My Secret Language of FAIL: or, good intentions, good performers, and an absolutely terrible play

[naomikritzer]

I want to start this by making sure all the local people know about Mixed Blood Theater's "Radical Hospitality" program. They explain it in some detail here, but to sum up -- they offer free general admission on a first-come, first-served basis to every single play. If you want to guarantee a reserved spot, you can pay for a reservation, and obviously they are happy to accept donations, but if you'd like to see live theater and can't afford to pay, you can go see professional theater at Mixed Blood, free. (You may have to pay to park, but the lot across the street from the theater is only $3 for the evening.)

They have also made a real commitment to accessibility for the disabled. All plays have "superscript" translations and some have ASL translators (and one of the shows haddayr and I saw last night was done entirely in ASL with translation projected on the back wall). There are ramps and self-opening doors, the wheelchair seating is awesome, disabled people get complimentary seat reservations and if you need it, they actually will send a taxi to pick you up and bring you to the theater. (More info here.) When they say they offer radical hospitality, they really mean it.

All of this added up to one of the most diverse theater audiences I've ever seen in Minnesota.

They're doing a theater festival right now called "Center of the Margins," which is three plays relating to disability and disability issues. We saw two last night: "Gruesome Playground Injuries," which was performed entirely in ASL (and the two actresses were seriously amazing and totally awesome -- I didn't absolutely love the play, but I loved the performances enough to recommend it anyway). And "My Secret Language of Wishes." Which -- oh my God. I don't even know where to start.

There will be spoilers below.



It's billed as an exploration of race, family, unconditional love, and "the complexities and legalities at the intersection of race and custodial care." The basic premise goes like this: Rose is a 17-year-old black girl with cerebral palsy, some mild mental impairments, seizures, and several unrelated but serious medical problems. She was abandoned as an infant on the steps of a church, and has grown up in institutional care. A wealthy black woman, Brenda, turned up at the institution and wanted to adopt her; initially Rose was very happy about this, but after an overnight visit with Brenda she grew very withdrawn and told her aide, Dakota, that she didn't want Brenda to adopt her after all. Dakota, a broke, 23-year-old white girl decides that SHE will try to adopt Rose, instead, and the story starts with her going to a lawyer, Jo, to hire her to fight for custody. Jo is a closeted lesbian, and there's a subplot involving her relationship with her Dominican partner and whether they're going to have a baby that offers up a whole new layer of fail (look, if you have one character saying to another, "you have to prove your love for me by having a baby with me! because that is how people prove their love -- they have babies together!" PLEASE do not ask me to sympathize with this character and consider her the sane one in the relationship! Conflict between a lesbian couple about when and whether to have a baby is totally fine, but the way this one was scripted made me want to scream.)

Anyway. FAIL. Let me count the ways.

1. Of all the offensive disability tropes out there, the one I find most grating is the cognitively disabled person who spouts profound or overtly poetic things in an innocent, child-like way. I can tolerate once per play or movie without choking too hard, but once per hour is pretty much my maximum. (A special dispensation would be granted to a play or movie that was interrogating the trope or doing this satirically. That was not the case here.) Rose had entire profound SPEECHES multiple times through the play.

2. Of all the offensive disability tropes out there, the one that Haddayr finds most infuriating is the one where the sweet cognitively disabled person dies at the end. Guess who dies at the end? (Hint: NOT BRENDA OR DAKOTA.)

3. A disability trope we both find really infuriating is the one where the physically disabled person talks about how in her dreams, she's normal or goes on at length and in detail about all the physical things they can't do but wish they could. A really excellent rebuttal to some of this can be found in Harriet McBryde Johnson's essay, Unspeakable Conversations, about her conversations with Peter Singer:

Pressing me to admit a negative correlation between disability and happiness, Singer presents a situation: imagine a disabled child on the beach, watching the other children play.

It's right out of the telethon. I expected something more sophisticated from a professional thinker. I respond: "As a little girl playing on the beach, I was already aware that some people felt sorry for me, that I wasn't frolicking with the same level of frenzy as other children. This annoyed me, and still does." I take the time to write a detailed description of how I, in fact, had fun playing on the beach, without the need of standing, walking or running.

I'm not going to say that no disabled person ever has felt the way the girl does in the play. What I will say is that it's something that is very, very frequently attributed to disabled characters by able-bodied writers, and when you read things by disabled writers, you are a hell of a lot less likely to see this sort of scene.

