Arts

Maria Size

Mark Hisler

Jennifer Denson

By Melissa Flitsch

Stages around the globe echo with a central mantra of both playwrights and actors: theater mirrors life.

What’s on the stage represents what’s out in the larger world. Words, themes, characters - they’re all meant to hold that mirror up to the audience, to show them themselves.

Yet throughout history, some voices have been kept out, primarily those belonging to people with disabilities. The experiences of people with disabilities, who make up roughly 20 percent of the U.S. population, have been almost entirely absent from the theater. For these people, theater does not mirror life.

In the past, even when a play included a character with a disability, the actor chosen to perform that role did not have that disability. Yet actors that live with disabilities understand disabled characters in a way others cannot. Simply put, people without disabilities cannot experience some things.

Taking Center Stage

Throughout the country, however, a movement is bringing the experience of disability into the script through playwrights and onto the stage through performers. “Artists controlling how they are viewed is a crucial element of theatrical performance,” says James Ferris, a faculty associate in communication arts at UW-Madison. “People with disabilities taking stage - and taking control of how they are seen - provides a powerful way to examine and critique social attitudes and practices toward disabled people.”

In Wisconsin, Encore Studio for the Performing Arts is doing just that. The ensemble makes up one of few theater companies in the country that offers a professional opportunity for people with disabilities to pursue a career in theater. As with any theater company, many actors audition for few spots in Encore. In fact, the company can accept only 25 percent of those who audition. Since opening in fall 2000, Encore’s 10 resident actors and five staff members have created and performed 12 original works, including “To Love or Not to Love,” “Not Stubborn … Not Strong-Willed,” and “Let Us Pray.”

Shaping Attitudes

Aside from offering a career in theater for people with disabilities, Encore has a few unwritten missions, as well. “I want people to get a true understanding … that people are people. They have disabilities, but they have the same desires, hopes and dreams that anybody else has,” says artistic director Kelsy Schoenhaar. “It’s all in there just like it is for anybody else.”

Theater companies like Encore strive to show these desires, hopes and dreams on stage in productions drawn from the experiences of the casts, bringing the similarities and differences between people with and without disabilities to the spotlight. The material for Encore comes from the lives of the actors. Schoenhaar interviews each actor accepted into the company and writes plays based on the stories she hears.

“I think it’s really nice that we make our plays really realistic to us - to what we’ve gone through and what we deal with,” Maria Size, Encore actress, says. “I like that - that it’s not just some random play, but it’s based on the actors.”

In the end, the scripts show a blend of humor and seriousness. “But truly, what is life?” Schoenhaar asks. “Life isn’t just drama or isn’t just comedy.” Because the stories of the actors play well in a punchy theatrical mode, Encore’s translations of life into art come in the form of vignettes. However, the current production, “Walk with a Vampire,” is the first non-vignette piece the company has performed.

Regardless of length, theater that involves people with disabilities emphasizes that disability is only one aspect of life. “Disability is a situation, but we tend to ascribe to it a broad kind of defining quality,” Ferris says. That broad defining quality manifests itself in metaphors of disability as everything from evil, sin, helplessness and trauma to innocence and saintliness.

But over the past 30 years, theater companies have chipped away at these metaphorical definitions and at the attitudes that perpetuate these connotations. “Seeing disabled people up on stage, where the culture tells us they are not supposed to be, powerfully pushes audiences to reconsider those attitudes,” Ferris says. “Getting up on stage pushes the disabled performers, too, calling up all that they have been taught, usually implicitly, to avoid attracting attention, to be ashamed of their bodies, to not expect too much. People with disabilities internalize society's attitudes about them. Performance is a wonderful way to call out those attitudes - and counteract them.”

Following in the tide of the casting movement encouraging American producers and directors to think unconventionally, Encore Studio for the Performing Arts works with these intentions at the root of every performance. The productions prompt audiences throughout Wisconsin to think of disability differently. Such work alone cannot change the many years that people with disabilities lived behind the curtains, but as part of a larger whole, this provides a piece of the puzzle.