The Non Physical Aspects of Access

By Sean Dineen

The following speech was given at the Sensitivity Training Workshop at George Street Playhouse on January 26, 2004.

Good evening, my friends. Following great counselors like Lauren Casey and Ina White with myself is a great challenge. It’s sort of like handing out afterdinner mints when everyone has just had a layer cake. But I shall do the best I can.

Lauren and Ina, along with our other comrades have told you about the major problem we all struggle with in the disabled community — the problem of both physical and financial access — to the national bedtime story known as the American theater. I could not have said it better. My area of concern is what great scholars have called nonphysical access. The image, the achievements and the struggles of the physically disabled community often take place in a magic circle, far from the eyes and the spirit of those who don’t posses our unique set of circumstances. That is very sad.

Despite great difficulties, there are lessons that my fellow speakers and I tonight have learned from our struggles, which we couldn’t have learned any other way. It’s our wish, both for ourselves and those who struggle to make communication possible to share what we have learned with our country and our planet. If my 15 minutes here tonight were 15 hours, I couldn’t tell everything I’ve learned. Even I would run out of things to say, and everyone would want to go home. No doubt all of you have your own stories to tell. Stories of joy and pain, anger and awe, divine blessing and search for earthly truth. So I’m asking tonight that you distinguished ladies and gentleman open the doors or your stages and your hearts to our voice and our vision.

Too often those who are not like us define us. Either our lives are seen as a perpetual childhood, in which we merely exist in absentia to be pitied and ignored or, our struggles and our joy, are rendered solely as burnt offerings on the altar of technology and the unbearable idea that our pain has no meaning.

We are like everyone else in search of love, family, God, and the desire for a better future. But we have sipped at the cup of a new world. What is our vision? It is a recognition that nothing can be done in life without courage and compassion. President Roosevelt once said “If you had spent two years in bed trying to wiggle your big toe, after that anything else would seem easy.” So my friends let your stages, be an outlet for our work, for all it has to show. Let us break down the fear, and set forth the reality, the reality of our group identity. Let the state and the nation do on a grand scale what we in VSA, under the heroic leadership of Vanessa Young and Elyse Knight do every day. We stand metaphorically at least to tell the world that our particular struggle, while it is not all we are, is neither something to be dismissed or forgotten. As the great, South African scholar Sir Divillars Graaf, put it let us, share with the world the prompting of our spirits and the hard won glory of our saga.

I know all of you have and will continue to do your part to achieve a theater, which speaks to our daily life and our hopes for eternity. May God watch over you all so that we can create our city of words together with the humility of all good work and the pride of who we are. Thank you.

Sean Dineen is a PhD student, in modern history and literature at Drew University in Madison. He is currently working on a play under a grant from VSA Arts of New Jersey under the guidance of the Unlimited Potential Theater Company.

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The Cultural Access Network is a co-sponsored project of the New Jersey Theatre Alliance and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts / Department of State, a Partner Agency of the National Endowment for the Arts.