A Midsummer Night's Dream
A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare staged at the Barrow Group Theater in Manhattan, was the first play by TBTB to feature a character in a wheelchair:
It holds Ann Marie Morelli, an actress playing Hermia, who at first has the attention of one too many men but later finds herself with the attention of one too few. Hermia, as created by Shakespeare, is short, and her rival in love, Helena (Erin O’Leary), is tall. Through the centuries poor Hermia has always taken a verbal beating for her physique, but here it has a different bite. "Get you gone, you dwarf, you minimus," barks Lysander, who once doted on her. And Hermia herself laments, "My legs can keep no pace with my desires."
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Neil Genzlinger [5] , New York Times
A note in the theater program said, "Increasingly we feel we must include all disabled people [rather than blind people only] in our work." [5] To reflect this shift in thought and philosophy, 2008 saw the company changing its name from Theater By The Blind to Theater Breaking Through Barriers. [6] Productions, such as Romeo & Juliet, closely followed featuring an actor, Gregg Mozgala, with Cerebral Palsy, their first in a subsequent line of productions incorporating actors with various disabilities. In 2020 as a result of the pandemic they presented playwriting intensives and performances via Zoom with captions and audio descriptions.
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A Midsummer Night's Dream is a comedy written by William Shakespeare c. 1595 or 1596. The play is set in Athens, and consists of several subplots that revolve around the marriage of Theseus and Hippolyta. One subplot involves a conflict among four Athenian lovers. Another follows a group of six amateur actors rehearsing the play which they are to perform before the wedding. Both groups find themselves in a forest inhabited by fairies who manipulate the humans and are engaged in their own domestic intrigue. The play is one of Shakespeare's most popular and is widely performed.
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