Description
Book Synopsis 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.
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Foreword (Calvin Arium)
Preface
Introduction (John Michael Sefel)
Part One—First Person Singular
STIFF (Sherry Jo Ward)
The 2018 Invisible Man (Leroy F. Moore, Jr.)
An Open Letter to the Usher at the Theatre Who Asked Me if I Was "the Sick Girl" (Amy Oestreicher)
RPM (Graham Bryant)
Whack Job (Kate Devorak)
I Come from Hoarders (Carly Jo Geer)
A Performer's Monologue (Connor Long)
Why This Monologue Isn't Memorized (A True Story) (Kurt Sass)
Tinted (Amy Bethan Evans)
Invisidisability (Anonymous)
Crooked (seeley quest)
Last Train In (Adam Grant Warren)
Part Two—Past Is Present
The Last Reading of Charlotte Cushman (Carolyn Gage)
Tales of My Uncle (Monica Raymond)
Gramp (Mandy Fox)
Dyscalculia (Katrina Hall)
Part Three—Alone, Together
The Brechtones (Billy Butler)
Hiccups (Ben Rosenblatt)
Ex/centric Fixations Project (Bree Hadley)
The Plague Plays (Bradley Cherna)
Still Standing (Anita Hollander)
Afterword (John Michael Sefel)
About the Contributors
Index
