As most of my human contact became restricted to the Zoom screen in spring 2020, I discovered a serious limit to my capacity for looking. I also began finding it difficult to read. A ten-month headache taught me to stop taking ibuprofen and learn to manage tensions around my eyes and head as well as to shift roughly half of my reading to screenreaders and audio books. The need to restructure my own practices of seeing refocused my interest in theatre's engagement of the senses at the same time as the COVID-19 pandemic destroyed people's ability to smell, prompted them to hoard toilet paper, and created a U.S. boom in bidet purchases. These personal and cultural developments coincided with revived metaphors of blindness on the pandemic stage. This article begins with a brief discussion of The Blind, an “immersive audio/visual meditation journey” that Here Arts Center produced in 2021, and then centers on Blindness, the “socially distanced sound installation” produced by the Donmar Warehouse in 2020 followed by an international tour. I wonder at the reiteration of blindness as a tragic trope, seemingly unaffected by progress in disability rights, equity, and inclusion. I wonder at the appeal of wielding any contagious illness as metaphor during a global pandemic. My analysis turns particularly upon the relation between blindness and excrement in José Saramago's novel Blindness and the effect of cleansing the theatrical installation of any shit as well as the even more surprising choice to eliminate the voices of the blind characters. A detour through medieval French farces that link blindness and excrement reveals submerged tropes at play in these performative responses to fear of diminished capacity and diminished control—everything that individuals and societies cast out in order to maintain what we call health, whether literal or metaphorical.

It was May in Eau Gallie, Florida, and Zora Neale Hurston was headed to church. Shutting the door to her cottage near the shores of the Indian River, Hurston set out to join the local Baptist congregation, where she would hear a sermon delivered by its pastor, the Reverend C. C. Lovelace. Hurston had been pondering the question of how to represent the experience of a church service in a theatrical performance. “Know what I am attempting?” she had written to Langston Hughes a few days earlier, in April 1929. “To set an entire Bapt. service word for word and note for note.” Listening to Lovelace's sermon in Eau Gallie, Hurston admired how the preacher's oratory built seamlessly from a creation story into a fiery vision of divine retribution. She was so taken by the poetry of Lovelace's words that she transcribed his sermon in its entirety. This sermon later served as the centerpiece of the play The Sermon in the Valley, a work that testifies to Hurston's aim to render a Baptist service “word for word and note for note.” Like many of her plays, The Sermon in the Valley reveals the intimate entanglement of her ethnographic compositions and her writing for the stage.

In April 1885, a New York Herald journalist rushed to Madison Square Garden for a special reception highlighting Jo-Jo, the Dog-Faced Boy. A feature of P. T. Barnum's traveling show, Jo-Jo was confounding scientists who had requested a stand-alone inspection of the mysterious attraction. Accordingly, the reporter provided an anthropological description of the boy: “He stands about five feet high. . . . His whole body is covered by a very thick growth of long, tow colored hair . . . and the peculiar formation of his head [is] very suggestive of the Russian dachshund.” At first, Jo-Jo appeared docile, but as the scientists prodded him more and more, he started “snarling, showing his three canine teeth” and asked his guardian if he could bite the inspectors. Jo-Jo was decidedly not a dog-boy, or not exactly. He was, in fact, a Russian teenager suffering from hypertrichosis, a condition causing excessive hair growth all over the body, including nearly every surface area of the face. Barnum had signed him to perform a year earlier, and the boy made quite an auspicious debut. However, Jo-Jo was simply the latest in a long line of supposed hybrid species and exotic curiosities that Barnum had been displaying since midcentury. The famed showman built his name in part by presenting human creation itself as a continual spectrum. Barnum's attractions ranged from live tigers and giraffes to enigmatic simian performers to wax statues of America's degraded lower classes. As much of a draw as he became, even Jo-Jo had to share a bill with Tattooed Hindoo Dwarfs, Hungarian Gypsies, Buddhist Priests, as well as a menagerie of animals including baby elephants, kangaroos, lions, and twenty-foot-long “great sinewy serpents.” But Jo-Jo's specific appeal was tied to his inexplicability. Even given the closer inspection of the dog-faced boy, “none of the physicians present would hazard an opinion as to his ancestry.”

In an 1847 lecture before the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Salem, William Wells Brown stated: “Were I about to tell you the evils of Slavery, to represent to you the Slave in his lowest degradation, I should wish to take you, one at a time, and whisper it to you. Slavery has never been represented; Slavery never can be represented.” In these oft-cited lines, Wells Brown makes a strong claim for the absolute impossibility of representing slavery. But I wish to pause and stay with his earlier suggestion that it might just be possible to tell about slavery in a whisper. Breaking through the fastidiousness of the audience, a whisper can bring the condition of slavery close.