This also sort of goes to the heart of the medical model vs. the social model of disability. To oversimplify a bit -- the medical model says, "if you use a wheelchair and there is a flight of stairs between you and your destination, the problem is that you can't walk, and we should focus on trying to fix you, because your body is the core issue." The social model says, "if you use a wheelchair and there is a flight of stairs between you and your destination, the problem is the stairs, and we should focus on putting in ramps and elevators, because the core issue is a world that is only set up for people who can walk."

Moving on.

4. The playwright doesn't seem to have done even fairly basic research into how the adoption process works. I will note that I am not an expert on this, particularly not for NYC, but the following things that seemed off, to me:

a. When Rose goes on her ill-fated trip to Brenda's house, she has a seizure, and Brenda freaks out because she has no idea how to deal with it (she actually screams to her maid to bring her a spoon. PRO TIP: do not put ANYTHING in the mouth of a person who's having a seizure. You really don't have to do much for a seizure: keep them from drowning, if they're in water, clear the area of things they could smack into and hurt themselves on, and call 911 if it lasts more than five minutes or if another seizure starts immediately.) I'm pretty sure that if you're adopting a child with multiple serious disabilities, you're expected to get some training on their medical needs and procedures before you bring them home for an overnight visit.

b. Overnight visits with a child you're adopting from foster care or a residential institution are not a first step, "getting to know you" sort of deal. The adoption process would be pretty well underway before Rose went to Brenda's house, making Dakota's "I know! I'LL adopt you!" approach even more quixotic.

c. Older children get a significant say in whether and by whom they're going to be adopted. This may not be true for a child with a cognitive disability, but Rose is verbal (profound, even!) and if she'd had a serious objection to Brenda adopting her, I would have expected this to be taken fairly seriously by her social worker.

d. Her social worker! WHERE THE HELL was her social worker? Any child in care has one, and her opinion (of Brenda, of Dakota, of Rose) would have mattered a fair amount. She might have been clueless, distracted, too busy to give a shit, or corrupt, but she should have at least been a character in the play! (And, frankly, at the point when it is discovered that a millionaire real estate investor is trying to adopt a child, and an aide from her institution has arranged for the child to be personally represented by a lawyer who normally charges $300/hour, I would expect that this social worker would have gotten a lot more interested because clearly something weird is going on.

e. The surprise revelation partway through the play is that Brenda is Rose's biological mother, and the one who abandoned her on a doorstep. When this is revealed, she is awarded custody with no further hearing. The (older black) man sitting to my right audibly exclaimed something like "give me a fucking break" at that twist. I would believe that there is possibly a family court judge somewhere who would do this, because there are some seriously fucked up judges. But the characters act like it's not even all that surprising, and WHAT? SERIOUSLY? I would expect most judges to award custody to Dakota at that point with no further hearing, not Brenda.

5. The play claims to examine racial issues in adoption, but this took the form of two things:

a. Brenda, when she goes to visit Jo, says that she should be given custody of Rose because she and Rose are both black, and suggests that Jo, also a black woman, should agree with her about this.

b. Jo, when meeting with Dakota, asked on multiple occasions whether her boyfriend and her boyfriend's family are seriously on board with Dakota adopting a severely disabled black teenager and Dakota says, "oh YES! everyone's cool. they love Rose!" Since the boyfriend is not portrayed in the play, we don't have a good way to judge whether she's right, or she's deluding herself. (The guy to my right, who made the "yeah, right!" comment about the custody award, also scoffed audibly every time this conversation happened.)

There are all sorts of complex things about trans-racial adoption that this play does not even begin to seriously grapple with, starting with hair. Rose's hair is done by Dakota, who fills her hair with colorful barrettes because they make Rose happy. Brenda dislikes the barrettes and suggests to Rose that she take her to a beauty salon to have her hair done more nicely -- which is one of the things that starts to create the fissure between Rose and Brenda. Brenda is also losing her hair, and wears a wig to disguise this fact -- this is mentioned, then shown in flashback.

So. Black girls' hair, and what exactly you do with it, is a HUGE issue in trans-racial adoption. Moreover, in institutions where disabled people are cared for in groups, the hair of the residents is often cut extremely short for the convenience of the caregivers: Harriet McBryde Johnson talks about this in one of her other excellent essays, The Disability Gulag. Harriet wore her hair extremely long, as a symbol of her freedom and the fact that she got to choose her own caregivers and insist that one of their jobs was to brush her hair and keep it looking nice.

