Tell Ed Waterstreet there is something he can’t do, and he’ll hear nothing of it. If he could, he would shout his denial from center stage.
Waterstreet, who has been deaf since birth, is a man who gets things done.
He started the DeafWest Theatre in 1990 with one chair, one desk, one typewriter and a donated office space. The theater? That would come later. His goal was to enrich the cultural lives of the 1.2 million deaf people in the greater Los Angeles area.
But he underestimated his potential audience.
DeafWest has mounted 35 plays that bring mainstream culture to the deaf community while giving hearing audiences a window into the world of the deaf. In doing so, he unexpectedly created a new theatrical language, one in which deaf and hearing actors collaborate to play single roles together. Sign language and the spoken word are interwoven into the storytelling as naturally as music and dance work together to create choreography.
When DeafWest’s revival of “Big River” landed on Broadway in 2003, the Tony Awards had to create a category to adequately honor the achievement. Next month, DeafWest will be among the finalists for the Tonys’ prestigious best regional theater award.
“Big River,” which launches the Denver Center Attractions’ 2005 season Tuesday at the Buell Theatre, now has two simultaneous companies, one based in Washington, D.C., and the touring company, which in 2004 performed for a month in Japan.
“It’s all beyond my wildest expectations,” Waterstreet, the first deaf person ever to become an artistic director of a major regional theater, said through a sign-language interpreter on a video phone call from Washington, D.C. “I never would have dreamed I would be considered for a Tony. Never. Now that it’s happening, I’m on cloud nine. I have white hair, but you should see it now. It’s even whiter!”
“Big River” is Roger Miller’s 1985 musical based on Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” The Denver cast includes Broadway “Big River” stars Daniel Jenkins and Tyrone Giordano. The director is Jeff Calhoun, whose Denver-born “Brooklyn The Musical” is now in its seventh month on Broadway.
As soon as people hear this is “the deaf show,” a common presumption is that someone simply performs sign language from the side of the stage, or perhaps follows actors around on the stage.
“Big River” casts a much longer fishing line.
“I understand the confusion, but it’s completely different,” said Waterstreet, who has been married to actor Linda Bove, best known as “Sesame Street’s” Linda the Librarian, for 34 years.
“The challenge for us was to see if sign language and speech could become one,” he said. “The actor playing Mark Twain is a wonderful example. Twain is our narrator, but he also plays the voice of Huck. So what you see is Huck doing his own sign language, while another actor playing Huck’s voice sings aloud.
“When you think about how Mark Twain truly is the voice of Huck – that Huck is a character (created through) Twain’s own perception – I think the combination of those two together on a stage just works beautifully.”
DeafWest began as an opportunity for deaf actors to perform in a tiny, 60-seat space. Los Angeles had nothing like it, but after two years, Waterstreet was stunned to find that 95 percent of his audiences were hearing. When he moved into a 99-seat space in North Hollywood, complete with an infrared system that piped dialogue to hearing audiences through a headset, hearing attendance further boomed. But Waterstreet wondered how he might better connect with his target audience – the deaf.
“I thought, ‘Well I’m going to have to change my thinking on this,”‘ he said. “I decided we were going to have to take more of a bicultural approach, with hearing and deaf actors coming together.”
With his production of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” Waterstreet put hearing actors onstage alongside deaf actors for the first time. His silent plays became, at least in part, talkies. That allowed him to play with the theatrical form, eventually leading to gigantic successes such as “Oliver,” which was transferred to L.A.’s most prestigious theater, the Mark Taper Forum, and the Broadway-bound “Big River.”
But Waterstreet is most proud that he has built up his deaf audience base to about 25 percent.
“The audience members are more balanced now, deaf and hearing, and they laugh and enjoy the performance together, which is really what I hoped would happen all along,” said Waterstreet, who does not intentionally choose plays involving deaf issues. Rather, he said he chooses plays that expose conflicts between the deaf and hearing worlds.
“Part of the reason I picked ‘Big River’ is that the central theme in the performance is about the world being apart,” Waterstreet said. “It’s about black versus white. It’s about cultural differences. That fits with the bicultural goals of DeafWest beautifully: it’s about hearing and deaf coming together. It’s about sign language coming together with the rest of the culture.
“Mostly it’s about all of us coming together and sharing the experience ‘Big River’ embodies.”
Waterstreet wants DeafWest to be considered mainstream. With the financial and critical success of “Big River,” he has found less and less of a platitudinous (if well-meaning) response to his work.
“Twenty years ago, if someone from the hearing community said to me, ‘Oh, what a good little performance,’ I would have taken it in that tone,” Waterstreet said. “The stereotyping that happens in the deaf community historically is that a deaf person is to be looked down upon and sort of pitied, not part of the mainstream.
“But I don’t see it that much anymore,” he said. “Now what we are doing has been elevated to more of an artistic form for a lot of people. Once the curtain opens, the audience no longer thinks of it as a deaf thing. They just see the language. Deaf or hearing is really unimportant at that point. It’s not about deafness, it’s about making a statement and finding the common ground for everyone.”
Theater critic John Moore can be reached at 303-820-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com.
