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

I Feel Pretty

Combat, however, is the name of the game when it comes to rehearsing first “The Prologue” and then “The Rumble,” the fatal brawl between the Sharks and the Jets that ends with both gangs’ leaders, Riff and Bernardo, stabbed to death on the street. Stage combat, usually done so badly, is often—even at its best—a painful thing to watch. Here, thanks in equal parts to Christopher ’s choreography, Diane’s pedagogical skills, and the actors’ willingness to fling themselves around the stage, the rumble seems surprisingly real, even at the necessarily close range imposed by the black box space. When Bernardo first hits the ground, viewers can feel the concussion right through the floorboards . But night after night, the fight goes off without any significant injury or hitch. In one dress rehearsal, a pair of glasses goes flying, but the next night, the costume department adds an athletic strap to the wardrobe list. In another, A-Rab (Prentice Southwell) and Pepe (Patrick Baker) skid on a milk crate and crash through the silver-painted blinds closing off Doc’s shop; the solid wood of the soda fountain counter comes dangerously close to denting Patrick’s skull. At moments like these, the genie of real violence nearly escapes the bottle. Pulse rates rise; the threat, as Riff says of the Sharks, is large. Diane leads the actors by the nose through their stage combat instruction, going step by cautious step, building from the ground up. The first rule: Always establish eye contact. Never make a move without the permission of your combat partner. She insists that sparring partners must develop signals that indicate, “Okay, go ahead”—and if that signal gets forgotten or is not given for any reason, the only option is to abort the attack. The second rule demands that the defender must always have total control of the action, even in such offensive schemes as punching , kicking, or pummeling. The Sharks, well schooled in making up hand signals, quickly invent a series of gestures and eye fakes to cue their Jet counterparts. Even so, the fighting initially resembles something careful and cautious, a ballet of feints and The Rumble 141 jabs without the menacing thump and noise of a real fight. Trying to add spice to the combat, Diane attempts to demonstrate a more involved maneuver, a throw and drop that leaves her on her back on the floor. Once there, she finds she can’t get up. “Help!” she cries. “I’m too pregnant to move!” Pregnancy has been less of a burden in directing West Side Story than she had expected. She has not experienced morning sickness since the first trimester, and in tandem with the Bali “vacation,” the conclusion of those early months also brought much-needed relief from the debilitating pain of fibromyalgia. The creative high she gets from rehearsing carries her past the general exhaustion of pregnancy itself, and except when called upon to show off the basics of stage combat, she has not found herself restricted in any way. In this, she considers herself to be uncommonly lucky; at the peak of her FMS symptoms, she was beginning to count herself as a person with a lasting, perhaps insoluble handicap. She does not, however, believe that she has gained any particular insight into the realm of deafness through her own brush with disability. Deafness and pain management are sufficiently different that she feels it would be immodest and blatantly egotistical to assume that she has a better understanding of a deaf person’s world simply because she was, for a brief time, forced to view the world through a new and different lens. Stage combat, given her pregnancy, does leave her at a decided disadvantage, and she leans ever harder on Christopher and the actors to find that fine line between dance and realistic battle, between risk and personal safety. Leonard Bernstein, in a 1957 interview with the New York Herald Tribune, recalled similar difficulties in perfecting “The Rumble”: The last scene of the first act is a typical West Side “rumble,” a free-for-all knife fight between the two rival gangs. As Jerry (Jerome Robbins) staged it, the fight is as good, as frightening as any I’ve . . . seen in a Gary Cooper Western, and yet it’s choreographed to my music from beginning to end. That’s where the 142 Deaf Side Story tightrope comes...