The inclusion of performers with disabilities in theatre has developed in tandem with wider public acceptance of integrating people with disabilities in mainstream society. French theatre actress Sarah Bernhardt was already famous when she had a leg amputation at age 71. She continued her acting career. Bernhardt disliked her prosthetic limbs and chose to use a sedan chair.
The National Theatre Workshop of the Handicapped (NTWH) was a repertory theatre company based in New York City that worked in advocacy, training, and production in theatre for performers with disabilities. It was primarily inclusive of performers and playwrights with physical disabilities when it was founded in 1977. NTWH oversaw projects such as the Writers’ Program for Wounded Warriors, which served as both a therapeutic and artistic program for war veterans to explore the psychological, emotional and spiritual experiences of war. Famous People Players, founded in 1974, is a touring black light theatre company based in Toronto, Canada, that employs people with disabilities as performers and staff.
Some notable 20th-century plays have dealt directly with disability. American playwright Tennessee Williams wrote many plays with female leads who were at least in part inspired by his sister Rose, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia, and then left severely disabled by a lobotomy as a young woman. Characters who reflect Rose's struggle with mental illness include Laura in The Glass Menagerie, Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, and Catherine in the screenplay Williams wrote for the 1959 film Suddenly, Last Summer. In Williams' plays, such women are seen as suffering tragedy as a result of their illness.
Leonard Gershe's Butterflies Are Free, about a young blind man who wins his independence from an overprotective mother, debuted on Broadway in 1969, was made into a film in 1972. The main character was played by non-blind actors in both the original run of the play and the film version. In contrast, the play Children of a Lesser God, written by Mark Medoff and debuting in 1980, included a deaf actress playing the female lead role of a character who is deaf. This continued in the 1986 film version; Marlee Matlin, who is deaf, won an Academy Award for Best Actress. In addition, the play Spring Awakening, a production by Deaf West and which debuted in 2015 on Broadway, featured a large cast of Deaf actors. The play featured both hearing and Deaf actors that performed using American Sign Language.
Links:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Bernhardt
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Theatre_Workshop_of_the_Handicapped
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterflies_Are_Free_(play)
36 Crown Street, WC2B 2DF London
reach@artanddisability.com 
070 3276 0562 © 2021 All Rights Reserved.
