disabilityarts.online: spate of high profile all-female productions of Shakespeare the past few years – Maxine Peake playing Hamlet in Manchester and Phillyda Lloyd’s trilogy of Julius Caesar, Henry IV and last year’s The Tempest, to name just a few. As a woman working in theatre, I applaud any attempt to provide more visible platforms for women practitioners, and believe there is still much to be mined from the classics with cross-gender casting (and I mean male actors playing female roles here, too…). Yet in the midst of all this welcome talk about diversity and parity, I believe there is still one area hugely overlooked – and that is atypical embodiment.
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Women are the future of theater. Simply put, if we go on strike, nobody would be willing to watch a show that is an all male cast, with a male director, and all male designers. That’s not to say it hasn’t been done, but if women boycotted working in the theater industry, so would a boycott of the biggest portion of the average audience: women. On the other hand, if a production takes place that is done by all women actors, playwright, director, designers, etc., audiences would be huge. Women support women and so creating Shakespeare shows, or in this article, films, with female leads, is one of the things that’s revolutionizing the industry, and more of it should be happening. I would love to see a performance with a female Hamlet, or a gay couple as Romeo and Juliet, or a female Othello, or a female Richard III, there are so many great plays that would be bettered if the leads were female and more theaters should be willing to make that leap.
This article tackles, in various depths, three different and very important topics that need to be discussed in theater: 1. Gender crossing roles 2) representation of disabilities on stage and representation of the disabled community on stages 3) media incorporation in live theater. Talking about the gender crossing of plays, I didn’t know that companies were doing all female Shakespeare. I think that is a really good idea and it is an interesting reversal on the historical note that original all of Shakespeare’s actors were required to be male. The discussion of the representation of disabilities on stage was very interesting. What really caught me was how the author kept referring to her plays with character with disabilities as not mainstream or “crip cult”, and yes, it is true that plays featuring characters with disabilities are not currently in the mainstream, it doesn’t mean that we can’t put them into the mainstream. Representation of people with disabilities is not going to happen until someone puts them there, so I believe that this author and playwright needs to keep writing that “crip cult” and put it into the mainstream so we can all start to have a conversation about both physical and mental disabilities and so that people with disabilities can see themselves represented on the stage.
This past summer, I was in New York for a week. My mom was there with other members of my high school’s theatre company’s production staff for a workshop. I was talking with her and my high school’s director about a talk they went to with Disney workers, talking about their Broadway shows. Apparently, they had talked about how they were trying to be more inclusive when it comes to race, gender, etc. representation in their casts. As we talked, I realized that, yes, Disney could definitely do this. Many of the roles in their shows do not have to be played by an actor with a certain race and gender. Take Newsies, for example. The Newsies crew does not technically have to be all white boys. Yeah, I know, they sprinkled a couple of POCs in there, but I think more needs to be done. I want to see a female Newsie who does not have short hair, who isn’t made to look fully masculine. In my mind, though adding females and POCs into roles where they can be is more important than historical accuracy. Give these people the opportunity to do what they love, and give audiences the opportunity to appreciate diversity!
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