The following articles appeared in Actors Theatre's subscriber newsletter prior to the 2005 Humana Festival. 
Actors Theatre mourns the loss of John Belluso who passed away on February 10, 2006.

A NERVOUS SMILE
These two green stones, large, wet, dripping with water.
These two green stones, are my eyes.
And they are watching you.
Now.
They appear lifeless, but they are watching you, as you are staring at me.
You are imagining the thing, that I am.
The thing, which should not be spoken of.

These words are spoken by the synthesized voice of Emily, a teenage girl with severe cerebral palsy, and the young woman at the center — but never on the stage — of John Belluso’s new play, A Nervous Smile. Belluso has a history of writing rigorous and compassionate plays about the experience of living with disability. With A Nervous Smile, he shifts his focus to include the experience of caretakers as well. The play follows three people — Emily’s mother; her father; and the woman her father is having an affair with, whom he met at their support group for parents of children with cerebral palsy. The three parents do the unthinkable: abandon their children in order to escape the bruising realities of caring for them.

This decision may shake our assumptions about parenthood to the core, but Belluso modeled this plot after a real-life incident. On December 26, 1999, Dawn and Richard Kelso, a middle-class couple from suburban Philadelphia, abandoned their ten-year-old son at a hospital in Delaware. He had cerebral palsy and used a wheelchair. They left him with his toys, medicine and a note saying they could no longer care for him. The incident sparked off a debate within the disabled community and their caretakers, a debate Belluso said he was eager to dramatize: “The incident spoke directly to the power dynamics of caretaking, particularly of a disabled child. After the incident, burnout became the big topic of debate. There’s an amount of moral relativity in the incident — what makes a good parent, what makes a bad parent — and I’m drawn to stories with that kind of complexity. I know where I stand on the story: I think they made a big mistake. But you can make cogent arguments on both sides.”

In the play, Belluso quickly complicates the parents’ plans for an easy escape. They think they will discover freedom: relief from a failing marriage, the chance to make a life with their true romantic partner, release from the everyday brutalities of caring for their severely disabled kid. Ultimately, none of them finds the clean break they wanted. Instead, they face the consequences of their actions and begin to deal with the fear and disgust they feel for children they also fiercely love. The play explores their choices with insight and a real compassion for the difficulties of raising a child who will never grow up to have the life they’d imagined. Belluso explains, “As a caretaker, you experience moments of both loving and hating your child — and we resist these ideas of conflicting emotions when it comes to children. That’s a huge taboo — you’re never supposed to acknowledge your disappointment in your child.” When Eileen, Emily’s mother, discovers that Emily has left poetry on her voice communication board, she must decide whether she can face evidence of her daughter’s intelligence and individuality, which she’s long obscured in her attempts to avoid the anxiety and heartbreak of raising a daughter who is so unlike her. Belluso reflects, “There’s a real sense of mourning in the play — here’s a beautiful child, and we have to mourn what this child will never be.”

Emily has an uncanny presence in the play — she has the first and last words, but never appears. Belluso’s inspiration for Emily, whose voice is as powerful as her body is unruly, is apparent in the epigraph for the play: “Subterfuge,” a poem by Vassar Miller, who had severe cerebral palsy. Miller emerged in the late 1950s as one of the first poets to write with grace and rigor about the experience of disability. In “Subterfuge”, Miller writes explicitly about the frustrations of her early life: being raised by a father who knew her well enough to give her a typewriter to free her voice but still considered her the “terrible favor” that life gave him. As Belluso explains, “Vassar Miller was the inspiration for the idea of a young girl who’s creating images and poetry through technology. I knew from the start that Emily would have a presence through absence. She’s off-stage, but her voice and the idea of her body are the driving force for the other characters and their journeys.” Emily’s words do, ultimately, demonstrate the depth of both her and her mother’s humanity. Mother and daughter find a moment of solace, if only in the privacy of Eileen’s experience, if only in retrospect.

