A Show of Hands

Deaf West signs and sings its Big River to Broadway

By Karen Wada

Any empty space can be a stage, director Peter Brook famously declared. Stripped of star turns and special effects, the theatre at its core relies on artists and audiences joining together in a game of make-believe.

Los Angeles’s Deaf West Theatre takes full advantage of this collaboration—and the license it grants—to prove that disability offers the chance to create as well as to compensate. The intriguing blend of the resulting sights and, yes, sounds has brought unexpected bonuses: Ed Waterstreet’s troupe has become one of the hottest acts in town. Its revival of the Tony-winning musical Big River: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was the first local stage work to be picked up by the Mark Taper Forum. And now the show is about to make the leap to New York. It is scheduled to begin performances July 1 at the American Airlines Theatre in a Roundabout Theatre Company co-production, in association with the Taper, with hopes of a longer engagement after the Roundabout’s 14-week commitment.

The non-hearing community considers this a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. After all, how often does a “deaf musical’’ make it to Broadway? The theatre world is curious to see if the rising buzz about Deaf West is true and, if so, whether its artistry will be enough to overcome any public reluctance or skepticism. “We need this to grow,” says Big River director Jeff Calhoun. “We also need to prove we’re more than a novelty.” 

This is not remedial theatre for the deaf. “Growing up, I imagined some way to use all the dynamics of the theatre,” says Waterstreet, who founded Deaf West 13 years ago. “Could we feel equal with hearing people and also get greater impact for both? Could we make something new and better for both?” He and his colleagues shun conventional solutions, including the use of closed captioning and the posting of sign language interpreters on the sides. 

Instead, Deaf West has pioneered the mixing of hearing and non-hearing actors who perform in “a third language”—a combination of expressive signing and inventive voicing—under Broadway veteran Calhoun’s symphonic style of staging.

The story is integrated with the storytelling. Plays are reinterpreted and recast to incorporate, not separate, deaf culture. In Romeo and Juliet, the lovers signed to each other while Romeo’s lines were spoken by another actor. The fact that Juliet could hear and he could not widened the rift between their families. In Big River, Huck’s father is played by two men, one signing and one singing, split images inspired by a line in Mark Twain’s novel about Huck having a white angel and a black angel. This kind of artistic combustion “reminds me of what happened with music in New Orleans,” says producing director Bill O’Brien, a hearing actor and composer. “A lot of cultures bumping into each other created a whole new sound.”

Odd as it may seem, what distinguishes Deaf West is its ability to find the music in a work—the cadence of the language, the coloration of the plot. The theatre’s most acclaimed productions, in addition to Big River, which it initially staged in October 2001, are the two shows it mounted in 2000: its first musical, Oliver!, and A Streetcar Named Desire. The last burns with the hot-and-blue notes of Tennessee Williams’s sensual language and stage directions designed to tease the ear—including one of America’s best-known mating calls: Stanley Kowalski “throws back his head like a baying hound and bellows his wife’s name.”

“Deaf people have their own rhythm,” says the 60-year-old Waterstreet, who demonstrates by jauntily pounding his chair as he and O’Brien sit in Deaf West’s compact offices in the North Hollywood neighborhood of L.A. The avuncular Waterstreet and his lanky producing director, who is two decades younger than he, often finish each other’s sentences—quite literally, as both men sign and O’Brien speaks, sometimes for himself and sometimes for his friend.

Even if they can’t hear it, O’Brien explains, the deaf can sense a song’s pulsing beat, which is why a subwoofer was built under the seats at the theatre next door. When you live in a voiceless world, Waterstreet adds, you learn to paint pictures with your mind. You also become adept at using your face and hands to fill in empty spaces with physical figments of your imagination, a way of looking at the world that can enchant the hearing, too. Most playwrights rely on words and the way they are hissed or cooed, slyly rhymed or punctuated with menacing pauses. Signing conveys only the nuggets of meaning. The missing nuances must be suggested by a deft staging touch or translated via body language. The challenge for actors and directors, whether they can hear or not, and the payoff for the rest of us, is confronting a different set of questions than we’re used to: What does love or suspense, Lorca or Shepard, look like? 

