Monday, January 03, 2022
Naming the Trope:
HowlRound Theatre Commons: It’s 2019, and I am walking into a prominent American theatre to see a well-reviewed production. This production is intended to examine a specific disability in an honest and exciting light to change our cultural understanding of disability. As a disabled theatremaker and activist, I anticipated an honest portrayal of both the hardships and celebrations of being disabled in America. Except this doesn’t do that. Instead, it follows a familiar pattern of sacrificing disabled truth for an unsettling, two-dimensional depiction of disability filled with clichés and stereotypes.
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2 comments:
Often, I hear about the harms of racial and gendered stereotypes, and how that reinforces unequitable standards but it is rare I hear about ableism. I found this essay thought-provoking and extremely thorough in its exploration of the harm of tropes and stock characters. I particularly appreciated the message in the first paragraph about how these tropes help create emotional resonance to the privileged group rather than the group that is being depicted. This reminds me of a conversation that I had with a fellow theater-maker in relation to the messages of Wicked. They told me they were frustrated by the way it goes about addressing themes of racial discrimination, and that the Wicked Witch had to be green rather then a person of color because modern audiences would not have been able to handle the frankness of that story. To me, this is another example of openly catering to the group of privilege.
This essay was extremely eye-opening in openly calling out a major problem in media as a whole, and one that I wholeheartedly believe theatre can lead the way to correct, should we as an industry be able to fully reflect on and address our own role in creating this harm in the first place and create change in our own community. There are so many people across both the nation and the world that experience some form of disability, and they deserve to be faithfully and respectfully represented. Instead, they are portrayed as these harmful, wrongful, inaccurate, and stereotypical tropes whose only purpose is to satiate the majority and provide them with entertainment or some twisted form of sympathy. Reading these tropes broken down and defined really just makes you realize just how pervasive these depictions are in theatre, and just how much we as an art form and industry are helping to perpetuate these perceptions to a society that already tends to ostracize and abandon anyone they perceive as "abnormal" or the "other". Greater attention needs to be given to this, especially during a time in which we are all the more aware of the many problems pervasive in the theatre industry that keep it from providing a truly diverse, equitable, and inclusive community for all members of that community.
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