WSC Avant Bard’s current production of Giraudoux’ The Madwoman of Chaillot, an entertaining tribute to the power of joy over despair, reminds us of the importance of the artist in an inevitably compromised world.

The premiere, in December, 1945, was viewed as a triumph over the Nazis, and a celebration of victory. The illustrious author, Jean Giraudoux, was dead, and there were rumors, probably untrue, that he had been poisoned by the Germans. Director Louis Jouvet, was a longtime associate of Giraudoux, and a leading figure in French theatre himself. Jouvet had just returned from a long exile in South America, where he and his company suffered privation rather than struggling with the horrors of the Paris occupation.

The opening of Madwoman was the beginning of a new era. German soldiers were not present. All of Paris (le tout Paris) was there, including General deGaulle. It was not difficult to see the parallels between the evil financiers and the occupying Germans, with Aurelie, the Madwoman, representing the real France, the epitome of literary culture with a philosophy of generosity and kindness, at least towards those who are not evil financiers. But the real story is slightly more complicated.

Paris in 1943, as Giraudoux was writing his play, was still under occupation. Jean-Paul Sartre notes in Paris Under the Occupation (Lisa Lieberman, tr., 2011…) that when friends disappeared, cries of horror split the night. The Gestapo often arrested people between midnight and five in the morning. “Three friendly Germans with revolvers” would appear. Houses were closed up or destroyed. He describes a people who fear that they have lost their future and their soul.

Giraudoux, like many theatre artists, remained in Paris. Separated from his wife, he lived in a small hotel in the rue Cambon, struggling to keep warm, with his poodle Puck for company. Friends describe him as often to be found “sitting in bed with a hot water bottle, wrapped up in a heavy sweater”, according to Donald Inskip in Jean Giraudoux: The Making of a Dramatist (Oxford University Press, 1958.) What must his thoughts have been as he worked? His mother died near the end of 1943. Inskip quotes his remarks to his son Marc, “This idea of the uselessness and laughableness of all our efforts… haunts men of my age… and makes our closing years dark and imprisoned.” Yet his friend, poet and novelist Louis Aragon, who met Giraudoux shortly before his death on Jan. 31, 1944, describes him as full of optimism. “He was full of plans for writing, full of plans for happiness,” as Inskip relates….

As a writer, he has been described as a “precieux,” a word which suggests artfulness, or artifice, with an emphasis on style. In The Madwoman of Chaillot, he dramatizes the conflict between the sinister baron, broker, and prospector who conspire to destroy Chaillot in order to exploit its oil, and the Madwoman, an eccentric resident who represents everything the district has to offer in terms of goodness, beauty, and love….

In its time, Madwoman was viewed as a fable of the French Resistance. Some maintain that in the wake of the Liberation, with the purges of Nazi sympathizers like the novelist Robert Brasillach, the French needed to view Giraudoux as great. It is true that he was no hero of the Resistance, but neither was he a collaborator. He was first and foremost, an artist, and as such fulfilled his major responsibility, which was to be a witness.

Today, his work seems startlingly prescient. The triumph of the 1% sometimes leaves the rest of us wondering what happened to the American dream. Whatever your dream is, in America you used to feel that you had the opportunity to accomplish it. That opportunity is vanishing, at a rapid rate. Giraudoux reminds us that poetry and love are eternal, and have nothing to do with one’s bank balance, station in life, or ability to succeed by manipulating others….

 

 

Excerpted with permission from “Dangereuse: ‘The Madwoman of Chaillot: An Ode to Joy in the Midst of Corruption’ by Sophia Howes, published June 15, 2015 by DC Metro Theater Arts. Copyright © 2015 DC Metro Theater Arts. To read the full article, click here.

Jean Giraudoux was born in Bellac, France, in 1882. A decorated war hero and career-long civil servant, he entered diplomacy and was appointed undersecretary of state for information in 1939. During the interwar period he began to publish novels and short stories. He owes his theatrical career to the prominent actor-director Louis Jouvet, who adapted his novel Siegfried and the Limousin to the stage (1928). In collaboration with Jouvet, Giraudoux became the first important modern French writer to devote himself exclusively to playwriting. Every premiere of a Giraudoux play—including Amphitryon 38 (1929), Judith (1931), Intermezzo (1932), The Trojan War Will Not Take Place (1935), Ondine (1939), and, posthumously, The Madwoman of Chaillot (La Folle de Chaillot, 1945)—was treated in Paris as a major cultural event. He died on January 31, 1944.