In 1920, Oscar Hammerstein II—fresh from the modest success of his debut musical Always You—was eager to write the show for Frank Tinney that his uncle Arthur was to produce. As Hugh Fordin wrote, “Arthur, confident of his nephew's ability but aware that he needed to learn more about his craft, brought in Otto Harbach to collaborate on the book and lyrics.” The two men joined forces on that show—Tickle Me—and went on to write such classics as Rose-Marie (1924, Rudolf Friml & Herbert Stothart), Sunny (1925, Jerome Kern), and The Desert Song (1926, Sigmund Romberg). After working with Harbach (Fig. 1), Hammerstein would venture on his own and write Show Boat, Oklahoma!, and be credited as having ushered in a new era of musical theatre, chiefly defined by his success at “integration.” As literary scholar Scott McMillin writes, the conventional idea of integration is that “all elements of a show—plot, character, song, dance, orchestration, and setting—should blend together into a unity, a seamless whole.” In popular commentary, this development is often attributed to Rodgers & Hammerstein's 1943 musical Oklahoma!, as seen in John Kenrick's claim that “[t]hroughout the show, every word, number, and dance step was an organic part of the storytelling process. Instead of interrupting the dialogue, each song and dance continued it. For the first time, everything flowed in an unbroken narrative line from overture to curtain call.” Other historians and critics are more tempered, touting the success of Oklahoma! while insisting that its integration must be seen as part of a broader historical arc. Andrew Lamb, for example, celebrates Oklahoma! by noting that it was the realization of “[w]hat Kern and Gershwin had experimented with as far back as the 1920s—a piece that was not just a collection of catchy numbers, but a fusion of drama, song, and dance.” In a 1962 article, Stanley Green notes that the creators of Oklahoma! “blended all the theatrical arts with such skill tha[t] many accepted it as a revolution in the theatre,” but he argues that their accomplishment was actually “more evolutionary than revolutionary. Rather than inaugurating any trend toward the well-integrated show, what it did achieve was a perfection in technique of a development that had been going on ever since the second decade of the century.” While Green cites the Princess Theatre musicals of Bolton, Wodehouse, and Kern as the earliest examples of integration, this lineage goes back further—further than Hammerstein, further than Gershwin, further than Kern. To understand the history of the idea of “integration” in musical theatre, we must go back to the artist whose 1910 musical Madame Sherry, hailed as the “musical comedy rage of a generation,” was celebrated by critics for the way its “entertaining elements” were “cleverly interwoven into a consistent whole,” for the innovative ways that “the songs, lyrics, and ensemble numbers . . . are directly related to the story of the comedy, and there is a plausible excuse for every musical interruption.” That artist—who not only developed an innovative approach to musical theatre but also articulated a coherent theory of it—was Otto Harbach.

Stock characters named “Nobody” and “Somebody” were mainstays of British performance culture in the mid- to late eighteenth century. Playbills and newspaper advertisements show that these roles were popular with audiences in London, Dublin, and Edinburgh, as well as on the regional stages. Men and women alike took on these personae to deliver songs, prologues, and epilogues, often as part of benefit performances where they chose their most crowd-pleasing roles to maximize ticket sales. Some of the pieces spoken by Nobody and Somebody were popular enough to make their way into print, excerpted in novels and miscellanies. The duo appeared in George Alexander Stevens's wildly popular Lecture on Heads (1764), which traveled across the Atlantic to stages in Charleston, Philadelphia, and New York, continuing to be performed in the early Republic until the nineteenth century. Offstage, the figures were staples of visual culture; as Terry Robinson has shown, audience awareness of these figures from Romantic-era political cartoons formed an important backdrop for Mary Robinson's theatrical afterpiece Nobody (1794).

A raging global pandemic handled inadequately and indifferently by the Republican-led US federal government, with Dr. Anthony Fauci in a featured role; an antiracist uprising in response to police brutality; a resurgent political Right fomenting and stoking culture wars; activists’ demands for a diverse and equitable art world; increasing fiscal precarity for small, innovative live art spaces; a looming recession; and an escalating housing crisis fueled by accelerating income inequality: welcome to Los Angeles between 1989 and 1993. In this period, AIDS became the leading cause of death for US men ages 25–44; ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power)/LA called public health infrastructure to account and successfully fought for an AIDS ward at Los Angeles County Hospital. A widely circulated video of Los Angeles Police Department officers viciously beating Black motorist Rodney King, and their subsequent acquittal of criminal charges by a suburban jury, ignited five days of antiracist rebellion. The rising number of unhoused people in Los Angeles was becoming difficult to ignore, though not for the city's, state's, or federal government's lack of trying. “Multiculturalism” became a widely embraced—if sometimes cynically deployed—aesthetic and programming imperative.