John Merrick, better known as The Elephant Man, spent most of his adult life on display as a freak attraction throughout Europe in the late 19^th century. During the same time period, Chang & Eng Bunker, General Tom Thumb, and Zip the What-Is-It? were working on the American side show circuit, making a profit (and usually enabling others to profit from) the performance of their bodily differences. The freak show as a performance genre coalesces a number of complex relationships between
the self and the other, the normal and the freakish, the abled and disabled (among other things). But for however problematic it may be, the heyday of the side show remains one of the few periods in American popular culture where “othered” bodies were widely represented on public stages.

This course seeks to investigate the representation of disability and bodily otherness in dramatic literature. We will read a variety of plays featuring characters with disabilities, ranging from Shakespeare’s /Richard III/ to more contemporary works such as Suzan-Lori Parks’s /Venus/. In addition to plays, we will also study the genre of side show “freak” performance in the late 19^th century and contemporary iterations of side show performances, such as performance art cabarets
by Mat Fraser and Julie Atlas Muz or the Jim Rose Circus. In close reading these texts and performances, we will consider the following questions: How do we narrate disability? How we articulate otherness in a script? How, too, does staging construct and model reactions to and interactions with disabled bodies? How have historical representations of disability changed and how are these changes reflected in dramatic literature?

This course satisfies the “W” requirement, which means that students can expect to produce 10-15 pages of writing on the above texts over the course of the quarter.

4. Book List

/Richard III,/ William Shakespeare (ISBN: 978-0451526953)
/The Octoroon,/ Dion Boucicault (ISBN: 978-1162703619)
/The Glass Menagerie,/ Tennessee Williams (ISBN: 978-0811214049)
/Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,/ Tennessee Williams (ISBN: 978-0811216012)
/The Miracle Worker,/ William Gibson (ISBN: 978-0573612381)
/Signs of Life,/ Joan Shankar (ISBN: 978-0819563231)
/The Elephant Man,/ Bernard Pomerance (ISBN: 978-0802130419)
/Children of a Lesser God,/ Mark Medoff (ISBN: 978-0822202035)
/Venus,/ Suzan-Lori Parks (ISBN: 978-0822215677)
Coursepack (including selections from /Porgy & Bess/ by George & Ira
Gershwin and /The Freak and the Showgirl/ by Mat Fraser & Julie Atlas Muz)