Thread by @epballou

Okay, so fun story: I did my honors capstone paper in college on East Asian ritual puppetry traditions and their connection to continued social marginalization of puppet theater practitioners.... (1/?)

https://twitter.com/allinarowplay/status/1092702067922255872

...So I'm actually *kind of* well-versed in the potential of various uses of puppetry in media. (2/?)

And so, when I hear that a production is having an autistic character portrayed by a puppet, no, that is not *automatically* jarring or off-putting to me. I need to know more than that about the context & concept of the production to know how I feel about it. (3/?)

By now it's well-known that Sesame Street has an autistic character who's a puppet, for ex. but in context, it's clear that Sesame St. is a world where characters who are both human & puppet appreciate each other's differences & are considered to have full personhood. (4/?)

(I'd love to see a human autistic character on Sesame St. eventually too, but in the context of Sesame St., no one is considered to be lesser or alien or unknowable b/c they are a puppet.) (5/?)

It's not a coincidence that a lot of autistic people adore Julia on Sesame Street. Not all do, but a lot do. She's a whole person, not just a portrayal of deficit, who's appreciated as such, in the context of that world. (6/?)

One of the things puppetry CAN do is to enable empathy rather than undermine it, allowing the audience to grapple w/ intense or difficult emotions it can be too difficult under normal circumstances to allow ourselves to experience wrt other human bodies. (7/?)

So like I worked on a proj a few years ago where only 1 character was a puppet. Other characters were human, but, as the story progressed, you realized that they might be fictional. They might be part of a video game. They might be imaginary friends of another character. (8/?)

And they might all be totally real people within one huge interlocking set of stories, but you couldn't tell by seeing only 1 facet of the story, so that 1 character was a puppet...didn't *necessarily* mean he wasn't as real or human, nor not, as all the others. (9/?)

So you had to invest in all of them. You had to empathize with all of them. Because you didn't know. It was set up that any one perspective on who or what was "real" might not be reliable, that no one *within* the story had the whole truth. (10/?)

(How's that for a demonstration of Theory of Mind? Sorry, I digress...) (11/?)

Anyways, so no, just the idea of an autistic character being portrayed by a puppet isn't necessarily jarring or upsetting to me.

It is that combined w/ the whole. rest. of the marketing and imagery and synopsis given about this play. (12/?)

I've seen puppetry used to some marvelously creative, humanizing, thought-provoking effects, but what I've seen of the marketing for this show...doesn't give me high hopes in this case. (13/?)

It's that this production is taking place in a cultural context in which most people are very accustomed to thinking of autistic people as somewhat less than fully human. (14/?)

The way this subject matter is handled would have to be MASSIVELY subversive in order to have the autistic character, alone, be a non-human, and yet succeed in undermining rather than reinforcing that incredibly pervasive preconception. (15/?)

It's the playwright's remark that the autistic child character is "so individual" that it would be wrong to ask someone else to play him. Which tells me that either you do not really know WHAT makes the char. unique, so I'm not interested... (16/?)

...or else *every other* character on stage is so formulaic...that I'm not interested. If virtually every character in your play isn't an individual I care about, honestly, I'd rather stay home and read a book. (17/?)

It's the marketing image of four little candies with the blue one alone prominently tipped over wrong, which, frankly, is what most people already think they know about autism. (18/?)

Like, this belongs to a whole class of imagery about autism that autistic people have been combating for over a decade as both dehumanizing and a fundamental misrepresentation of the reality of the condition.

I'm bored of it.

(19/?)

Like way more than being hurt or offended by it, I'm just bored. (20/?)

"Like any couple, Tamora and Martin have big hopes and dreams. But when your child is autistic, nonverbal, and occasionally violent, ambitions can quickly become a pipe dream."

This isn't only other plays that have been done before... (21/?)

...it's what most people already think they know about certain kinds of autistic kids, and it's those kids who are *most vulnerable* to dehumanization...who can't easily make themselves understood & whose reactions of frustration are so often characterized as violent. (22/?)

So when a production implies that they're showing an audience something they don't know about life w/ an autistic kid, but really is just reinforcing what they think they already *do* know, and it's *that,* that violent, non-verbal autistic kids upend lives... (23/?)

...and that the minds & experiences of kids like that are so opaque, so unknowable, that they might as well be replaced by a puppet onstage rather than give a human the responsibility of developing any insight or identification w/ them... (24/?)

...That stands a really high chance of entrenching the victimization and dehumanization of those kids, not challenging it. (25/?)

And maaaybe I'm wrong, maybe something about the writing of this play is so subversive that it conveys the opposite message. I can accept that possibility.

But pattern recognition from ~9 years in the advocacy world & longer in the performing arts says probably not. (26/?)

That's my concern. It's not just the puppet, in and of itself. It's the nonverbal autistic kid SOLELY as a puppet, in ALL of that context. (27)

(Uh, I have to go do some actual work now, but more later, maybe.)

(9.5 And it came through in how the crew and stage management treated him. He wasn't treated like the other props. He looked like a wooden log, but he got carried around and handled with care like something that was conscious. People couldn't help but feel that he was.)