The Problem of Portraying Disabilities

An interesting disability issue came up with Abigail Breslin’s casting as Helen Keller in the upcoming Broadway revival of The Miracle Worker. Advocates such as Sharon Jones of the Alliance for Inclusion in the Arts have protested, pointing out that an actor from their community should have been considered. The producer of the show, David Richenthal, explains that to secure the financial backing, the show needed a recognizable star. Anything else, he said, would have been “financially irresponsible.” Still, this demonstrates some circular reasoning common in acting circles – if disabled actors are never considered for recognizable roles, how will they ever become recognizable themselves? 

This brought up in interesting discussion at Jezebel, wherein Anna North talks about how uncomfortable she is with able-bodied actors portraying people with disabilities, particularly mental disabilities. I have to agree. For a while there, playing someone with a disability on film became an Oscar bait, and I find that idea incredibly exploitative. Similarly, I don’t like the implication that disabled actors are only good at portraying their own disabilities. The goal isn’t for deaf actors to play deaf characters. The goal is for deaf actors and other disabled actors to play a range of characters, not necessarily related to their disability.  

This same issue came up a few weeks ago on the casting of an able-bodied person to play a deaf character in Off-Broadway production The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, and the same excuses were given. But to say that there aren’t recognizable actors with disabilities is just disingenuous. Take Marlee Matliin. Matlin is an Oscar-winning actress that has (gasp) actually played roles that do not hinge entirely on her being deaf. My favourite of these is her portrayal of Joey Lucas, a bad-ass political operative on “West Wing.” Lucas easily bests the most over-confident of Bartlett’s staff time and time again. She is witty as hell, smart as a whip, a recurring romantic interest in the show. She is all of these things, and she is deaf. Not because of being deaf, not despite of being deaf. 

Able-bodied actors playing disabled characters remind me of nothing so much as white actors playing black characters in blackface in the early days of the film industry. People with disabilities continually being marginalized to the point where they’re not even considered to play people with disabilities is pathetic in and of itself, but though a deaf and blind actor playing Helen Keller would be great, it wouldn’t be as much of a victory for disability advocacy as it would if disable actors were considered for roles that didn’t hinge on their disabilities. The world I live in does not look like Hollywood’s version of it, where people with disabilities only factor into life when they have some sort of tragic (or comedic, in some sick situations) value, so I don’t see why we continue to make films that only feature able-bodied (skinny, white, etc etc etc) characters. I would love to see people with disabilities occupy the same playing field without being defined by their disabilities, in acting as well as the rest of society.