graduate Justin Deabler, is essentially a parable—the kind of parable every lawyer dreams of, in which even the most mundane topics in the law serve as a larger metaphor for the human condition. It concerns the lives of four first-year law students taking a basic contracts course. Not surprisingly, the dry legal tenets they learn about in school spill over into their private affairs, revealing the devastating effects of promises made and broken in the course of our everyday lives. Each character serves to represent a different type of broken contract. The lovers Sarah and Katherine abandon each other emotionally over the course of the year. Jason is abandoned more literally by his deadbeat father. And Daniel must contend with a mother who injured rather than protected him as a child. The bonds—or contracts, if you will—of love between lovers and within families are broken each in turn.

There is nothing wrong with this conceit in the abstract and it makes for entertaining drama, but in the case of the disabled Daniel it sends a troubling message. For Daniel, and for the audience, his disability is an unmitigated symbol of loss—loss of love from his parents, loss of opportunities in his future, and most of all loss of a "normal" life. He is a capable enough individual: independent, highly intelligent, and highly mobile in his wheelchair. He is for the most part as positive a representation of disabled people as one could hope to find. And yet he is hopelessly bitter, angry at his mother for stealing away his life. True independence will be hard to come by for Daniel, and it is made all but explicitly clear that he will never find a committed partner and experience true love because his sexual functioning is compromised. His is a broken life.

This is not simply the distorted perspective of one particular character. It is a view of disability essential to the thematic functioning of the story. If Daniel's condition is not a loss, then he cannot fit into Deabler's legal parable. To recognize how far from a healthy view of disability this truly is, we need only look at a character like Sarah. People's prejudices about her homosexuality are in some ways as problematic as those about Daniel's disability—they drive her away from her family, in whom she cannot confide, and from her lover, who is disgusted with the secret status of their relationship. But no self-respecting playwright today would ever dream of portraying Sarah's homosexuality itself as a curse, a blight on her chances of living a "normal" life. It is simply a condition of her existence and it can be dealt with well or poorly, just like anyone's sexuality. Literary devices are well and good, but it seems a sign of how far the disabled community still has to go when an impairment can be portrayed as an impediment to life and not simply a condition of it, the same as any other. Daniel's mere presence in Contracts is an encouraging sign; it is rare to find any wheelchair-using characters in contemporary drama. But if his disability must be made to serve not just as a character trait but as a grand symbol of lost opportunities, we must wonder whether the treatment of disability in Contracts is any kind of advance at all.