 

Alan Katz: Despite the age of this play, the content and social issues involved in your new translation of Madwoman of Chaillot feels fresh and really present.

Laurence Senelick: The playwright, Jean Giraudoux, died in the mid-1940’s, but he was already concerned about the industrialization of the modern age. He was a poet who was nostalgic for humane cultural values that were being forced out by commercialization, by industrialization, by international greed. It was very perceptive of him to be aware of these things before this age, where they’ve become immense and monstrous. So the basic concept of the play is that you have a bunch of crooks, who are nobility, who represent the stock exchange and major industry, all kinds of exploitation companies (the critical word being exploitation there). They see Paris as simply an oil field that can be taken advantage of. Paris represents Giraudoux’s humane cultural values. The Madwoman, because she’s mad and doesn’t subscribe to any kind of rationality, represents the potential triumph of the human spirit when it’s not constrained, but goes by its sentiments. Essentially, it’s a fable or a fairy tale.

But Giraudoux is no Brecht. He’s not a political dramatist telling you to ponder these questions and decide on a course of action. He certainly doesn’t tell you to build barricades or go to the stock market and shoot everybody. What he gives us is a poetic praise of the human spirit being able to overcome what seems to be encroaching on our lives from every direction.

…

As a high school student in Chicago, we were taken to Northwestern to see a production of Madwoman, and I fell in love with the play! A very strong production, beautifully costumed. I thought it was a great play. But I didn’t realize at the time that I wasn’t watching the original play, but Maurice Valency’s version of it. Later, I read the play in his English version. Then I came across a back issue of Theater Arts magazine in which the critic Eric Bentley pointed out how Valency had travestied the original play. He compared a very important speech at the end of Act I in a literal translation with what Valency had done, saying it was, well, inadequate. That made me read it in French.

When I read it, I saw that it was a totally different play in many respects. But I didn’t try to translate it then. The problem was that Valency, who was a professor at Columbia University, was commissioned to do the translation for the production which ran from 1948-1950 on Broadway. Essentially, he took Giraudoux’s play and tailored it to the taste of Broadway audiences in the late 40’s and 50’s. The kind of audience that had very low patience for listening to rhetoric or poetry, that was rather sentimental and didn’t want to hear anything that was cynical or overtly sexual. …

The thing about Giraudoux which some people might find off-putting is that he is a poetic dramatist. Not in the sense of lyrical poetry, but that he is in love with language. His characters often speak very rhetorically. You need actors who are capable of getting that across, but most modern actors aren’t trained for that. They’re trained in a neo-Realist manner, with short phrases, the colloquial language we all speak. Even if that language is highly stylized (like in David Mamet’s work). When you see a speech that goes on for a page and a half, you need an actor who can really make that work. Like an aria.

In the opening of Madwoman you have a couple of monologues by the villains of the play. Each does this in a long, convoluted speech. A funny way to open a play, which a lot of people would find hard to take. Need I say that in Maurice Valency’s version, all those speeches are cut, either to the bone or entirely.

It’s a major problem with adaptations and translations today. When an author is thorny or difficult or creates an idiosyncratic language, the translator will often iron out the wrinkles. But that makes it bland, and easy for the audience. It doesn’t challenge the audience’s ear, or even [challenge them] at all. But Madwoman does. In other respects, it’s a very contemporary play.

This is part of the problem of translation. You want to make it sound fresh, have a modern audience follow it. But you don’t want to update it to the degree that you lose the flavor of the period.

I trust the author. If they’ve suddenly done something funny with the grammar or story logic, I don’t feel I have to correct the author. Imagine if someone translated Mamet into standard French. You’d lose all the flavor! You have to find a French equivalent for a very idiosyncratic language. A language that no one in America actually speaks, even though it’s made up of familiar phrases, but the phrases are orchestrated in such a way so that people can point to it and say, “That’s Mamet!” It’s the same thing with Chekhov, the same with Giraudoux, the same with any great dramatist. They’ve created their own language. My job as a translator is to convey the idiosyncrasy of that language. …

Excerpted with permission from “Liberating Madwoman of Chaillot: Laurence Senelick on his new translation at WSC Avant Bard” by Alan Katz, published June 3, 2015 by DC Theatre Scene. Copyright © DC Theatre Scene. To read the complete interview, click here.

