Vignettes of the Deaf Character and Other Plays

Foreword

Foreword Aaron Kelstone ix AS HUMANS, WE HAVE a need for a good story, and most everyone has at least one good story to tell. Yet, relatively few of us make the effort to be published. Even fewer become playwrights. After all, it is difficult enough to be published in this day and age without choosing an apparently esoteric art form. Yet, it seems to me that a playwright does more than just write plays. What is it about a play that compels us to leave our warm, comfortable houses, often in the evening hours after a long day of work? Why are we willing to spend our time and transportation resources sitting in a large dark room for two hours to see imaginary life happen on stage? In most cases, we go see a play once and are done with it. But there are certain plays that we are willing to watch over and over until we know them by heart. How is it that some playwrights are able to persuade an audience to return? Some suggest the answer lies in the reputation or prolific output of certain playwrights. Others suggest it is based on how often a specific play is produced by different theaters. Still others propose that successful plays contain great dialogue, are entertaining, contain universal themes, have something to teach, or simply touch on the collective experience and memory of an audience. Time after time, the play evokes something that enables us as human beings to cope, endure, appreciate, and get on with life. Maybe all of these responses define what produces successful playwrights within each generation, but perhaps they do not effectively explain how some playwrights cross over successive generations . Think of Shakespeare, O’Neill, or any other well-known playwright and I would suggest that they found a way to cross the divide we unconsciously build within ourselves and our society. We have built this divide to keep us safe from our most painful and difficult experiences. It is like a castle surrounded by a moat, yet these playwrights have the ability to breach that moat, throw down the gate, and expose us to our collective experiences. These experiences are often tightly intertwined with a constant tension between what was, what is, and what will eventually come to be in our lives. Creating life on stage that challenges an audience requires playwrights to have the courage to grasp our raw nerve. Holding on for dear life, they reveal the tension that exists within those poignant moments surrounding our first mistake, our first bad choice, our first lost love, our first realization that life has an ending. These enduring playwrights yank us back from the yearning to look homeward and reveal to us, in living color, our flaws and errors; then, from that chaos and pain, they enable us to change, to let go, and to step toward the unknown that we fear daily in our busy lives. How does this kind of playwright emerge within a culture? Is it any different for deaf playwrights? We may find part of the answer in Tennessee Williams’ reflections on writing Battle of Angels. I took to theatre with the impetus of compulsion. Writing since I was a child, I had begun to feel a frustrating lack of vitality in words alone. I wanted a plastic medium. I conceived things visually, in sound and color and movement. The writing of prose was just their description, not their essential being: or so I felt it to be. I was impatient of sentences. . . However with a play, a play on a stage—let any fool come to it! It is there, it is really and truly there—whether the audience understands it or not! This may be a childish distinction : however, I felt it that way. . . . It seemed to me that all good writing is not just writing but is something organic. (275–76).1 What Williams describes about “conceiving things visually” fits aptly the aspiration of deaf playwrights. In 1910, George Veditz asserted that deaf people are “people of the eye;”2 to deaf playwrights, x Foreword 1. Tennessee Williams, “The History of a Play (With Parentheses),” in Tennesee Williams Plays 1936–1955, vol. 1, ed. Mel Gussow and Kenneth Holdich (New York: Library of America, 2000), 275–286. 2. George Veditz, “Preservation of the Sign Language,” in Proceedings of the Ninth Convention of the National Association of the Deaf and the Third World’s Congress of the Deaf...