But with the pram, it’s easier to keep Cassandra “invisible” for the audience, so we can project our own (ablist) nightmares on what she is.

Actually a modern crib with some high baby bumpers could keep a baby in a crib just as invisible while looking entirely familiar. That pram is anachronistic in a very distinctive visual way. The set designers could also have gone for a medical newborn bassinette incubator (y’know the type for premies) but with frosted sides, rather than clear. But both a regular normal crib and the bassinette invoke a certain mundanity (I hesitate to use normalcy). That pram very distinctly says other and that’s before all the wires and tubes etc.

I suppose I could consider this play as something that speaks to modern audiences about maternal child abuse. But the set up doesn’t seem to be one where the audience is meant to feel horror at the mother.

I’d feel distinctly uncomfortable watching a play where the set design and premise does the opposite of what I observed in hospitals 15 years ago – when they were trying their best to make hospital rooms (maternity wards especially) seem more homey and less cold and technological.

Every week we all learn about an able bodied parent who decided their disabled child shouldn’t live another day. I don’t think a play where a disabled child is set up as an unseen monster challenges the society that makes excuses for those parents.

I also find it telling that Axler, in trying to figure out “how anyone could love that” (in her words) went straight to parental love. Because the idea of PWD being objects of romantic love is just unfathomable to her.

I’m sorry, not thinking which isn’t an excuse but there you go – it’s so entrenched.

But with the pram, it’s easier to keep Cassandra “invisible” for the audience, so we can project our own (ablist) nightmares on what she is.

I think I may have gotten hung up on the baby’s name being Cassandra and wondering what is it the baby’s meant to be telling everyone that they refuse to listen to? If we’re meant to think of the name as symbolic. Or if the point was that the baby was communicating but no one was recognizing it as communication.

Which left me thinking – WTH? Disabled people will only respond to hateful diatribes and vicious judgement? That’s the message?

Laying out all those reviews as you have, however, clarified things quite well for me.

On the surface it seems like there’s something there, with a mother unable to see a child that doesn’t look like her dream as being real and a father who’s content to be a father. But by making the child, Cassandra, be an amalgamation of ablist fears; no limbs, no traditional baby face, no traditional communication; it sets up a lot of subtext justification for animosity towards the child.

NOTE: The pram in the picture reminded me vividly of Burton’s Batman Returns and how the Cobblepots treat their infant; abandonment via attempted drowning. There is a strong pop cultural basis to associate the pram with ‘monster/bad guy/evil’ (right down to black blood).

When I think of the visual difference between a regular crib with some stage created medical looking equipment, and an Edward Gorey style pram, then it becomes a deliberate invocation.

Again, we have someone- in this case, the disabled baby- who does not communicate in the manner (tab) audience and the (tab) characters are accustomed to, and this is read as another sign of the baby girl being “less that human”.

Because you existence as an (intelligent) human being depends on your ability to do everything the way “we” do it.