When everything on stage is working, the deaf and the hearing—and the actors and the audience—share Waterstreet’s elusive “rare communal experience.” There is no lag time caused by subtitles. Tears and laughs are mutual. “It’s magic,” says Gordon Davidson, artistic director of the Taper. “Our audiences loved Big River because it’s good storytelling. People lost track of who’s deaf and who’s hearing. Without our hiding it, that just became invisible.”

Although the goal is seamlessness, you never quite forget the lives behind the stage roles. Sometimes reality makes the fiction more compelling. In Streetcar, Stanley was deaf and signed while a bystander voiced his words from a balcony above him. When, in despair, he cried out for the wife who has left him, director Deborah La Vine decided to have Stanley speak for the only time in the play. His “Stella!” was a primal noise, startling both in its dramatic context and because the audience knew that actor Troy Kotsur could not hear himself scream.

When he was a boy, Ed Watersteet wished he could enjoy Christmas pageants as much as his hearing parents and siblings did. His bittersweet memories inspired him to become an actor and, later, the nation’s first deaf artistic director of a resident theatre. After studying at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., Waterstreet toured for 15 years with the National Theatre of the Deaf, based in Connecticut. “Wonderful works came out of there,” he says, “but primarily it was always deaf actors with one or two hearing actors to interpret. As an actor, it got boring. And for the audience, you’d get a stiff neck from looking back and forth between the stage and the interpreter.”

Waterstreet and his wife, actress Linda Bove, moved to Los Angeles in the late 1980s and discovered that there was no stage company for the hearing-impaired. Deaf West began as a one-man operation at the Fountain Theatre in Hollywood. Since its first production, The Gin Game, the company has mounted nearly 20 shows, including several premieres and such challenging dramas as ’night, Mother, Medea, The House of Bernarda Alba and True West. Three years ago, Waterstreet’s group settled into its own 75-seat space. It has a $1.3-million annual operating budget, runs a summer acting program and has earned a following among area performers and playgoers, about a quarter of whom have hearing problems 

“We’ve seen the productions evolve,” says Bove, a founding member of Deaf West best known for playing Linda the Librarian on “Sesame Street.” “We’ve asked, ‘How can we use sign language? How far beyond that are we going to go?’ No one that I can think of really is as daring as Deaf West in those ways.”

In pursuit of a longtime desire “to do something crazy—a musical for the deaf,” Waterstreet recruited O’Brien in 2000. Attracted by his very visual, free-thinking style, O’Brien brought in Calhoun, a director and choreographer whose Broadway credits include revivals of Grease and Bells Are Ringing. The three men decided to try Oliver!, the early-’60s Lionel Bart musical based on Dickens’s classic about the escapades of a (now deaf) orphan. 

Casting was difficult because few non-hearing performers had worked with music and, O’Brien says, “Since it hadn’t been done before, it was hard to get people to answer an ad that said ‘Actors wanted for deaf musical.’” Hearing actors who did show up were tested to see if they could learn to sign, speak and stay in character. Deaf actors had to master even more skills, the most ordinary sometimes being the most difficult to attain. (For Streetcar it took Kotsur days to teach himself to yell “Stella.” He blew into a trumpet to develop control of his breathing and practiced his volume and pronunciation by shouting in the theatre after the others had left, his wife coaching him from the seats.)

The song and dance numbers in Oliver! were experiments because no one had ever tried to teach so many people to sign and sing, and to sign to music, or to move so many actors around a stage when only half them could hear. The internal cueing was intricate. “Everybody can’t listen to the intro of a song and know when to start dancing,” O’Brien says, “so someone slaps a knee, then everyone counts to five, and we go on.”

“We kept figuring things out,” says Calhoun in a phone interview. “Oops, he can’t hold props or wear gloves because his fingers aren’t free to sign. Oops, she can’t face away from the audience. I had to learn to direct differently. And yet I’ve always seen myself as a choreographer of actors, so this strengthened the vision I already had for what should happen on stage.”

