Nussbaum subverted the loophole, threw the trope aside. In her notes on how the play should be produced, she described Janet 2 as “the self Janet has invented to help tell her story—to make it ‘accessible,’ in a way.” By letting Janet talk to Janet—to translate her own thoughts, feelings, and frustrations—Nussbaum could address the audience directly, as a disabled person. There was no filter.
In her writing and in conversation, Nussbaum conveys a sort of equanimity tempered by pessimism, to pretty humorous effect. At the Bodies of Work Festival, she noted how far the movement had come in the last 30 years before imagining—no, hoping—what disability activists in another 30 years might say about 2013: “Do you remember how horrible that was?”
Nussbaum wrote one more play after No One as Nasty. It was called Crippled Sisters, and she thought it was a breakthrough: “I’ve written a bunch of plays, and this one play, I thought, really achieved what I wanted to—finally.”
Working with Nussbaum on a play he’d written, Mike Ervin experienced a sort of inverse of that problem that also illustrates the challenges of representing disability onstage. Ervin is a longtime activist, a friend of Nussbaum’s, a playwright, and the author of the blog Smart Ass Cripple—which, if you’re looking for bona fides, was relentlessly promoted by Roger Ebert after he started exploring illness and disability in his writing and on Twitter. Ervin recruited Nussbaum to direct his play The History of Bowling, which premiered in 1999. “The reason I wanted her for History of Bowling was that a director with her perspective, not just in terms of humor or artistically, but also with a disability perspective, was really essential to that piece working or not working,” Ervin said. For example: “We were auditioning for the lead role of Chuck and several people came in and none of them had disabilities. It just wasn’t quite right. There was something missing.” Nussbaum found an actor named Robert Ness, who at that point hadn’t worked in a while. Ness, like the main character, was disabled; he “wasn’t the most polished of the bunch and he wasn’t the most accomplished of the bunch,” Ervin said, but Nussbaum cast him anyway.
A friend of her father’s had offered Nussbaum a job as a production assistant at his radio theater company soon after she got out of the hospital. She worked there for about a year and a half, then learned about a new disability rights organization, Access Living, being founded in Chicago. “I felt that I belonged there,” she says. She offered to do PR for the organization; there she met Mike Ervin, who also did various jobs for Access Living over the years.
