In Scenes

My friends and I see The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time on teen night, although none of us are teens anymore. I pick up a color communication badge from the parallel play area, and stare longingly at the ear defenders on the same table. Parallel play, as defined by the sign in front of me, is “the act of engaging in activities in a shared space with other people, but NOT necessarily interacting much (if at all) with those people.” I set my badge to a yellow triangle, which indicates that the person wearing it is okay to make conversation with those they already know but not be approached by strangers, and then double check that there are red and green cards in the pocket too, because I don’t know if I want to ask strangers what they think about the parallel play space or if I want to sit on the bench on the lower level and not speak to anyone at all.

I don’t see anyone wearing ear defenders as I circle the other tables in the area to look at the activities and artwork. There is a bingo card that looks to me like an almost complete list of everything stressing me out at this moment. I make eye contact with the person in the drawings, which are excerpts from A Girl Named Earl, and avoid eye contact with any of the strangers around me. Out of the corner of my eye, I watch the older woman next to me regard the table with the removed interest people look at contemporary artwork in a museum that they immediately dislike but are trying to give a chance – or maybe she’s just reading very carefully. I am afraid to know what she thinks of it, because I am afraid to know what she thinks of me.

The main character of Curious Incident, Christopher, is a 15 year old boy who likes math and space and Sherlock Holmes and who hates talking to strangers and being touched. He is autistic, which is the fourth thing we have in common. He lives with his father, who is violent and loves his son. Christopher sets out to discover who killed his neighbor’s dog, Wellington, after being forcibly taken by the police after his meltdown upon seeing the dead dog. He hits the policeman who tries to take him in – a child moaning and rocking in distress next to a dog that’s been stabbed with a garden fork is cause for not concern but police intervention and suspicion – because he hates being touched. “2:10, Policeman grabs Christopher; he responds.” This is the first scene of the play, and the first time I cannot look at the stage directly.

***

The first time I can’t look at the stage directly, it’s August and it’s 2016 and it’s Central Park, so that means I’m going to see a Shakespeare ballet.

I get there late because of the underpass just before Cardinal and Brook – not because there’s traffic or it flooded by rain or water main break, but because I hate biking down and up it and I always put it off as long as possible. I’m a dyke on a bike with really, really bad anxiety about things that intimidate me. But for Kentucky Shakespeare, I make the mile-long ride in the dark and the heat and only miss the first few scenes of their premiere collaboration with the Louisville Ballet. It’s exciting because no one knows what we’re going to see, because it’s never been done before, this piece and this collaboration.

I find a seat at the end of a row toward the back, stage left, on one of the old benches that will slowly be replaced. Two narrators are reciting Shakespeare’s sonnets in turn over the bluegrass and the ballet dancers act out a love story, two love stories, a love triangle. I’m finding it hard to tell because the first love story is between the Shakespeare-dancer and the dancer I slowly, stupidly come to understand is the fair youth, the young man to whom Shakespeare addressed 126 of his sonnets. I’m alone in this crowd of strange neighbors and on stage is a ballet so deliberately here, with its live bluegrass music and Appalachian dancing. When I understand that this will include a romantic duet between Shakespeare and the young man who was compared to a summer’s day, I have to stop watching.

The gentle dancing has knocked me out of myself. I am a ghost who has been possessed by someone else’s body, and that body is not under my command. Something essential to myself is moving onstage in or among the dancers, between Shakespeare and the fair youth, and it feels like I looked into a mirror and found it was a window instead, an audience staring back with drawn brows, tight mouths. Shakespeare and the young man lie down on stage to dream, one curled around the other. I am only in my own breaking-down body, looking away from a ballet for just a moment on a hot summer night, and the only thing more intimidating than looking back to the dance is looking at the folks next to me, which I staunchly do not do. I’ve never wanted to know what homophobes’ faces say about me when they think my back is turned.

For days after I struggle to describe that to people who ask how the show was. I can’t shut up about it, and I can’t talk about it. Every possible description of that scene is either too homoerotic or not enough: Shakespeare and the young man slept together (raised eyebrow); they slept (in a non-sexual, non-romantic, heterosexual way). One curled around the other, they lied down on stage to dream. I can’t make the invisible visible again with only my voice.

***

Christopher’s meltdowns are loud. They are alarming, in the sense that the people watching it are alarmed, and also that a meltdown is an alarm bell ringing Something has gone horribly wrong, stop what you are doing, something has gone horribly wrong. The ever-changing set that dims and brightens and physically manifests Christopher’s emotions adds its own meta-layer as the audience perhaps nears sensory overload themselves. Actors Theater has made a guide for those who might need it, so they can look away or cover their ears or step outside during moments of particular intensity. At two minutes, ten seconds into the play, I need it for reasons that are less sensory than memory related. Sometimes being touched hurts, like all my skin is trying to get away from me. Policeman grabs Christopher; my skin responds. Christopher strikes out, hits the policeman, and I look away because I have spent my whole life trying to hide that hurt so it doesn’t come back worse to hurt me.

To be (in)visible is double-edged: if you are not seen, you cannot be attacked directly; but if you are unseen, you do not authentically and fully exist in the world. Disability intensifies this if the markers of your disability exist as options – knee brace or not, stimming or not, ear defenders or not. To go without often means to suffer, but to be seen – and usually then interrogated – means a different sort of suffering. Being a lesbian is similar: I can choose to put on some markers of queerness, modulate myself at the cost of being myself. Other people’s decisions to perform queerness in the context of the arts then becomes a play on a play, a scene on the seen. To be forced to make the choice to act as I am not, and then see a performance with so many people and moving parts, all of which have come together to perform exactly what I have hidden is to be horribly liberated, unmasked.

You might think these are very poor reviews of two incredible productions, but I don’t know that I could give them any higher compliments. To take a work like The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, a book that chooses to show us the tired trope of a young boy who is a savant who’s good at math and bad at people, or the Shakespearean sonnets which were never even discussed as having homoerotic elements when I was taught them during decades of school and transform it into something that confronts others with a facet of myself – and of other unseen community members, absent and present, out and invisible – that is embraced as being truly human actually fulfills the often empty saying that art can teach you to be more empathetic. Or maybe, better yet, it doesn’t matter if the people who are horrified to find themselves outsiders for the first time learn empathy, because these are human narratives too.

I am telling you a sad, scary story because I want you to understand why it brings me so much joy, even when I am so afraid. I need you to be in the audience with me and become something other than a strange neighbor. When meaningful stories that center marginalized people are made by marginalized people in and for their own communities, the responses to those stories have a material impact on anyone who shares that identity.  When a prominent doctor rails against homosexuality at the Louisville Ballet, my anxious fears are realized – and when organizations and individuals around my city make statements that affirm my welcomeness both in the audience and on stage… well, I cry, and then I buy a ticket.

The louder and more genuinely local organizations commit to telling the stories of the marginalized people they serve, the better both those organizations and our communities will be. Our voices in concert can bring what has been made invisible to light. I get closer to a day where I can see myself represented onstage, without ever looking away. We all get closer to sitting together in solidarity without fear of judgement, or persecution, or having to hide some part of who we are to be there.

All of us.