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:
“Physical force has no value, where there is nothing else. Snow in snow-banks, fire in volcanoes and solfataras is cheap. The luxury of ice is in tropical countries, and midsummer days. The luxury of fire is, to have a little on our hearth; and of electricity, not the volleys of the charged cloud, but the manageable stream on the battery-wires. So of spirit, or energy; the rests or remains of it in the civil and moral man, are worth all the cannibals in the Pacific.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“From man’s blood-sodden heart are sprung
Those branches of the night and day
Where the gaudy moon is hung.
What’s the meaning of all song?
“Let all things pass away.””
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“Keen instruments, strung to a vast precision
Bind town to town and dream to ticking dream.”
—Hart Crane (1899–1932)