Oliver! and Streetcar swept the local theatre awards. Buoyed by the response, Waterstreet, Calhoun and O’Brien took an even bolder approach with their next musical. They selected Big River because its culture clash between young white Huck and his friend, the black slave Jim, could be easily enhanced by making Huck deaf. Calhoun and O’Brien also thought they could convert Roger Miller’s music into a bluegrass-y score that wouldn’t overpower the show. (“One thing that doesn’t look right for us is big production numbers,” O’Brien says.) Bove and four other translators took three months to work on Miller’s lyrics and William Hauptman’s libretto, trying to capture Twain’s twang and humor. After Oliver!, the translators knew the first challenge would be creating visual equivalents for the words of each song. “We would analyze the meaning,” Bove says, “pick signs that would equal them, then with a hearing colleague figure out ways to cover the rhythms with the right number of signs.” Once the show was cast, translators customized gestures to each actor’s style.

Big River quickly sold out its North Hollywood run. Among its fans was Taper artistic director Gordon Davidson, who considered it a companion “watershed event” to Children of a Lesser God, the drama about the deaf experience that was developed at the Taper two decades earlier. He wanted to give the show broader exposure, so he and Waterstreet discussed moving it downtown.

Many wondered how Deaf West would play away from home. Even though the company has won cheers from the deaf and a raft of awards—for acting as well as staging—from the hearing, it’s easy to suspect some of the hubbub is a result of altruism, political correctness—who’d dare to pan a bunch of deaf people?—or lowered standards. 

Indeed, there are caveats. Some people will never get used to this double-sided approach. Some scenes just don’t translate to signing. And, in North Hollywood, at least, performances could be uneven, given the limited talent pool and the complexity of shows that require mastery of so many elements. One side benefit of the special production demands: The common temptation to overact or overload the directing—less is usually more on stage—is thwarted because, Waterstreet says, when half the audience needs to follow signing, “You focus on one thing at a time and make that thing really good.”

Lessons from the transition to the Taper could prove useful as Deaf West heads east. In moving to Davidson’s 750-seat theatre, care was taken to expand the production without diluting its intimacy. Because the Taper has a thrust stage, Ray Klausen’s clever scenic designs, anchored by blown-up pages of Twain’s novel, were tweaked and, says Davidson, the show was made “to feel more three-dimensional.” A few roles were recast and the script was clarified and tightened, “but things were pretty much where we wanted them,” he adds. (The American Airlines Theatre holds roughly the same number of people as the Taper, but it has a proscenium stage, which will prompt new fine-tuning, Waterstreet says.) The sight lines and Michael Gilliam’s lighting designs must be checked to ensure actors’ hands and faces will be visible from all seats.

When it opened at the Taper in November 2002, Big River was greeted with ecstatic reviews. “A glorious realization of the art of theatre storytelling,” said the Hollywood Reporter. “A window into a magical new realm of theatre,” said the Orange County Register. And the Los Angeles Times offered a high compliment for a “deaf” musical: “[It] shook the Taper like a gospel church.” 

“I think we caught a few people by surprise,” says Waterstreet. “Some might not have realized they were coming to a sign-language production.” Or that there were hearing actors in the cast. Many also had not expected to be swept away by the music—or by the emotional intensity felt on stage and off. 

In the hearing theatre, says Calhoun, “you know you have a hit because there’s a buzz in the air” when a play ends. However, with Big River he has learned the beauty of silence. The first preview ended in dead quiet. “After Act 1, I was filled with flop sweat,” Calhoun says. “Bill O’Brien told me not to worry because the night’s audience was mostly deaf. I didn’t know what he meant until the lights went on. Then you could almost hear the fingers talking. Everyone was signing.” Hearing people have responded just as vociferously. Curtain calls have brought a veritable show of hands: waves of clapping mixed with the raising of arms and the wiggling of fingers, which is how the deaf applaud.

The Taper run enticed producers from around the country. Jujamcyn Theatres president Rocco Landesman, whose first production was the original Big River production in 1985, says he started hearing about Deaf West as soon as the revival debuted. Then he ran into Calhoun at a Broadway party. “Jeff came to my office and played a videotape for me.” Impressed but not quite sure what to expect, Landesman flew to Los Angeles. “It was very emotional, very special,” he says. “Some of the scenes were more powerful than the original because of the gestures and the choreography. A song like ‘Worlds Apart’ had a whole new meaning,” he says, referring to Huck and Jim’s duet about the racial divide that complicates their friendship.

