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ASL in Performance: A Conversation with Adrian Blue 232 17 Adrian Blue is a director, translator, storyteller, playwright, and actor. His plays include Deaf Heroes; A Nice Place to Live, written with Catherine Rush; and Circus of Signs, which won the Cleveland Critic’s Circle Award. He has directed and acted in numerous plays produced by the National Theatre of the Deaf, the Wheelock Family Theater in Boston, the Cleveland Sign Stage, and other venues. In addition, Adrian has translated more than thirty plays and novels, including children’s books and several Shakespearean plays. He served as master translator for the ASL Shakespeare Project’s production of Twelfth Night, in which he also played Malvolio. Currently he is filming an ASL production of Much Ado about Nothing, which he translated with Catherine Rush and in which he plays all the characters. EDITORS: Did you grow up in a Deaf family? ADRIAN: Yes, my father is Deaf. My mother was hearing, but she had Deaf influence in her family. Her grandparents were deaf. They used home signs. My mother’s mother was the first interpreter in Boston in the 1930s and 1940s. There was no code of ethics then. The attitude was: “I’m here to save the deaf.” That sort of thing. EDITORS: How did you get started working in theater? ADRIAN: In Rochester and in Boston, when I was about sixteen, I’d go out to the street and be a mime and collect money that way. I’d go to where the people were good hearted and they gave money. EDITORS: Had you seen other mimes performing? ADRIAN: Yeah, on TV. Noncaptioned days. Mostly clowns. I loved to watch them. But I didn’t have any kind of formal training, I used gesturing. I knew sign, because my father is Deaf, though he grew up oral. I went to a school for the deaf very young, and my mother communicated with a mixture of home sign and talking . But when I did mime, I used gestures. EDITORS: Where did you go to school? ADRIAN: I went to the Horace Mann School for the Deaf in Roxbury, Massachusetts, near Boston. It was considered an oral school, but at the time I was enrolled, the students signed a lot with each other. It was impossible for the school to keep the students from signing, even though the classroom instruction was oral. EDITORS: How did you move from performing mime to directing? ADRIAN: During my younger days I struggled to communicate with the hearing world. I’d ask myself, “How can I get my thoughts across?” I would mime and gesture. I started that way. That enabled me to achieve some sort of communication with hearing people. One thing led to another and then I discovered scripts for plays and screenplays. With miming and clowning, there’s no written literature, so focusing on the written script was new to me. I enjoyed the challenge of moving from a basic, gestural communication to working with written English and ASL. This change pleased me for another reason, too. Miming and clowning were fine for a while. But the white makeup and all that . . . I moved away from it. Still, I had an abiding interest in the performing arts, so I moved into directing. Then I discovered I didn’t want to act, I wanted to direct. EDITORS: What was the first thing you directed? ADRIAN: My mime shows. The germ of directing was: “Oh, I have an idea . . .” and I’d get others to act it out so I could stay off the stage and direct. My first mimed stage performance grew out of this scenario: There’s a fly in an elevator with three people. One says, “No, no, you shouldn’t kill the fly.” Another says, “Kill it. It’s bothering me.” The third person becomes the negotiator . That was my first experience directing. If I were to direct it today, it would probably become an hour-long play. A lot of things about acting don’t suit me. When I was an actor, after the performance , they’d call me to the stage to take a bow. I had a hard time with that because in my view, my job was finished. I had changed my clothes. I wanted to get out. If acting never required me to bow, maybe I would have continued. EDITORS: Did you see the work of other Deaf actors and directors in those days? ADRIAN...

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