Antarctica Can Wait

Only because we just got home yesterday after about 30 hours of travel, and I really neeed to process some stuff.

Image description: A very blue sky, above a snowy horizon and rock covered in snow. This is reflected in the water below.

So after thirty hours, give or take, and rides on an inflatable boat, charter plane, two real planes, and a three-hour car ride, we are back from Antarctica. I have so much to say. But weirdly, I am quite fatigued, physically. Go figure. And also, this trip. Oof. There is a lot to process. Not even counting the disability signs with boobs! (Yes, this is a thing in the Santiago airport.)

Image description: A black door in a charcoal gray wall. On the door are three white restroom-door drawings, in order horizontally: A baby, a figure in a wheelchair, and a figure in a wheelchair with longer hair and boobs.

I will write more after Thanksgiving. But the quick takeaway: 1) This was the hardest travel I have ever done. 2) Accessibility isn’t really a thing in Antarctica (but we knew that). 3) The staff and guides of Lindblad Expeditions are beyond. Super Staff. Truly. This, however, is not to say that Lindblad’s Antarctic trip is accessible or that they provide accessible vacations (I don’t know if they do).

But since it has been a MONTH since I wrote last, I wanted to share something, and that something is my thinking more about the Lucky monologue in the new production of Waiting for Godot, starring Bill and Ted (aka Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves).

October Is a Funny Month

I wrote about this a bit in October, but have been thinking more about it. I am going to get a little bit geeky here, so bear with me, but I promise I won’t go block-quoting the text or close-reading like some sort of nerdy English PhD. In this iteration of Beckett’s play, the Lucky character is physically marked as disabled in a couple of interesting ways, which inclines me to read the actor (the remarkable wheelchair-user Michael Patrick Thornton) as performing Lucky’s one speaking part with an eye toward disability as well. Traditionally, Lucky’s monologue is delivered at ever-increasing speed, which highlights its absurdism and nonsensicality (is that a word? I think so?). Like this:

Or this (with Billy Crudup as Lucky!):

But Thornton goes slowly the whole way through. As though what Lucky is saying makes sense. Which it almost does. He’s interesting about this, in an interview with TheaterMania. I’m going to revisit something he says here in a sec. But first, a couple of things:

The first is that the monologue (I think the Billy Crudup version above has subtitles, if you want to read along) is basically a run-on sentence that uses weird made-up words and phrases, some of which are English and some aren’t (like “Acacacacademy of Anthropopopometry of Essy-in-Possy of Testew and Cunard” and the repeated quaquaquaquaqua), references to God that don’t go anywhere, the repeated “a skull a skull a skull a skull in Connemara” (which might be a line you’ve heard or just the title of Martin McDonagh play, also really good!). And it all blends together in most versions, but when Thornton does it, you find yourself trying to listen hard (or at least I did). And even just the scraps I mention here show that Lucky is parroting out institutional language, of the Academy (higher ed), the Church, the legal profession (with all those quas recalling sine qua non and other stuff). Even the skull in Connemara recalls Oliver Cromwell slaughtering the Irish in the 17th century (military and government).

And usually this is understood as: Lucky is very good at listening and parroting, but the words are meaningless in his mouth because he lacks understanding. And that maybe the lack is compounded by the institutions themselves being opaque or even absurd. And I’m a good student, I totally agree. But also! While these are institutions that have historically been bad in different ways to different groups of people. they have ALL been bad at different times to disabled people. Especially those who are obviously disabled, like, say, in a wheelchair, as Thornton is. It also opens the door to considering more invisible disability, too. Like intellectual ones or neurodiversity.

Which leads to my second thought: If Lucky is visibly disabled, AND if he is speaking slowly enough to be understood, AND if despite that, the words still don’t make logical sense, perhaps we’re also being put in a deliberate position vis á vis intellectual disability or neurodiversity. In the interview, Thornton said of his decision to play the monologue this way,

The most challenging and fun thing you can do with absurdist text is to treat it as if it’s not absurdist. A lot of times, that speech becomes a parlor trick of volume and tempo. I was more interested in trying to connect to the audience in a way where, even if they don’t understand exactly what’s being said, that they get the underlying emotion.

I think he’s onto something, because I think what results from the actor trying to connect with an audience that doesn’t understand what’s being said, is a twofold experience. Stay with me here: We’re simultaneously the neurotypical person trying to understand someone who is presenting as at least neurodiverse—and we’re failing. But we also find ourselves in a position of what I imagine neurodiversity might feel like, wherein someone is speaking to us very seriously and using big words and we just cannot make it make sense. The audience is thus both able and disabled at the same time, by Lucky’s slowed-down speech. And inhabiting both roles simultaneously is disorienting, and compounded by the other characters’ seeming interest in/bafflement by Lucky, which reinforce the duality of the audience’s own dis/ability positioning. AND the instability of that position, as the monologue progresses (now you are the able one, now disabled), seems to me awfully indicative of how disability actually works. So Thornton’s Lucky is both physically and intellectually disabled (or at least neurodiverse), and the fact of the former opens us up to the possibility of the latter, AND maybe compels us to inhabit that space with him, through the choice of performing the monologue as normal speech. Whew.

I mean, right? Maybe? I can’t post a video of the performance, of course, so I can’t refer you to specific moments. And I’m working off a month-old memory so, you know, I might be wrong. But I might not be, and if nothing else, this production really made me sit up and take notice. And not just because of Keanu Reeves.

Anyway. This is what I found myself thinking about when I couldn’t get off the inaccessible toilets on the Antarctica cruise. But more on that next time!