Cripples ain't supposed to be happy sings Anita Hollander, balancing on her single leg and grinning broadly. This moment--from her multi-award-winning one-woman show, Still Standing--captures the essence of this theatre anthology. Hollander and nineteen other playwright-performers craftily subvert and smash stereotypes about how those within the disability community should look, think, and behave. Utilizing the often-conflicting tools of Critical Disability Studies and Medical Humanities, these plays and their accompanying essays approach disability as a vast, intersectional demographic, which ties individuals together less by whatever impairment, difference, or non-normative condition they experience, and more by their daily need to navigate a world that wasn't built for them. From race, gender, and sexuality to education, dating, and pandemics, these plays reveal there is no aspect of human life that does not, in some way, intersect with disability.
Author(s): John Michael Sefel; Amanda Slamcik Lassetter; Jill Summerville
Publisher: McFarland & Company
Year: 2021
Language: English
Pages: 404
Tags: Literary Criticism, Disability Studies, Drama, Anthology of Drama
Cover
Acknowledgments
Foreword
Preface
Introduction
Part One. First Person Singular
STIFF
The 2018 Invisible Man
An Open Letter to the Usher at the Theatre Who Asked Me if I Was “the Sick Girl”
RPM
Whack Job
I Come from Hoarders
A Performer’s Monologue
Why This Monologue Isn’t Memorized (A True Story)
Tinted
Invisidisability
Crooked
Last Train In
Part Two. Past Is Present
The Last Reading of Charlotte Cushman
Tales of My Uncle
Gramp
Dyscalculia
Part Three. Alone, Together
The Brechtones
Hiccups
Ex/centric Fixations Project
About the Contributors
Index
