A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare staged at the Barrow Group Theater in Manhattan, was the first play by TBTB to feature a character in a wheelchair:
It holds Ann Marie Morelli, an actress playing Hermia, who at first has the attention of one too many men but later finds herself with the attention of one too few. Hermia, as created by Shakespeare, is short, and her rival in love, Helena (Erin O’Leary), is tall. Through the centuries poor Hermia has always taken a verbal beating for her physique, but here it has a different bite. "Get you gone, you dwarf, you minimus," barks Lysander, who once doted on her. And Hermia herself laments, "My legs can keep no pace with my desires." —Neil Genzlinger, New York TimesA note in the theater program said, "Increasingly we feel we must include all disabled people in our work." To reflect this shift in thought and philosophy, 2008 saw the company changing its name from Theater By The Blind to Theater Breaking Through Barriers. Productions, such as Romeo & Juliet, closely followed featuring an actor with spastic diplegia Cerebral Palsy, their first in a subsequent line of productions incorporating actors with various mobility impairments.
Read more about this topic: Theater Breaking Through Barriers
Famous quotes containing the words midsummer, night and/or dream:
“Why, this is very midsummer madness.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Fine vapors escape from whatever is doing the living.
The night is cold and delicate and full of angels
Pounding down the living. The factories are all lit up,
The chime goes unheard.
We are together at last, though far apart.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“We too are ashes as we watch and hear
The psalm, the sorrow, and the simple praise
Of one whose promised thoughts of other days
Were such as ours, but now wholly destroyed,
The service record of his youth wiped out,
His dream dispersed by shot, must disappear.”
—Karl Shapiro (b. 1913)