From the moment he watched the video, Landesman says, he knew this version could have “some kind of life in New York. Just what kind is the question.” He says the largest obstacle, especially to commercial success, “is that it’s a production by a deaf company or a half-deaf company. There will be resistance by people who haven’t seen it and don’t want to see it. ‘How good can this be? It’s going to be signed.’ You have to see it to be really engaged by it.”

Fortunately for Deaf West, Todd Haimes, artistic director of the Roundabout, also had heard about Big River. “It’s exciting for me, as a producer, to show people work that is not only fantastic, but also something they haven’t seen before,” he says. Haimes believes the unique interweaving of music, drama and American Sign Language will take Broadway audiences to “an entirely new level.” The nonprofit Roundabout’s resources, reputation and healthy subscription base could help Deaf West generate the word of mouth required to address the problems Landesman cites. “We know this is a show that needs time to build,” says O’Brien. “So we’re happy we have these 14 weeks at such a high-profile place.” Landesman says he will keep an eye on Big River and is interested in shepherding a commercial production, should the conditions look right.

Calhoun and his colleagues are sharpening the story line with suggestions from the Roundabout, Landesman and Hauptman, the original librettist. “They’re also going back to the original writer—Mark Twain,” adds Linda Bove.

Deaf West hopes the Taper and Roundabout relationships will be models for partnering with major nonprofits around the country. Initially Deaf West planned a “bus and truck” tour. However, it realized that its interests would be better served by arranging co-
productions with respected regional theatres. “We could share our cultures,” Waterstreet says. “We have so much to learn. And maybe others could learn from us. Maybe some theatres could set up or support deaf theatre companies.”

The need to expand opportunities for deaf actors became obvious during this spring’s auditions for the New York Big River. The Roundabout’s usual quantity and quality of hearing actors appeared. Finding qualified non-hearing performers, however, was a difficult task. Notices were e-mailed to deaf communities and to theatre groups and schools. Readings were held in New York and at several other locations. “Jeff wanted to find the best deaf actors in America,” says Waterstreet. “So we looked everywhere.” 

“Really, it inspired me to see the people we did,” Waterstreet adds. “But so many of them don’t have agents or training or professional experience. It was a very hard experience to see such raw talent and not be able to use them.”

Ten actors from the Taper production will appear in New York. Eight other parts had to be recast largely because of travel budget limitations. Huck will be played by Tyrone Giordano, a charismatic young newcomer who was picked out of a Deaf West summer class to star in the musical in North Hollywood and at the Taper. Michael McElroy (who appeared in Rent and The Wild Party on Broadway and Blue for the Roundabout) will take over as Jim. Dan Jenkins, who starred as Huck in the 1985 Broadway production, will be Mark Twain, the narrator who gives the young hero a voice.

In the biggest change, Tom Sawyer will become a hearing character. “We loved the Taper actor, but he matured too much for the part,” says Waterstreet. They could not find another suitable deaf performer so they hired Michael Arden, a Juilliard student. “Jeff loved the way it was and wasn’t initially looking to make a change,” O’Brien says, “but he understood after a while that it was better to protect the show with terrific actors everywhere.”

“It worked well with the story,” says Waterstreet. “A hearing Tom gives Huck’s friendship with Jim much more impact.”

The cast also includes Tony-winner Phyllis Frelich, Gwen Stewart (an original cast member of Rent), and Lyle Kanouse and Troy Kotsur, whose intertwined antics and wickedly witty physical acting made them showstoppers as Huck’s father.

Waterstreet admits to dreaming about a long run in New York. But he is quick to note that even if this does not come to pass, Big River already has traveled farther than anyone would have imagined. “I meet deaf people on the street all the time and they sign ‘Broadway,’” he says. “Everyone can’t believe this. There is so much cultural pride. We know this is our one chance to do it.”

He also is looking ahead to his next musical project, most likely an original work based on Cyrano de Bergerac. Who better to embody Deaf West’s spirit than a poet whose love transcends his inability to speak for himself?

Karen Wada is a writer based in Los Angeles. Portions of this article previously appeared in Los Angeles magazine.

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