Laurence Senelick is Fletcher Professor of Drama and Oratory at Tufts University and recipient of the Saint George medal of the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation for services to Russian art and theater. He has translated The Complete Plays of Anton Chekhov (W. W. Norton), edited The American Stage: Writing on Theater from Washington Irving to Tony Kushner (Library of America), and compiled the Historical Dictionary of Russian Theater (Scarecrow Press). For Broadway Play Publishing he has translated Gogol’s Inspector General and Dead Souls, Schiller’s Love and Intrigue, Anything to Declare? by Hennequin and Veber, and Mustn’t Do It! by Jo van IJssel de Schepper-Becker.

 

In my earliest conversations with Tom Prewitt the director, he told me that he wanted to give Othello a contemporary, nautical military setting. I love the challenges of contemporary costuming—struggling to make the characters’ clothing look special and interesting while still looking familiar to what modern audiences see on the street every day. But costuming a military production raises even more questions. Were they Navy, or Marines? What was the exact rank of each character? I began by researching the uniforms of the US Navy and Marines. From the “blueberries” camouflage fatigues, to the traditional “cracker-jack” jumpsuits, to the crisp, white dress uniforms, I developed an appreciation for the intricacies of military dress.

Yet as we got deeper into the process, both Tom and I started to have misgivings about representing the US military in our production. Would the audience find it distracting to hear references to Italy and Venice while seeing the characters sporting the American Flag? Was it legal to have actors impersonating US military officers onstage? How realistic could we be? We ultimately realized that we would likely fall short of a perfect representation, and we didn’t want to risk alienating any US soldiers or veterans in the audience with inaccurate costumes. Therefore, I decided to create uniforms unique to our own world of Othello, based on an amalgam of several countries. In addition to the US military, I looked at images of the Italian marines and the British Royal Navy. I began to realize that most countries use the same basic pieces—suit coats and trousers for dress uniforms, fatigues and protective gear for battle. The difference is primarily in the decoration. The decoration can tell us the rank of each character, and, as anyone familiar with the play knows, rank is integral to the plot of Othello.

Costumes can also tell us a lot about the mood of the play from scene to scene. Othello begins with all our characters at home in Venice. Their costumes reflect their comfort and sense of power in this familiar setting. We see Othello and Cassio in their military dress uniforms, and we see other characters in their normal, day-to-day streetwear. In the second act, the play travels to a war zone in Cyprus, and we see everyone in full battle-ready uniform. It is important for me to emphasize that drastic shift through the costuming—instead of polished patent-leather shoes and  blazers heavy with medals, our soldiers are now decked out in fatigues, combat boots, and protective vests. Quickly, however, we learn that the opposing army is lost at sea and our heroes have already won the battle. They slip into what I call their “Yellow-Alert” costumes—they discard their protective vests and helmets and pair their BDU pants and boots with more casual tops. The guard has been let down slightly, but there is tension in that they are ready to throw on the rest of their combat clothes at a moment’s notice. Safety can be fleeting, and while Othello may think that his enemies are vanquished, there are worse threats lurking closer to him…

 

 

Elizabeth S. Ennis (Costume Designer) graduated from American University in 2010 with a BA in Musical Theater. For the past four years she has been freelancing locally as a costume designer, dresser, and stitcher. She is thrilled to be designing her fourth show for WSC Avant Bard– past credits include Visible Language, Nero/Pseudo, and King John. Next year, Elizabeth will be returning to school to obtain her MFA in Costume Design. You can find her full resume and portfolio here.

For more than 200 years after Shakespeare’s Othello was first staged in 1604, only white actors played the title role. From Richard Burbage to Edmund Kean, the Moor of Venice was portrayed by seasoned white tragedians in blackface. Not until 1826 was Othello finally played by a black performer: renowned African American actor Ira Aldridge.

Aldridge emigrated from the United States at the age of 17 and pursued a professional acting career in London that led him to perform throughout England and abroad. Yet his work as Othello drew criticism in London. The editors of the London newspaper The Athenaeum recoiled in disgust at an 1833 Covent Garden performance of Othello, in which they witnessed the white actress Ellen Tree (Desdemona) “pawed about the stage by a black man.” And despite Aldridge’s innumerable successes as an actor, it would be another hundred years before the role of Othello was taken up by fellow African American actor Paul Robeson.

The 1944 production of Othello on the West End of London featured Robeson and, as written, a white Desdemona. The physicality of the two actors onstage, including the kisses shared between them, scandalized the primarily white audiences just as Aldridge and Tree had a century before.

