Amanda Kubic, University of Michigan
This paper explores how Kaite O’Reilly’s play peeling, a contemporary reimagining of Euipides’ Trojan Women originally produced in 2002, reads Euripides’ text through the lens of disability culture to examine the relationship between disability and trauma, the gender politics of disability, disabled visibility, histories of eugenics, and disabled futurity.
A UK-based playwright who identifies herself “politically and culturally as a disabled person” (Turnbull 2016), O’Reilly centers peeling around three disabled women—Beaty, Coral, and Alfa—who act as chorus members in a play within the play, a post-modern production aptly titled The Trojan Women: Then and Now. Played by queer d/Deaf and disabled performers who use wheelchairs and British Sign Language, Sign Supported English, and Audio Description, Beaty, Coral, and Alfa act in The Trojan Women as little more than “tableaux fodder”—“looked at” but not heard (O’Reilly 2016). Yet within the context of peeling, these three women take center stage, joking, sniping, and commiserating with each other, stripping away their emotional defenses and their huge hoop-skirted dresses as the play progresses into complex discussions about the realities of living as a disabled woman, then and now.
While several scholars (Pauliat-Golbery 1990, Hall 2010, Fisher 2018, Di Daniel 2019, Case 2021) have paid attention to emotion, trauma, and so-called madness in Euripides’ Trojan Women, a more explicit framing of Hecuba, Andromache, and Cassandra’s experiences in the play through the lens of disability studies is lacking. Furthermore, while O’Reilly has received much critical acclaim in the US and UK for her classically-inspired work and been recognized for her role in shaping what she calls “alternative dramaturgies informed by a d/Deaf and disability perspective” (O’Reilly 2016), the only extensive scholarly examination of peeling’s engagement with Euripides is to be found in Choi 2013. My paper seeks to redress these gaps in scholarship and to position O’Reilly’s text as a work of critical classical reception.
Examining O’Reilly’s script and photographs from performances of peeling (2002-2016) alongside excerpts of Euripides’ Trojan Women, this paper argues that O’Reilly’s play illuminates both the affordances and limits of ancient Greek tragedy for understanding disabled women’s embodiment/enmindment and daily existence. As Hecuba and Andromache suffer physical and emotional trauma and are robbed of their children, and as Cassandra sings and dances (madly?) to her future enslavement and death, so too must Beaty, Coral, and Alfa grapple with their own experiences of “women’s body as a battlefield” (O’Reilly 2016)—a battlefield marked for them by exclusion, misrepresentation, tokenism, violence, and a history of eugenics that denies disabled motherhood and disabled futures. At the same time, I argue that O’Reilly’s work finds moments of joy and humor and employs the logic of disability aesthetics (see Siebers 2010) to speak back to curative medical models of disability (see Kafer 2013) and Western cultural norms that narrativize disabled subjects as always already tragic figures. In peeling, disability isn’t an affliction to be eliminated or mourned, but one aspect of another equally worthy way of being in a bodymind.