Theater, Original

In the United States and abroad, there has been a rapid growth of programs in Deaf Studies, Deaf education, Deaf history, American Sign Language (ASL) teacher training, linguistics of sign language, and sign language interpreting over the past two decades. American universities are beginning to recognize ASL as a foreign language. Some primary and secondary schools teach students basic sign language. We are seeing more and more deaf actors on stage, and in film and on television. What all of this indicates is a considerable emerging interest in the art, culture, and language of deaf people. Perhaps one of the greatest catalysts for sparking this interest was the establishment of the National Theatre of the Deaf (NTD) in 1967, which first put Deaf theatre on the map. This company of predominantly deaf actors toured internationally, and via the very nature of their art on the world stage helped raise the prestige of deaf people and their signed languages. Along with that came the natural emergence of Deaf playwrights writing original plays with themes related to Deaf culture in the 1970s.

With the exception of a few productions, most NTD plays were adaptations or enactments of literary classics by hearing writers. In 1971, the very first original, Deaf-themed play, My Third Eye, was created by the NTD ensemble. The play was not like a traditional play with the usual one- to three-act structure, but more of a series of vignettes in a carnivalesque style about the Deaf experience.

Notable writers of this period were Gilbert Eastman, Dorothy Miles, and Bernard Bragg—all had their origins with NTD as actors. Yet prior to the 1970s, deaf groups, clubs, or organizations had to choose plays—originally written by hearing writers for speaking actors and hearing audiences—and adapt them for sign language performances for deaf audiences. Eastman’s play, Sign Me Alice, marked the beginning of original plays with deaf themes written solely by deaf playwrights. George Detmold, a former drama professor at what then was known as Gallaudet College, wrote, “For the first time in their lives, deaf [Page 974]audiences were shown a play about deaf people (and in the variety of languages that deaf people use today), in their characteristic confrontation with the ‘hearing’ world over styles of communication, and the rewards that society offers to those who use the accepted style.” From that time, members of the Deaf community could begin to look forward to seeing plays of their own.

Eastman is perhaps the first published Deaf playwright to tackle, comprehensively, the challenge of using English in a way to capture on the page the essence of ASL and other sign systems. For readers and actors, Eastman developed a table of “word-codes” for the number of sign language modes that he envisioned in his comedy:

• word sign of American Sign Language
• word sign with letter [meaning finger spelled letter from the manual alphabet]
• word finger spelled
• word-word one sign
• word/word repeated sign
• word=word same sign, both hands
• word+word different sign each hand
• WORD gesture (generally understood)
• “word” spoken word
• [word] action or mime, conventional stage directions
• *name sign for proper name
• (S.C.) simultaneous communication [meaning signing and speaking at the same time]

Eastman also included a chart of initialized signs in the American Manual Alphabet, a few illustrations on how to sign the proper names of characters, and some illustrations of special sign vocabulary. In his notes, he gave suggested sign language mannerisms for some of the characters, such as stuttering with signs, signing and speaking at the same time, and signing in exact English word order with corresponding mouth movements (an artificial language in the play he called “Using Signed English”—U.S.E.).

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