Since the mid-twentieth century, there have been several other notable black Othellos, including Laurence Fishburne and James Earl Jones. In modern productions it has become customary to cast black actors as Othello, but there are instances of white Othellos throughout the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Laurence Olivier famously “blackened up” to play Othello on stage and screen in the 1960s, as did Anthony Hopkins in 1981.

DC’s Shakespeare Theatre Company produced a racially flipped Othello in 1998 featuring Patrick Stewart as a white Othello. Actors of other ethnicities have also played the title role. The text of Othello is inconsistent in its information about Othello’s race, in part because Shakespeare would not have had complete knowledge or understanding of the huge variety of peoples that lived in North and Sub-Saharan Africa. Casting Arab actors is a particularly justifiable choice, not only because of the “otherness” assigned to Arab culture in the Islamophobia that gripped the Western World after 9/11, but also because Moors were a people from the Middle Eastern/ North African region. Scholars and artists continue to debate about how the text defines Othello’s race—but the important point is that his race and his origins contribute to the “otherness” that in part allows the plot to unfold.

Though race plays an important part in casting a play like Othello, it is not the only distinguishing physical trait that contributes to the portrayal of a character on stage. For example, although the text does not directly state Othello’s age, there are references throughout the play that indicate he is no longer a young man; regardless, many companies choose to cast younger actors. Avant Bard’s production, however, features Chuck Young, a veteran DC actor (and Avant Bard Acting Company member) who is older than the typical modern Othello. This accentuates the age gap between Othello and the younger Desdemona (played by Acting Company member Sara Barker), adding an additional point of contention to their marriage.

As you can see from the images above, the physical build and general appearance of Othello vary from production to production. Physical traits— including whether an actor has broad shoulders, is short or tall, or has hard or soft features—all contribute to the character and ultimately the story.

THE FACE OF IAGO

 

The casting of Iago has had less coverage, but it recently came to the forefront of Shakespearean news with the Royal Shakespeare Company’s announcement that Lucien Msamati would be its first black Iago. Msamati will be taking on that role in the RSC’s 2015 production of Othello. This will  not the first time a black actor has played Iago, but it is a high-profile case and a first for the company. Avant Bard’s production, too, features a black actor (Acting Company member Frank Britton) as Othello’s treasonous ensign. Working with an Othello/Iago pairing of the same race presents interesting and challenging questions about racism, assimilation, and “otherness.”

When you come to see Othello, you will encounter an Iago who puts a new twist on the traditional race-related challenges of the play: Othello is no longer the only black character on stage. Iago’s use and acceptance of racial slurs signifies something more complicated than his own racism, especially considering that his own marriage, like that of Othello and Desdemona, is interracial. And you will have to decide: Do the characters—and do you—racially separate Iago from Othello because his skin is a lighter shade of black?

Note that Avant Bard’s production run of Othello coincides with Black History Month. Could there be a better time to you to revisit this classic, or a more fascinating local cast to see perform it? For tickets and more information, click on the image of Frank and Chuck below!

EMILY ANNE GIBSON is the production dramaturg for Avant Bard’s Othello and is the script developer for the upcoming radio play collaboration with Lean & Hungry Theatre. Emily graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with degrees in Dramaturgy, History, and English. She has worked as a production dramaturg at Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh Irish & Classical Theatre, and The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey. She has also done new play dramaturgy in New York and Pittsburgh and maintained a TheatreMania University column in 2012. You can view more of Emily’s work at emilyannegibson.com. 

How did it occur to you to treat Othello the character as suffering from PTSD?

Early on in the play there’s a speech in which Othello is pleading innocent to charges of witchcraft that have been leveled against him by Brabantio, Desdemona’s father. And Brabantio says, There’s no way my sweet little daughter would ever have married such an old black guy if it weren’t for witchcraft. In answer to these charges, Othello says, All I did was tell her war stories.

And these war stories included such items as the fact that Othello was conscripted into being a mercenary soldier at age seven; he was a child soldier. He was a prisoner of war for a time. He was impressed into slavery for a time. He faced experiences like living among cannibals. We later hear from Iago that Othello experienced a dear friend of his being literally blown out from right next to him in battle.

Most of these stories are told in the safety of Western Europe, in Venice. Then the play moves to Cyprus—“the mouth of the dog” (as a contemporary Western European historian called the Muslim world). It’s when Othello gets to Cyprus that he starts to act crazy. He becomes insanely jealous. And it’s not just Othello; it’s also Casio. He seems to be very much under control in Western Europe in Venice, where they are initially stationed and where Othello and Desdemona get married. They go on a sea journey, through a tempest, and when they get to Cyprus, Casio’s alcoholism kicks in. He drinks and gets into a brawl. Iago’s vengefulness toward Othello kicks into high gear as well.

