In an evening get-together, a combination of 45 attendees and two sign language interpreters filled the seats lined up on top of the stage of the Little Theatre in the Creative Arts building for the first ever Disability and Theatre Arts Workshop.

The workshop was divided into three days from April 4-6 with the lecture as the primary event. On Saturday, the workshop was closed to the public to rehearse for Sunday’s performances. The workshop ended with participant performances and a panel discussion.

“[It was] quite an empowering night,” said Victoria Ann Lewis, a guest scholar and artist who gave a lecture on the first night of workshop in regards to teaching people about the various ways disabled persons are depicted in theater.

SF State’s Disability Theatre Workshop, “Beyond Victims and Villains,” was initiated as an interdisciplinary project to address inequity of the disabled within theater programs. It also addressed ways in which institutions of higher education can create programming to counteract stigma and discrimination toward deaf and disabled performing arts students, said Lewis.

“I would never get work as a professional actor,” Lewis said, recalling how she was denied training by New York’s Neighborhood Playhouse, a prestigious training school for actors, because childhood polio left her with a mobility impairment.
Lewis divided her presentation into three chronological acts, from 500 B.C. to present day. In each segment she specified how disabilities are viewed in the theater world. There is the moral model where the disabled person is usually viewed as a saint or sinner, the medical model where the individual is overcoming his or her disability or being cured and the social model where the disabled person is an activist or part of a socially defined group, she explained.

She showed images that per-tained to each model and engaged participants by having them read quotes from handouts prior to her discussion on the topic.

Rachel Reichert and Justin Gonzalez, both SF State theatre arts majors, went to the Friday workshop to learn about how disabled actors are depicted in theater and also performed in Sunday’s workshop in the Little Theatre. The participants picked out anthologies from Lewis’s book, “Beyond Victims and Villains: Contemporary Plays by Disabled Playwrights” and acted out scenes.

“It’s always great to learn about something you don’t know a lot about,” Reichert said.

Gonzalez, on the other hand, said he will take the information and use it as a guide for when he opens his community theater specifically for low-income families and children with disabilities.

“My ultimate, ultimate goal is to open my own public theatre. As with time, things change and something like this workshop promotes positivity,” Gonzalez said.

Other attendees of “Victims and Villains” were SF State history professor and essayist Paul K. Longmore, theatre arts department chair Yukihiro Goto, Disability Programs and Resource Center Director Gene Chelberg, and Larry Eilenberg, who is an SF State theatre arts professor and the former artistic director at the Magic Theatre.

“In my personal opinion, this workshop is 50 years behind,” Goto said. “I am very proud of tonight and this is just the beginning of a beautiful relationship with the theatre arts department and disability studies.”

To find out more information about this year’s “Victim and Villains” workshop and performances or to learn more about Lewis and her book and other upcoming workshops, check out her University of Redlands Web site.