No reason if the person lives on the first floor and does not have to go up and down stairs. But the Wingfields do not live on the first floor. I think it's not said what floor they live on, but it is clear that it is not the first floor because they have a fire escape on which they sometimes go out to talk. As Laura is able to go to the store without someone helping her down the stairs and then back up, I think she cannot be someone who is largely confined to a wheelchair because she cannot walk on her own, at least she cannot be if we are speaking realistically.
Laura was played by an actress in a wheelchair as early as 1949. That actress was Jean Peters. She had been injured on New Year’s Day 1945 when she accidentally discharged a rifle while on a hunting trip with her husband, Richard Quine, then an actor but probably best remembered now as a film director. (They later divorced.). The accident left her paralyzed from the waist down. She played Laura in a summer-stock tour in 1949. She died of kidney failure in 1952. After her death, her doctor said that she “wouldn’t allow anyone to help her recently. In the last few months, I felt she had lost the will to live.”
Quine committed suicide in 1980, shooting himself.
All terribly sad.
I think that until fairly recently there had been few if any productions, following the one with Jean Peters, in which an actress confined to a wheelchair played the role. |