Another other factor on my mind was recent events—the Navy Yard shootings a few years ago; the Boston marathon bombing; Littleton, Colorado; Newtown, Connecticut.

To me the central question of the play is, How can such an such evil exist in our midst? How can one of our own turn on us? We just don’t know. I started thinking about the very closely knit community in Othello the play. Virtually all the characters except for Desdemona and Bianca are military or civilian advisers. How can such a tightknit community experience such evil in their midst? What if we stage the play as an investigation into what happened and why? So the triggering mechanism of the journey from the safety and security of Western Europe into the middle of a war zone—and suddenly people start to act uncharacteristically crazy—that started me seeing the play as an instance of post-traumatic stress disorder as we would say today.

How are you going to achieve that investigation, which is not the structure of the play as it is written?

As written the play unfolds in real time in chronological order. We will explore the play as an inquest into the nature of evil, as if all of these events have happened in the recent past. On the evening of a memorial service for all of the people who have been killed, and all the havoc that’s been wreaked, this tightknit community decides that they’re going to take matters into their own hands and investigate what happened in their midst. The play then becomes an instance of not only a few characters’ post-traumatic stress disorder but a whole community experiencing and trying to grapple with it.

What will be the setting and the visual motif of the production?

I always start with the text and my reading of it to figure out what was in Shakespeare’s head. Shakespeare didn’t care much about actual geography or chronology. In Othello the journey from Venice to Cyprus seems to take place in a matter of hours when it would have been many days in Shakespeare’s time. And I was struck by the fact that in Shakespeare’s day most of the major battles—partly because England is an island nation—took place at sea. So rather than set the play in the world of artillery or infantry, I thought, Wouldn’t it be interesting to explore it in a contemporary military and nautical world, something Marine-ish or Navy-ish.

In Othello the sea battle in Cyprus never takes place because wind blows the Muslim Ottoman fleet off course and destroys them—as happened during Shakespeare’s time with the Spanish Armada (it wasn’t so much that the British conquered them than that winds killed them). So Shakespeare’s interest in that is not historical; it’s psychological, or almost mystical—that is, it’s a journey through a tempest, which as we know from The Tempest or from King Lear is always a potent metaphor for him.

The idea of telling the story backward, in retrospect, gives us license in reenacting it to set it anywhere. The challenge of doing it in the cozy confines of Theatre on the Run is that you have to find a unit set that will work; there’s not a whole lot of room to move scenery in and out, which I like, actually. I like finding a central metaphor for a particular production and going with it. The governing metaphor for the world of this play is that these people are meeting late at night without permission in the control room of some sort of nautical vessel—a ship, a submarine. The whole play is a psychological journey; it’s not a literal journey. We don’t have to adhere too closely to the kind of literal facts that Shakespeare didn’t care about, so we won’t. The basic world of this play will be like a conning tower control room or a nuclear submarine or a ship at sea or a ship docked somewhere.

The first scene, which is between Iago and Roderigo, will likely take place via some sort of surveillance cam; there will be video footage shown on surveillance camera as if it’s captured in some entranceway or elevator or convenience store, and they’re plotting. This will be by way of saying, This is what you did; we have you red-handed; now just tell us why. And that’s really what the play is. More than a whodunit—most audience members know that already—it’s a whydunit. It’s a psychological thriller.

What kind of experience can the audience expect from the show?

Ultimately it’s a tragedy. It’s very wrenching and sad what happens to this glorious couple, this marriage between Desdemona and Othello. They are star-crossed lovers, ill-fated, because he’s from a different culture. He is military through and through; he is not used to being in civilian clothing in civilian territory. He is much older than she is. She on the other hand had many other suitors, turned them all down and chose Othello. There are glimpses of what those two are to each other and could have been to each other. Some of the most beautiful and heightened poetry that Shakespeare ever wrote about relationships exists in the brief exchanges between Othello and Desdemona and in words that they use about each other. It’s a very moving love story. These are two who should’ve been able to overcome these odds and create one of the great marriages, one of the great romances of all literature. And it was shipwrecked by one guy’s machinations. So experiencing that story—along with the meta-story of what happened and why—is a large part of the journey of this play.

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For complete performance schedule and ticket availability, call 703-418-4808 or click here.

