The "Stage in the Head": A Cognitive Approach to Understanding Audio Description in the Theatre

From the vantage point of backstage at the Roundabout Theatre Company's Off-Broadway house—the Laura Pels Theatre on 46th Street near Sixth Avenue—I was introduced to audio description by accident. Working as a dresser on Christopher Durang's darkly comic study of family dysfunction, The Marriage of Bette and Boo, I noticed that during one particular performance, a large group on house right contributed a significant amount of the audience's laughter in response to the production. After the show that evening, the stage manager informed me that this group of patrons was blind, having experienced the performance with the aid of audio description (AD).¹ As I thought about this, I became increasingly interested in the ways in which audio description might enhance diverse audience members' theatrical experiences.² I wondered how the audio-described images of stage action combined successfully with actors' lines and other audible sounds from the stage to frame this production in a way that elicited so much audience engagement, and how this production subsequently became more accessible to its audiences.

Yet I realized that as a graduate student studying theatre arts, and after nearly ten years of working backstage, I possessed no clear concept of what AD is, and neither did the majority of my colleagues and professors. Unlike American Sign Language (ASL), for example, audio description is not something to which the general public is regularly exposed, and its formal use is limited primarily to the fields of arts and entertainment, for which visual perception most often plays a considerable role in the aesthetic experience. However, where AD is practiced, its role is far-reaching, as AD specialist Joel Snyder explains:

Audio Description (AD) allows persons with visual impairments to hear what cannot be seen at theater performances, on film and video, in museum exhibitions—in a wide range of human endeavor. Audio describers provide services in myriad settings, including multi-media events, educational venues, at circuses, rodeos, ice skating exhibitions, sports events, and on Internet web sites. AD provides a verbal version of the visual—the visual is made verbal, aural, and oral for the benefit of people who are blind or have low vision. But it has been shown to be useful for anyone who wants to truly notice and appreciate a more full perspective on any visual event.

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As Snyder infers, the scope of AD is wider than many theatre practitioners and scholars realize. In America, there are over 3.4 million blind or visually impaired persons; all are potential theatre-goers, and understanding their experiences as audience members helps theatre practitioners and scholars increase their awareness of a cultural identity within their own field about which most know very little. From a disability studies perspective, Carrie Sandahl and Philip Auslander state that "[t]o think of disabled people as a minoritarian culture entails considering how that identity is performed both in everyday life and in theatrically framed events that contribute to the self-conscious expression of that identity" (9). Such exploration into the "performance" of disability includes a consideration not only of the role of disabled performers, but also of the role of disabled audience members absorbing and responding to a theatrical production. Thus to study the role of audio describers and their consumers is to explore the methods by which theatre can communicate on a cultural level with significant segments of the population.

Excited to discover the techniques and challenges surrounding a theatre-related culture and discipline about which I knew so little, I studied AD from an experienced describer in Pittsburgh and served as an audio describer for the University of Pittsburgh's productions of Angels in America: The Millennium Approaches and Perestroika in 2009. While I learned much about relating key information to audiences without distracting them from the sounds of the production going on in front of them, my experience raised more questions regarding the learning and execution of AD technique. Despite my efforts to research AD through various Internet sources, limited print sources, interviews, and my own endeavors as...