West Side Silence: Producing West Side Story with Deaf and Hearing Actors

In spring 2000, the MacMurray College English and Drama Department tried to cross linguistic and cultural boundaries by developing a collaborative production of West Side Story with hearing actors from MacMurray and deaf actors from the Illinois School for the Deaf, both located in Jacksonville, Illinois. From the outset, the idea of creating this production was so clearly appropriate for our students and the community as a whole that no one could believe it had not been done before. On the east side of town stands MacMurray, a small liberal arts college whose largest program is its Deaf and Hard of Hearing Teacher Education major. One mile away, on the west side of town, is the Illinois School for the Deaf, a state-sponsored residential campus without full-time arts programming in the high school. While the schools had maintained a relationship through their student teaching efforts, the students had never collaborated artistically. Within the larger community, interactions between deaf and hearing people have ranged from chance encounters at the local Wal-Mart to a community theatre production of Children of a Lesser God, directed by a deaf woman. Despite these ideal conditions for collaborating, the West Side Story production team and I (as director) faced a host of unexpected problems. This essay explores some of the practical dilemmas we encountered as we negotiated the distinctions between the Deaf and hearing communities. (As I explain below, an individual's identity as "deaf" may be determined by either cultural or strictly audiological determinants. Following the lead of Harlan Lane, author of "Constructions of Deafness," I will capitalize Deaf when referring to culturally determined Deafness and use the lowercase form when referring to deafness as a physical condition not necessarily connected to a cultural identity.)

The idea seemed so simple at first. As director of the theatre program at MacMurray, I noticed that many of my students were using sign language backstage. That language, I thought, should be onstage, not off. So I posed a question to my students and colleagues: why not get the high school students from the Illinois School for the Deaf (ISD) involved in a sign language production at MacMurray? At that point, I knew that such a project would fail without collaborators from the Deaf community and that we would need to find funding. I turned to the Illinois Arts Council, only to discover that while they had a well-funded Artist-in-Residence program, there were no deaf people on their list of approved artists. Through a contact at Dell'Arte, a performance troupe and school for physical comedy in Blue Lake, California, I found Christopher Smith, a deaf choreographer from Chicago, who was eager to jump into the project. With enthusiastic support and assistance from the head of the Residency program, the Illinois Arts Council added Smith to their list, and we were ready to start planning a show. A musical. A deaf and hearing musical. This genre, we believed, would not only showcase Smith's talents but also demonstrate that deaf performers in general could exceed the expectations of those who think they lack a sense of musicality.

Eager to begin, I sent out a flurry of emails to some of the major theatres and organizations connected to the Deaf community: the National Theatre of the Deaf (NTD), Cleveland SignStage, Deaf West, the Deaf Entertainment Guild, as well as to individual artists in the Chicago area. Deaf artist Chris Lopez assured me that while "it takes alot [sic] of work to do the musical play," deaf artists had long been creating music. He himself had appeared in Hello, Dolly! and in the Candlelight Theatre Production of Godspell. Will Rhys, then artistic director of NTD, informed me that deaf performers had not only incorporated music into their plays at NTD but also created full-scale musicals such as The Christmas that Almost Wasn't, a musical adaptation of...