A visual dramaturg acts as the eyes of the Deaf and hard-of-hearing audience.  A visual dramaturg well versed in ASL and Deaf culture can be an invaluable consultant to a director, who may not know ASL and Deaf culture or may be just too busy to attend to this aspect of the production. My job on Visual Language production has been to ensure that the overall stage presentation of sign language, open captioning, visual production elements, and Deaf culture-related matters are all on point with the script and clear to an audience.

There may be some overlap in the duties of the Director of Artistic Sign Language (DASL), depending on the depth and range of assigned responsibilities during a production.  The DASL on Visible Language is Aaron Kubey, who has been heavily involved in the translation of the English dialogue and lyrics into ASL for the signing actors.  He has also taught the ASL lines to actors who do not know signs.

Here are some of the production elements or visual concerns that I am always on the lookout for as a visual dramaturg:

1. Are my eyes looking at the right places in the play?  A hearing audience’s attention is  drawn mostly by the direction of sounds or voices.  A Deaf audience’s attention is guided by movement.  A motion as simple as an actor unintentionally wiping his nose can draw the focus of the entire Deaf audience away from something important happening on stage. Extraneous or intentional actor movement that inadvertently draws focus may need to be cut, re-choreographed, or timed differently. Sometimes this matter is resolved simply by getting the actor(s) to find ways to visually draw focus while the others nearby give focus where needed.
2. Are signing sightlines clear for the Deaf audience?  Spoken words can go through or around the body and reach the audience but not signed words. Sometimes the signing of an actor may get blocked by the positioning of certain actors (or props) on stage.  Audience members sitting in the first couple of rows may not be able to see the hands of signers if there’s an actor or two standing in the way.

   

3. Are the captions well positioned and visible to the audience? All of Visible Language will be captioned in plain view on a screen above the stage. I once dealt with a situation at a theatre that used projected captions.  The very tip of the text was blocked by a set piece in front of the projector and none of the tech team noticed it until I mentioned it.
   
4. Will the Deaf audience understand name signs and locations that may seem out of context? It is important to seek creative ways to introduce character names and places.  Plays often have names of characters and locales.  To the hearing ear, the English word lends itself to easy identification without any need for explanation. In Deaf culture, name signs are invented to represent a particular person.  Take for example the name Gallaudet. It is created by forming the fingerspelled letter “G” and swinging it over one eye.  This name sign came from the eyeglasses worn by Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet. It is also the name sign of the university where this play takes place. If the name Gallaudet comes up in dialogue, there has to be clear reference to what or who this name sign is in reference to:  Thomas Gallaudet, his son Edward Miner Gallaudet, or the university itself.  Inadvertent visual confusion must be avoided. For instance the name sign for Edward Miner Gallaudet almost resembles the sign for breasts—so some kind of visual context needs to be created for the Deaf audience to know that the dialogue topic at hand is not about breasts. Bottom line:  Careful thought must go into ways to introduce character name signs and signs for locations to help the Deaf audience with understanding exposition.
5. Is the presentation of ASL legible on stage?  During the early part of the rehearsal process for Visible Language, the actor playing Helen Keller was exploring tactile reading of Annie Sullivan’s signing: With historical accuracy, Helen was putting her hands over Annie’s hands to “read” fingerspelled and signed words. But from an audience’s point of view it was hard to understand what Annie was signing. The solution was to have Helen “cheat” a little by not covering so much of Annie’s hands, and one way we found to do this was for the actor playing Helen to put her hands on the wrist of the actor playing Annie.

When you attend Visual Language, you may never notice everything that I as visual dramaturg must always be aware of and watch out for.  But that’s as it should be. If I’ve done my job right, you can just sit back enjoy the show!

Visible Language, with book and lyrics by Mary Resing and music by Andy Welchel, runs October 21 to November 16, 2014, at Gallaudet University. For more information, click here.

About Willy:

I am an actor, director, playwright, and translator, and have been a theatre arts professor for twenty years, seven as a department chairperson. My work as a visual dramaturg stems from watching the rehearsals of my fellow faculty directors, where we often ask each other for feedback on our respective productions. One of my early works in this capacity was at CenterStage in Baltimore during the production of The Hostage. I was the associate director under Irene Lewis. In essence my role was really that of a visual dramaturg, since I was responsible for the direction and look of a signed song that was performed by the ensemble during the show. I have also worked a number of years as a DASL for various theatres such as Arena Stage, the Kennedy Center, Studio Theatre, and Everyman Theatre. It is my wish that more professional theatres involve the work of DASLs and visual dramaturgs when sign language is involved in future productions.