Bitter Gertrude

The Seeing Place’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream plays August 28 at 7PM EDT and August 29 at 3PM EDT. For tickets, click here.

Yesterday I sat down (virually) with Erin Cronican and William Ketter of The Seeing Place Theater in New York to talk about their upcoming production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, opening tonight! The production is, of course, on Zoom, so wherever you are, you can still grab a ticket and attend. I’ll be attending this afternoon’s performance (7PM Eastern; 4PM Pacific) and doing a longer write-up later, but I wanted to give you some highlights about why I’m excited to see this piece and give you a chance to see it with me before the piece comes out. (If not, one of the live performances will be recorded and posted online after the show closes).

First of all, it’s a benefit production for homeless LGBTQ youth. To quote their site: “This play is being presented as a benefit for The Ali Forney Center, a non-profit organization dedicated to protecting LGBTQ youths from the harms of homelessness and empower them with the tools needed to live independently.” What’s not to love about that?

The Ali Forney Center is located in New York. Learn more about them by clicking here. 

But here’s what really hit home for me: This production of Midsummer is part of their 10th season, themed around “The Body Politic.” They’re presenting Midsummer as a story about the fight for autonomy and self-determination.

In this production, Lysander and Hermia are a lesbian couple, foregrounding the difficulties faced by LGBTQ youth in accessing the community acceptance needed to support self-determination. You can only determine your own destiny if people with power are not hostile to that destiny and using their power and privilege to disrupt it.

Hermia is given the choice to marry the man her father chooses, become a nun, or die. And while this play is 400 years old, many LGBTQ youth are forced into similar choices. Some legal progress has been made, but LGBTQ youth are still 140% more likely to experience homelessness than their peers. Parents are still throwing their transgender kids out into the street, or abusing them because they can’t perform their gender or sexuality according to parental specifications, driving LGBTQ youth to run away to seek a safer environment. The Ali Forney Center has a waiting list of over 100 kids a night just looking for a safe place to sleep.

While LGBTQ-focused productions of Midsummer are admittedly no longer rare, what is rare is The Seeing Place’s understanding that these issues are intersectional in casting two actors with disabilities: Erin and William.

Erin Cronican is also the Executive Artistic Director of The Seeing Place. (Source: seeingplacetheater.com)

People with disabilities, especially PWDs whose intersectional identities include other marginalized aspects, such as queer PWDs and BIPOC with disabilities, face enormous roadblocks to bodily autonomy and self-determination. Youth with disabilities must struggle against an ableist society that relentlessly seeks to infantilize PWDs, deny our self-determination, deny our autonomy, and frame us as sexless beings whose primary purpose is to provide a framework for able-bodied people as they perform “generosity” and “gratitude.”

Disability is routinely– even aggressively– shut out of discussions of privilege and marginalization. In my last teaching job, I pointed out that we had disability mentioned as part of our “commitment to diversity,” but that we had not even done any information gathering around disability, let alone begun anything approaching equity and inclusion work. Instead of committing to beginning that work, they responded that they would just remove disability from the list.

Disability is almost invisible in discussions of diversity, equity, and inclusion, exacerbated by the fact that PWD representation in media is almost nonexistent, and when we do appear, it’s mostly inspiration porn.

So I’m very excited to see how they approach this play with these issues in mind! I’ll be posting a longer write-up about it early next week. See you at the theatre!

Theatres! If you would like to me write about your Zoom production, contact me at bittergertrude@gmail.com. 

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