Belluso navigates these complex questions with a delicate hand, presenting the parents as petty, selfish and heartbreakingly understandable. He taps into the ambivalence of parenting that both speaks directly to and transcends the experience of raising children with disabilities. He does so with a sly compassion, perfectly captured in the title he’s given the play. “A smile is an involuntary reaction, and it’s supposed to be this completely positive thing, but of course it isn’t always. It’s that idea of conflicting emotions, of doing the thing you’re supposed to, but using it to mask what’s going on, because you can smile out of anxiety as well. It can lead to laughter, or lead into something that’s very serious.”

— Adrien-Alice Hansel

JOHN BELLUSO
John Belluso realized he had found his calling while doing some research on disability and theatre at New York University’s Bobst Library. “I didn’t come up with any hits, which puzzled me,” remembers Belluso, who has used a wheelchair since he was thirteen. “I’ve been disabled all my life, and it just didn’t occur to me that there’s no August Wilson for the disabled community. No one’s writing about the disabled experience.”

Undaunted by the lack of material, Belluso, then a theatre student at NYU, decided to write about the experience himself. He’s been pursuing that undertaking ever since — as a member of Ensemble Studio Theatre’s young theatre artists collective Young Bloods, and in his participation in the Mark Taper Forum’s Other Voices Project, the country’s largest development program for “theatre professionals with disabilities.” For The Project’s 1997-1998 season, Belluso wrote Gretty Good Time, which centers on a paralyzed woman visited by a Japanese woman disfigured in the Hiroshima bombings. Two years later, The Project held a reading of Belluso’s Body of Bourne, based on the essays and personal letters of turn-of-the-century writer and social critic Randolph Stillman Bourne, whom a childhood case of spinal tuberculosis rendered hunchbacked. The play went on to a production at the Taper’s mainstage, and Belluso now serves as the Other Voices Project’s director. He is also a New Dramatists alumnus.

Perhaps from thinking so much about dramatizing the experience of disability, Belluso finds a performative aspect to being disabled. “When you enter a room or get onto a bus, eyes turn to you. Everybody stares and it’s like you’re getting on a stage and spectators are watching what you do. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing: to some extent you are in the spotlight, just like an actor, and you have to perform. If you understand that the people looking at you are mostly not malicious, somehow you can think of it like theatre, a ritual of watching and learning.” This situation is one in which several of Belluso’s disabled characters find themselves: deciding how to interact with a society that sees them as other.

Although Belluso’s work is original in its vision and subject matter, he draws from a number of literary and dramatic sources. These include Henrik Ibsen (whose play Little Eyolf he adapted), Caryl Churchill, Tony Kushner and Bertolt Brecht — playwrights who, according to him, “understand the nature of theatre.” His most recent work is also influenced by Vassar Miller, whose devotional poetry collections center on her experiences as a severely disabled woman. Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment is also referenced in Belluso’s plays Pyretown and A Nervous Smile. Like Dostoevsky’s books, Belluso’s work examines guilt, loss, redemption and personal responsibility.

Along with his work for theatre, Belluso wrote an episode for the HBO series Deadwood, giving him a chance to explore the experience of disability in the Wild West through a character called The Gimp. He has also written episodes for the high-tech spy show Eyes, an ABC television series premiering in March. Belluso said he particularly enjoyed writing for this series because of its focus on technology — a topic which surfaces in A Nervous Smile’s voice modulators and specialized wheelchairs.

Although his days searching through NYU’s libraries are behind him, Belluso’s need to discuss issues of disability on stage remains the same. “When you’re disabled, there are two ways life can go. Number one, you can become an introvert. Society teaches you to become introverted, to keep your body hidden because it’s abnormal according to the dominant culture. Or, number two, you can become an extrovert and demand to be a part of the social process. Force your way to being a citizen. Which is the route I’ve always gone.”

— JoSelle Vanderhooft