‘Telethon’ Offers Wheelchair View of Fund-Raisers

While a kid with a big grin--and an incurable disease--sits by his side, the emcee turns a sincere face toward his television audience and begs you to send your dollars in before it’s too late.

What’s wrong with this picture?

Plenty, according to the co-authors of “Telethon,” a comedy-drama about TV fund raising for the disabled that opens Thursday at the Burbage Theatre, under the direction of Terry Bozeman.

The play concerns an ex-child star named Bobby Astor, whose only job at this point in his career is his yearly telethon. But that job is in jeopardy after the appearance of Jane Piercy, young, attractive, disabled and angry.

The same description fits paraplegic co-author Susan Nussbaum. She was 24, on her way to classes at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre School, when she was struck down by a motorist. It wasn’t a hit-and-run, Nussbaum says, “just hit and fall down and have a broken neck.”

It happened on what she calls the cusp of the disability rights movement, a little over a decade ago. That movement gave her the means to look at what had happened to her, and figure it out. “And realize that it was OK,” she says.

Nussbaum turned to writing and continued acting. She played Gertrude Stein in the Goodman Theatre production of “She Always Said, Pablo”; and her play “Staring Back,” produced by Chicago’s Second City, won the Joseph Jefferson Award and the California Media Access Award. She and the others in the cast won an Emmy when the play was televised. She is an active member of ADAPT, the national direct action group fighting discrimination against people with disabilities.

Another Goodman student, and a good friend, was co-author Will (Chip) Hammack, remembered locally for his appearance in Blue Line Theatre’s recent revival of Elmer Rice’s “The Adding Machine.” While watching the Jerry Lewis telethon when he was still living in Chicago, he had the germ of an idea for a play.

“Lewis went into this amazing monologue where he brought all these newspaper clips out of his pocket, and started answering all of his critics, anybody who had criticized the telethon. He started crying. He started getting angry, and I was amazed. It was brilliant theater.”

“Chip was amazed,” Nussbaum says, “that a lot of disabled people were very unhappy with telethons. Crips hate telethons.”

“It opened up a new thing for me,” Hammack admits. “Susan exposed me to comic books and newsletters that the disabled community puts out, especially as they pertain to telethons.”

Although Nussbaum confesses with a chuckle that she doesn’t think anyone has taken a poll, she is definite that none of her disabled friends like the telethons. Over the last year there has been a large movement among the disabled toward protesting various telethons.

“Especially the Labor Day telethon,” she says. “ ‘Jerry’s Kids,’ as he calls them, are really more angry than anyone else. Of course, they’re in their 30s and 40s now, so you can imagine why. It’s just such a humiliating, negating experience. This whole fixation on doom, as it’s associated with disability, is so much a product of that telethon stuff. ‘If you don’t give money now, this little boy right here is going to kick off in about 20 minutes.’ It’s scary. People associate disability with no choices and no future. Of course, it’s much less than it was, but oh, God, there’s a lot of work to do.”

Hammack feels that telethons are a part of “the real Band-Aid mentality that is occurring in this society. We’re throwing money at problems without getting to the core of the problems, dissecting and trying to figure out what’s wrong and then finding a new approach. We just throw money at it. For instance, muscular dystrophy, it’s this terrible disease, right? Throw a lot of money at it, and it’ll go away.”

Nussbaum wheels her chair closer to emphasize her intensity. “We treat it as a charity,” she says, “instead of a legitimate societal issue. In our case, the case of disabled people, when we rely on charity, think of the position that puts us in. When people freak out about the movement against telethons, what they’re freaking out about is that they know they live in a society that isn’t going to fill that gap. It’s just so horrible, in indignity and in other ways.”

Maggie McDermott, the disabled actress who plays the disabled activist in “Telethon,” has had multiple sclerosis since she was 21. She gave up her hopes of an acting career. She couldn’t even find an acting coach who would take her seriously. In the 13 years since then, she has put herself through college, learning to be an interpreter for the deaf. The word charity makes her blood boil.

“I’m not a charity,” she says. “I work. I’ve never collected money from the government. And yet I’ve had people make comments to me, like I don’t have a right to vote, because I’m just collecting from the government. And I think telethons portray that, that we are victims, that we can’t take care of ourselves.”

McDermott was also surprised others felt as she did about telethons. “I felt that way about telethons before I was ever disabled. I always hated the Jerry Lewis telethon, because I thought he was just trying to make you feel terribly sorry for these people, to get money. Just about all the disabled people I know hate them. They build on the desperation of parents more than the actual disabled person, and the promises that telethons give. A lot of what telethons are about, if you watch them, is guilt. If you’re degrading the people you’re trying to help, that’s illogical and stupid.”

What about Bobby Astor himself, the telethon emcee? Actor Charles Stransky, who plays Bobby, has tried to find positive things in his characterization.

Stransky, who has appeared on Broadway and in the national tour of David Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross,” and Mamet’s films “Homicide” and “Things Change,” says, “There’s a sincere motive involved. But the human ego also gets involved. Bobby’s here to help; the telethon came out of a need to help. The process may offend people, but in the end, he feels that the end justifies the means.”

Nussbaum, who doesn’t fail to remind us that “Telethon” is also a comedy and a romance, says that Bobby is, after all, human. “He strongly believes that what he does is valuable,” she says. “People get into these things with complex motives. There’s no doubt in my mind that telethons would not be successful if the people involved in them didn’t truly believe that what they were doing was a very necessary thing.”