Arts, Performing

The Theater for the Deaf and an Expanded Audience

Drama has long been part of the Deaf community. As early as 1860, Gallaudet and other schools for the Deaf had students performing in plays. Gallaudet first offered theater classes in 1957, and by [Page 48]1963 the school had established a drama department. During the 1940s and 1950s, Deaf clubs proliferated in major U.S. cities, frequently segregated by race. These clubs served as social centers, but they also provided venues for performing artists. Wolf Bragg, father of well-known Deaf actor and author Bernard Bragg, staged signed plays at the clubs of the Hebrew Association for the Deaf. In 1943, the drama troupe from Gallaudet College (now Gallaudet University) became the first Deaf actors to make appearances on Broadway when they were invited to perform their production of Arsenic and Old Lace in the Fulton Theatre. Throughout this period, Deaf actors were performing for a Deaf audience.

Bernard Bragg, who had his own show, The Quiet Man (1958–1961), which ran on a San Francisco television station, is credited with being the first Deaf professional actor. Bragg was a major force in the melding of NTD. The concept of a professional company of Deaf performers began in the 1950s with Edna Simon Levine, a psychologist working in the area related to the deaf people. Arthur Penn and Anne Bancroft, Tony Award winners as director and leading actress for Broadway’s The Miracle Worker, a play based on the life of Helen Keller, were approached with the idea. They brought in David Hays, a veteran stage designer. Hays, who was profoundly moved by the beauty and strength of sign language on stage when he saw Gallaudet productions, envisioned a professional company in which Deaf and hearing actors worked together, with the Deaf actors signing the play and the hearing actors, not hidden away but as a visible part of the dramatic action, voicing the lines signed by the Deaf actors. Hays was adamantly opposed to using mime, even though Bragg, who also became the new company’s first actor, was trained by Marcel Marceau.

Bragg had a list of Deaf actors whom he was eager to see hired. Among them was Audree Norton who became a founding member of NTD and the following year became the first Deaf actor to appear on American network television in an episode of the detective show Mannix. Other NTD alumni who achieved success in mainstream media include Linda Bove, the first Deaf actor to be seen in a daytime television serial, Search for Tomorrow (1973). Bove is best known for playing Linda the Librarian on Sesame Street for over 20 years.

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