Body language

Playwright John Belluso makes a connection

by Bill Rodriguez

For a guy who could never do kung fu kicks, John Belluso is as tough as they come. Once a high school dropout from the Oakland Beach section of Warwick, the wheelchair-bound 31-year-old playwright has earned admiring words from the likes of Tony Kushner. And now, after staging his works way off Broadway and having workshop productions at prestigious theaters, he is finally going to see one of his plays produced professionally at a top regional theater. Trinity Repertory Company -- where he first got excited about theater, seeing Julius Caesar -- is mounting the world premiere of his play Henry Flamethrowa (January 5 through February 4).

The play has just three characters, plus a girl offstage in a coma whom we never see. Oil and blood are found oozing from religious statues in her room, so troubled and sick people come from all over and camp out in the family's front yard in hopes of being miraculously healed. She is cared for by her father (Fred Sullivan Jr.), resented by her 16-year-old brother Henry (Michael Esper), and inquired about by a reporter (Joanna Adler). The immobile young woman serves as a flesh and blood Rorshach test, as the skepticism of the reporter and the faith of the father are tested, and as the boy -- who may have been responsible for her condition -- grows obsessed over whether he is as evil as she is good.

You might know Belluso's work from the hard-hitting but unsentimental production of Gretty Good Time, which Perishable Theatre did in 1999, in which a bed-bound young woman contemplates suicide. He has also collaborated with director Joseph Chaikin, the venerated founder of Open Theater, on Body Songs. In June, Belluso will see another of his half-dozen full-length plays premiere, this time on the main stage of Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. The Body of Bourne is about the disabled turn-of-the-century essayist Randolph Bourne and will be directed by Lisa Peterson, who is also helming the Trinity production.

Tony Kushner, of Angels In America renown, was one of Belluso's instructors -- along with such masters as John Guare and Tina Howe -- at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, where Belluso was graduated in 1996. Kushner was fascinated by the unique realm that Belluso has focused on and was quoted as declaring: "John is an artist, and his delving into the bottomless complexities of every issue, adhering to the question of what he calls `the otherly shaped body,' moves and excites me as much if not more than any other work I've recently encountered."

Quite an accolade.

When Belluso was three he was given a death sentence by a doctor who diagnosed him as having an inevitably fatal form of muscular dystrophy. At 17, by then in a wheelchair, another doctor happened to pass his x-ray and correctly identified the condition as Engleman-Camurdrie syndrome, a bone disease that weakens muscles but does not cause death.

After living many years as a struggling playwright in New York City, Belluso is now based in LA, co-director of Mark Taper's Other Voices Project, a development lab for theater artists with disabilities.

We spoke recently at Trinity before a rehearsal.

Q: You once pointed out that being handicapped is innately theatrical. That's interesting. There's conflict immediately: perception and reality, internal life and external, coping with obstacles.
A: It's fascinating. You realize how often you are on stage, how often you are being looked at. And you either shy away from that or you embrace it. Actors embrace it; that's why they get on the stage. That is the element of disability that does fascinate me: not being afraid of being looked at -- in fact, to understand and relish the power that comes with being looked at.

Q: Tony Kushner says he's moved and excited by your exploring the theme of what he says you call "the otherly shaped body." What do you see as your through line, unifying your concerns in your plays?
A: Being in a wheelchair shapes my existence every moment that I'm awake. Many people ask me, "Do you ever want to not write about it?" I think the answer is no. I feel that because this is my experience, because this is something that shapes my life moment to moment, then it sort of seems nonsensical to me to not write about it. It seems that this is an identity worth taking pride in and therefore exploring it as such. I think that is sort of the through line through my plays. They often are plays about the body and about the body politic, and how society creates this notion of what it is to be disabled, through culture, through assigning stereotypes, through actual oppression.

Q: Many other playwrights and novelists have used disabilities, the shape of a person without, to indicate the inner person, often malign -- Shakespeare gave Richard III a hunchback, it wasn't enough that he had a malevolent life. Does this piss you off? Or do you shrug it off?
A: A little bit of both. Somewhere in between. My project is to take those images and reshape that and recreate it. I was talking recently with some friends about a Robert Pinsky essay, about responsibilities of the poet. He talks about the writer's desire to take the world in and reshape it and then release it again; that the two most interesting things to the human species are ideas and the individual human body. I think that's true. I think that we're tremendously fascinated by bodies and by disability. Disability theorists say this and I think it's true: disability presents the body in extreme; it is our human experience taken to extremity. So we are fascinated with the "What if this happened to me? What if this happened to somebody I loved?" Because of this fear, we create these stereotypes, this evil imagery, these old models of disability representation. I think my goal is to take that on and wrestle with that.

Q: Every literary or stage writer tries to elicit empathy for characters. Do you have a harder job? Since your central characters are disabled, you have to work at keeping the audience from dismissing them with pity.
A: I think that is absolutely right. That is the old model that has been given to us, in terms of disability representation: the piteous child, the tragedy of it. What I've been finding in my work is that as soon as that is taken away and replaced with the humanity that everyone has, the sexual desire, the highs and the lows, the anger, the humanness that we all possess regardless of the shape of our bodies or the abilities of our bodies, people sort of get it and they get it really quickly. They understand and start relating to them not as disabled people but as people. Especially when they see it live on stage, there's something about that connection that really becomes clear.

Q: Has your being gay gotten into your plays much?
A: It's gotten deep into my play Rules of Charity, but it hasn't really evolved that much. I'm more interested in sexuality in general, in terms of disability. I'm certainly interested in gay sexuality, but it feels to me like the very notion that disabled people have a sex life, are sexual creatures with desire, is the first level.

It's almost as though we're just beginning to see sexuality at all in people with disabilities. The next step is to complicate it further.