Deaf Side Story: Deaf Sharks, Hearing Jets, and a Classic American Musical

America

Christopher hesitates, then takes a risk. “Forget about the music,” he tells her. “Use the poetry. Use what the words are telling you.” That clicks. Pearlene abandons her attempts to concentrate on the piano—from most positions on the stage, she can’t see Terri’s fingers (a potential visual cue)—and she listens, instead, to the text itself, to Stephen Sondheim’s lyrics freed as never before from Bernstein’s rollicking music. Little by little, Maria’s emotions replace Pearlene’s frustration; song by song, Maria and Pearlene blend into one. Diane’s own breakthrough in directing Pearlene comes almost too late to be of use. Traditional motivations and various acting tricks and styles have had little effect, but late in the game, while watching Pearlene sign during a scene, Diane has an epiphany. Pearlene, accustomed to relying on physical gestures to communicate her moods, needs strictly physical direction. Diane tests her hypothesis in a bridal shop scene where Maria, positively giddy with anticipation over Tony’s impending visit, can hardly sit still. To coax Pearlene into Maria’s frame of mind, Diane tells her to behave exactly as she would in her own dorm room, “horsing around” with friends. Pearlene immediately becomes a giggly, smitten schoolgirl. From that moment on, Diane plies the opposite trade from Christopher (who continues to stress poetry) and asks Pearlene to react only with specific physical memories and stances. The dual approach begins to pay off. With spoken lines, Pearlene learns to rely on physical cues, attitudes born of body language and posture; with lyrics, she sinks into the words themselves, their literary quality, their (for her, unheard) poetry. Maria’s Tony makes things at once easier and harder for Pearlene. To the surprise of many students and not a few faculty, it is Ken Roumpos, the actor whom Diane had originally hoped to have as Tony, who steps in to fill the breach. Ken had not expected to be free due to student teaching commitments, a fact he’d made known to Diane in the fall of 1999, and it was his Maria 85 unavailability that led directly to the casting of Scott Corbin, now long gone. Ken is a Mac senior, a Music Education major soon to be married. He’s heavy, gifted with a charming smile that fits nicely with his baby face, and he seems tremendously more mature than most of his Mac fellows, a trait which partially accounts for his position as student body president. He sings tenor in the college choir and also performs with a smaller group, including several West Side Story cast members, called the MacMurray Singers. On stage, he proves to be the kind of flexible and willing actor any director would wish for. It seems that everything comes easily to him. Pearlene struggles to recall her lines right up to the end, but Ken memorizes his in a matter of a few short weeks. When blocking confuses Pearlene, Ken helps guide her through the motions. They are as different during rehearsals as night and day, with Ken the quick, fluid study, and Pearlene the awkward stepchild, fighting to get something—anything—right. Ken has one clear advantage over Pearlene: experience. He is twenty-two to Pearlene’s fifteen. Pearlene expresses, more than once, her perturbation with having to act the role of a teenager in love when she herself has never had a boyfriend. Over e-mail, she writes to Diane that, “It’s hard because I am totally not very romantic. Um, i haven’t felt any loss of death yet in my life.” The twin hurdles of music and passion conspire against her nightly, and despite her formidable work ethic and obvious willingness to please, one rehearsal after another leaves her close to tears. Group scenes, however, show her at her best. Freed from the shackles of worrying about romance—and getting romance right—she becomes something of a leader. She encourages her classmates to put their all into each moment on stage. During a mid-March rehearsal, she stamps her foot and demands of the room at large, “Try harder! When are we ever going to get a chance to act with hearing actors again?” Acting, in and of itself, is important to Pearlene. It carries a certain familial cachet, mostly due to her aunt Terrylene, a pro86 Deaf Side Story fessional actress who is deaf and who...