Twisting the expectations of genre, the Mark Taper Forum’s
new production of the musical “Big River ““ The
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” aims, at least in part, to
fall on deaf ears.
“Big River” features a cast of deaf and hearing
actors from the Deaf West Theatre and will run at the Taper from
Nov. 14 through Dec. 24.
The move to the Taper recognizes the show’s success,
already evident in its 11 Ovation Award nominations (an Los
Angeles-based theater award). Only last year the show was playing
to audiences at the company’s own small theater.
Based on Mark Twain’s classic book “The Adventures
of Huckleberry Finn,” “Big River” originally
debuted on Broadway in 1985, winning the Tony Award for best
musical. In Deaf West’s production, director Jeff
Calhoun’s unique approach unites song and sign, using both a
deaf and a hearing performer for each role. The show seeks to break
auditory boundaries, bringing the musical to a deaf audience while
also allowing the hearing audience to enter the world of sign
language.
“The hope is that the imaginary line that exists between
hearing and deaf cultures is completely blurred for the two-plus
hours of the play,” said Bill O’Brien, Deaf
West’s producing director and the recipient of a Los Angeles
Drama Circle Critics Award for Best Production in last year’s
show.
This imaginary division resonates within Mark Twain’s
classic and controversial portrayal of racial inequality in the
American South. Deaf West’s production does not lose focus of
this all-important theme, but rather creates an additional layer of
meaning that broadens the original text’s theme of unity
across cultures.
“Jeff (Calhoun’s) creativity has really shaped the
show without taking the heart out of it,” said actor Lyle
Kanouse.
Kanouse, a four-time veteran of the show who toured with part of
the original Broadway company in the early ’90s, plays the
speaking role of Pap alongside deaf actor Troy Kotsur. Although
much of the cast features deaf actors signing onstage while their
hearing counterparts sing and voice from the wings, Kanouse and
Kotsur appear together on stage in their presentation of Pap.
According to Kanouse, the shared role is an example of the unity
between the deaf and hearing worlds.
“We try to be sensitive about each others needs, and
we’ve come to a pretty good understanding, intellectually, as
to what Pap is about. It’d be difficult if there wasn’t
give and take,” Kanouse said.
The communal aspect of their work, in which each learns from the
specialized skill of the other, is a benefit for actors in the Deaf
West Theatre.
“I think (hearing actors) develop a better appreciation of
how they’re able to communicate to people without
words,” O’Brien said. “An actor can take that
skill out of sign language and use it in Chekhov.”
The acting methods and mission of Deaf West, which have helped
shape award-winning actors like Kotsur, began in 1991, when the
company was founded by deaf artists Ed Waterstreet, now the
company’s artistic director, and wife Linda Bove, a long-time
cast member of “Sesame Street.”
The idea for a musical came from Waterstreet’s own
experience growing up in a hearing family and his feeling of
exclusion when attending musical events as a child, O’Brien
said. Waterstreet changed all that with the Deaf West
Theatre’s production of “Oliver,” which won the
Ovation Award for best musical of the year in 2000.
The company’s current production continues where
“Oliver’s” success left off. And with “Big
River’s” themes of cultural understanding and unity,
Waterstreet is giving voice something within and beyond the deaf
community.
“Our hope is that the core message will resonate even
stronger when both onstage and in the audience, we start to look
past the boundaries that we may have been conditioned to
see,” O’Brien said.