Disability Theatre and Modern Drama

Kirsty Johnston is associate professor in the Department of Theatre and Film at the University of British Columbia, Canada. Her publications include the monograph Stage Turns: Canadian Disability Theatre (2012) and she has also published in such journals as Modern Drama, Theatre Topics and The Journal of Medical Humanities.

• Acknowledgments Introduction Part I: Critical Survey of Disability Theatre Aesthetics, Politics, and Practices 1. What is Disability Theatre? 2. Critical Embodiment and Casting 3. Staging Inclusion 4. Inherited Plays and New Approaches Part II: Critical Perspectives 5. “Every Man his Specialty”: Beckett, Disability, and Dependence Michael Davidson (University of California, San Diego, USA)6. Reclaiming the Ordinary Extraordinary Body: Or, The Importance of The Glass Menagerie for Literary Disability Studies Ann M. Fox (Davidson College, USA)7. Access Aesthetics and Modern Drama: An Interview with Jenny Sealey on Graeae Theatre Company’s The Threepenny Opera and Blood Wedding Kirsty Johnston 8. Shattering the Glass Menagerie Terry Galloway, M. Shane Grant, Ben Gunter, and Carrie Sandahl (University of Illinois at Chicago, USA)Notes Bibliography Notes on ContributorsIndex

In this highly readable volume, Kirsty Johnson takes seriously the central place of disability within modern theatre. Johnston draws together important theoretical and theatrical insights into the complex commingling of disability and modern drama, powerfully moving beyond reductive approaches that read disability as a metaphor or evaluate representations of disability within a narrow progressive or regressive framework … The result is an excellent, widely applicable work that “recasts” modern drama through creative and contradictory readings of disability history in plays such as Samuel Beckett’s Endgame and Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie, as well as through analyses of inclusive practices of casting, training, dramaturgy, and design in contemporary theatre productions that engage with accessibility as not only an ethic but as a generative aesthetic.