Written by Victoria Lewis, featured panelist at the VSA arts RI sponsored preshow discussion of the Gamm Theatre’s production of The Elephant Man on Friday October 5, 2007 at 6:30pm
Back in the day, the day being the late 1970’s and early 80’s, well before the quirky, dark dramas of HBO became the water-cooler rage, some astonishingly fresh and unlikely stories and stars appeared on stage and screen. In 1980, Bernard Pomerance’s The Elephant Man, the story of sideshow exhibit Joseph Merrick and his doctor Frederick Treves, won the Tony for Best Play. The next year Mark Medhoff’s Children of a Lesser God, a drama featuring a romance between a Deaf woman and a hearing man, took home the Best Play prize as well as awards for Best Leading Actress (Phyliss Frelich) and Best Leading Actor (John Rubenstein). In cinema, similarly, Hal Ashby’s Coming Home, a film whose emotional core rested on the sexuality of a disabled man, won Oscars (1978) for Best Screenplay, Best Leading Actor (Jon Voigt) and Best Leading Actress (Jane Fonda). What, one might have asked, was going on? When did disabled characters become leads? When did audiences come to accept disabled characters as complex, autonomous human beings, instead of heroic overcomers such as Franklin Delanor Roosevelt in the old warhorse Sunrise at Campobello or the victims and villains so familiar from melodrama (Tiny Tim, Dr. Strangelove, Captain Hook, etc.). But as we know there is no such thing as “overnight” success: years of unrecognized labor more often than not proceed a brilliant “debut.” So too with ideas. In the early 1960’s a new disability identity was being formed on the streets and in the courts of America. Disabled activists fought discrimination in education, employment, housing and transportation and, less concretely, but no less profoundly, challenged the old stereotypes of disability. Inevitably, this struggle for identity found its way into our national storytelling.
No play better captures that moment of transformation than Pomerance’s The Elephant Man. The drama represents and then undercuts the two primary cultural lenses that have been used to interpret physical and mental difference through the ages–lenses that have operated both on the legitimate stage and in the mass media. The first is the so called Moral (or religious ) Model in which the physically different body is explained by an act of divine or demonic intervention. “Who has sinned, this man or his parents?” the Pharisees asked Christ about the blind man. In the medieval era a spinal deformity was explained by the presence of a devil curled up inside the hump. Choruses of devils babbled in the ears of the deaf. Children born disabled were proof of intercourse with the devil, and their mothers could be burned as witches. Famous stage roles that rely on this character shorthand include the stigmatized Oedipus, Richard III, on the dark side, and saintly characters like Tiny Tim, the special child who represents pure goodness, on the other. When the Elephant’s Man’s manager Ross promises the crowd at the play’s beginning that they will see “Mother Nature uncorseted and in malignant rage!” he is tapping into the crowds’ fears and superstitions, giving them a brush with a taboo and a chance to reaffirm their own normality and goodness.
But beginning in the Victoria era and continuing well into the 20th century, a new idea of disability began to take hold in Western societies. Fueled by advances in the sciences and the growing professionalization of physicians, the so-called “Medical Model” radically revised the meaning of disability. The “impaired,” whether in body or mind, were no longer viewed as supernaturally good or evil, but sick. Under the Medical Model the disabled person is no longer a saint or a sinner, but a patient and must either be charitably removed from society, through institutionalization and in some cases death, or cure themselves, or at least “pass” as cured. Extreme proponents of this view used Social Darwinism and the pseudo-science of Eugenics to justify segregation and elimination of “defective” human beings in pursuit of a perfect human race. Plays and films that reflect the medical model include: Sunrise at Campobello, The Magnificent Obsession, Heidi, Of Mice And Men and Whose Life Is It Anyway? In The Elephant Man Frederick Treves represents the best of the medical model: kind, compassionate, intelligent, and seemingly selfless – an idealistic man whose control of Joseph Merrick is always “for his own good. “
The conflict between Ross, the crass “carny,” and Treves, the humane healer; between superstition and science; between public display and institutionalization was a quarrel that would play out in civic dialogue over the course of the 20th century The Freak Show was one cultural hotspot where the two met head on. Cities passed ordinances closing down the shows, accusing the operators of inhumane exploitation of the ill and unfortunate. By 1932 a New York Times reviewer commenting on Todd Browning’s horror film, Freaks, wrote: ” the difficulty is in telling whether it should be shown at the Rialto [movie house] —where it opened yesterday—or in , say, the Medical Centre.”
Interestingly, the objects of this early 20th-century “culture war,” the side show exhibits themselves, held with neither model. Many considered themselves legitimate entertainers and, more importantly, prized being employed and financially independent. Anything was better than being in the hands of the doctors. Conjoined twins Daisy and Violet Hilton (1908-1968) protested that they “loathed the very tone of the medical man’s voice,” and feared that the doctors would take them from the stage and “punch and pinch and take our pictures always.”
In the sideshow exhibits’ desire to control their own lives we hear the beginning of a new expression of the disability experience that emerges in the late 20thth century–one that rejected both the moral and the medical models and argued instead for independent living and social integration—the social model. In great part the issue of institutionalization provided the catalyst for the entire disability civil rights movement. Advocates argued then, and continue to argue today, that institutionalization of people who are physically dependent is much more expensive than providing support services so that people can live in their own homes, integrated into society. Independent Living came to mean, not physical autonomy, but the ability to make decisions about one’s own life.
And what of Joseph Merrick and Frederick Treves? Pomerance wrote about a time, the Victorian era, and in a time, the 1970’s and 80’s, when questions and assumptions about power fascinated and activated the public. Some twenty years later these issues continue to trouble our public life: Who controls our bodies? What is the value of charity in medical care? Is health care a right or a privilege? What constitutes “quality of life?” And the simplest and the most difficult: How do we care for one another?
A final note on the question of casting. As The Elephant Man premiered in New York in 1980, disabled actors had begun to organize within the performing unions seeking access to wider casting opportunities—the chance to play disability-specific roles as well as so-called “non-specific” roles –lawyers, moms, etc. All minority actors have fought such battles. When William Butler Yeats and Lady Gregory set out to create a Irish/Celtic literary theater that would “reveal the true nature of Ireland,” they drew the line at casting Irish actors. Instead Yeats and Gregory traveled to England where they cast and rehearsed their revolutionary plays with English actors. Not surprisingly few Irish actors of the day could make a living on the stage relegated as they were to playing the Irish drunk in melodramas.
–Victoria Ann Lewis, Associate Professor of Theatre Arts, University of Redlands; Founding Director Mark Taper Forum’s Other Voices
Sections of this essay were published in Victoria Ann Lewis, ed.’s Beyond Victims and Villains: Contemporary Plays by Disabled Playwrights. New York: Theatre Communications Group, Inc., 2006.
Sources: Robert Bogdan. Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Paul Longmore. “Screening Stereotypes: Images of Disabled People,” in Why I Burned This Book and other Essays on Disability. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003.
Now it’s your turn! Discuss Victoria Lewis’ essay here at the VSA arts of RI blog and then come see her speak in person at the pre-show discussion of the Gamm Theatre’s production of The Elephant Man on Friday October 5, 2007 at 6:30pm. For more information click here for the full pdf or to purchase tickets visit www.gammtheatre.org