In the play, this could have been approached from any number of angles, with the most obvious being to give Rose long but somewhat unkempt hair, and to say that Dakota has time to do some basic combing (and to pin in barrettes) but does not have time to braid it. Brenda could have latched on to this as evidence that a white woman is not a suitable mother for a black girl. This leads to all sorts of other interesting questions, about the sort of grooming you do for a cognitively disabled person in an institution. Do you comb her hair thoroughly even if she complains that you're pulling, or do you let it slide? It's not OK to say, "well, you're a disabled person who lives in an institution, so who really cares how your hair looks? screw it." But on the other hand, she's 17, so if she says, "STOP combing my hair. I don't like you doing this," there's a point where you need to respect that. These are complicated and interesting questions that the show could have explored during the time they spent having people make endless, endless speeches about "WHAT IS LOVE" and "OH LET ME SAY PROFOUND THINGS ABOUT WISHES!" or having the lesbians fight about making a baby (or not) or having the Latina lesbian tell you all about the quaint superstitions of her foremothers (don't ask) or ... gah.

I should note here that the issues in transracial adoption neither begin nor end with hair care. I focused on it here because the play does talk about hair -- while ignoring all the ways in which it relates to transracial adoption even though this is supposed to be a play about transracial adoption.

6. Did I mention the speeches? Rose gives speeches about wishes, dancing, love, and kissing (I will give them a point, reluctantly, for suggesting that a cognitively impaired severely disabled teenage girl has a sex drive, but then I have to take it away again for the take-home message of, "yes! and you'll get to have sex WHEN YOU DIE AND SHED YOUR HORRIBLY DISABLED SHELL!") Jo gave speeches about love and parenting and love again. Jo's partner Cecilia gave speeches about love and parenting and babies and love. You know what? Hearing people talk about love is nearly always boring, so keep it brief.



And after all this, I need to get lunch and go somewhere so I'm going to stop here but I am leaving stuff out! There was fail with the lesbians, there was fail with the fact that of the three black women in the play, one was profoundly disabled and the other two were bitches with anger management problems, there were other things I bitched about last night in the car on the ride home that I'm not even thinking of right now. Dear Mixed Blood Theater: was this really the best you could do? REALLY? I saw such commitment to inclusion in the ways that you have worked on your physical space. I see such embrace of diversity with your Radical Hospitality program, and the actors in this play were incredibly talented, particularly the woman who played Rose (she had clearly studied people with CP -- how they move, how they sit, how they talk, and she did an absolutely amazing job) and the woman who played Dakota, a character who could have been incredibly grating but who instead was so appealing that I completely understood why the bitchy lawyer wound up representing Rose against her best judgment. (I really hope I see that actress again in a better play.) And this was the play you chose?

Really?

So! Haddayr and I are going to see the third show in the festival, "On the Spectrum," tonight. I really hope it is better than Wishes. Oh, how I hope it is better.

Comments

[wisconsinwriter.livejournal.com]

Ow. As an adoptive parent, I cringe, cringe, cringe. Getting a child is not like putting 50 cents in the claw machine and hoping you score a prize at the local Shopko. It's a long process with lots of players involved, as you've rightly stated.

That and there's nothing worse than a preachy-ill advised but of course "well-intentioned" play.

[terrie01.livejournal.com]

Sounds like the third play would have to be actively trying to be worse than Wishes.

Aside from that, Mrs Lincoln

[eileenlufkin.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry the play was bad, but thanks for the interesting review that explains how it's bad. Also thanks for the information about Mixed Blood Theater's "Radical Hospitality" program. Finally, thank you so much for the links to the Harriet McBryde Johnson essays. I hadn't read either of them before and they are both wonderful.

P.S. Sorry for spamming your inbox with edits. There's a reason I don't comment very often.

[jesse_the_k]

Harriet McBryde Johnson has an essay collection — Too Late to Die Young — as well as a lovely YA book about a "crip camp," — Accidents of Nature — which shows the internal heirarchies which can develop in cross-disability institutions.

Thanks, Naomi, for the good news and the bad. I think turning Accidents of Nature into a play would be a worhty task indeed: all disabled actors under 18!

[naomikritzer]

I loved both of those books. I'd have to re-read Accidents of Nature to assess how it would work as a play -- my first thought was that it wouldn't work because of the camp setting (there's horseback riding, there's swimming...) but I can't remember at this point how central the camp activities were to the story.