ED WATERSTREET

James A. Doolittle Award for Leadership in the Theatre

LA Stage Alliance

2003 Ovation Awards

ED WATERSTREET (DWT Artistic Director/Producer) founded Deaf West Theatre in 1991,making it the first resident theatre company in America operating under the direction of a deaf artistic director. Under his leadership, Deaf West has received numerous awards for outstanding artistic achievement, including six Ovation Awards (including one for Best Play —A Streetcar Named Desire, and one for Best Musical – Oliver!), over 30 Ovation nominations (including 11 for DWT’s production of Big River), six Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Awards (including Best Production —Big River and the Polly Warfield Special Award for Best Season), eight LA Weekly Awards, 14 Drama- Logue Awards and nine Back Stage West Garland Awards (including Best Musical — Big River). Ed also won a Drama-Logue Award for Best Director of DWT’s Shirley Valentine in 1992. A former member of the National Theatre of the Deaf, with whom he toured for 12 years, Ed is best remembered for his starring role in the Emmy-Award winning Love Is Never Silent. Most recently he received the International Fete d’Excellence 2002 Gold Medal Award for Cultural Education in Theatre at Geneva, Switzerland.

Deaf West Theatre

Deaf West Theatre is the only professional resident Sign Language theatre west of the Mississippi. Founded in 1991 by Ed Waterstreet to "directly improve and enrich the cultural lives of the 1.2 million deaf and hard of hearing individuals who live in the greater Los Angeles area," DWT has given extraordinary opportunities for both deaf and hearing audiences to share a legacy of deaf culture. Recently, they experienced a ground-breaking commercial success, as well, when their production of BIG RIVER moved to the prestigious Mark Taper Forum and garnered 11 Ovation Award nominations and six wins, including one for Best Musical. It is the first time in the Taper's 35-year history that a production from an "intimate" theatre (in LA, a 99-seat theatre) has been transferred.

Deaf West produces one production per year--from classics, contemporary and original plays to musicals. All are cast with both deaf and hearing actors and incorporate American Sign Language (ASL) simultaneously with spoken English. At the resident theatre, audiences historically have been 75% hearing and 25% deaf. Techniques such as state-of-the-art lighting (to assure that signers are properly lit) and subwoofers under the seats (to allow deaf audience members to feel the vibrations from low frequency sound effects) add to greater accessibility for both audiences. Video monitors backstage let deaf actors watch what's happening on stage in order to get their entrance cues. Founding member Linda Bove describes all of this as "taking advantage of every design element in the theatre."

Working hand-in-hand with a team of ASL masters (three deaf and one hearing), the hearing actors receive individual translation work, learning to sign the text line by line and how to communicate in a way that's compatible to the deaf actors. The masters give the cast information on the culture and how to approach this challenging rehearsal process. They also work with the deaf actors to make sure that a strict, intricate translation from English to ASL is adhered to.

Subtitles also have been used, as in a recent production of TRUE WEST. Providing captions to describe background and sound effects, the subtitles were also used to illuminate the English text of characters that were portrayed as deaf, as character devices. In Big River, no subtitles were used, but many characters were portrayed by two actors: one as the voice, and one as the signer. The effect was dramatic and mesmerizing, adding a unique depth to the text.

This non-profit theatre also takes part in community initiatives, with funding from the U.S. Department of Education, such as bringing programming to underserved populations in the area, in-school workshops, summer programs for children and exporting their unique brand of theatre to other areas of the country. Ms. Bove (who is the Summer School Director) speaks about her own limited access to the arts as a deaf child and Deaf West's commitment to filling that void for students today. Their workshops integrate deaf and hearing students, bringing professionals to teach exercises illuminating how they create theatre and story translations. Many times these programs provide rare role models for the deaf students and impact hearing students' understanding and perceptions about deaf people's ability to communicate. Through these workshops, Ms. Bove says, as the students become fascinated with ASL and start to understand one another more, a pride in the culture, community and language is instilled.

Deaf West aims to become a part of mainstream theatre, viewing itself not for deaf people only, but as a theatre creating quality product, breaking barriers and increasing exposure to a unique culture. As Deaf West continues to have an impact on the media, they are also hopeful that other theatres will get the idea from this multi-award winning success story that integrating signing actors can enhance their own story-telling, as well.

File written by Adobe Photoshop® 4.0 Ed Waterstreet’s Current Project: Big River on Broadway at the American Airlines Theatre, NY

July 25, 2003, Friday, Late Edition - Final

THEATER REVIEW; Twain's Tale, With Music for the Ear and Eye

By BEN BRANTLEY

The music doesn't end when the band stops playing.

There comes a moment in the inventive new revival of "Big River," the 1985 musical based on "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," when the twanging country tones of Roger Miller's score go still in the middle of a production number, and the stage is filled with an uncompromising silence. Yet the entire cast is still singing, expressively and expansively. What's more, you can hear the voices, though your ears have nothing to do with the experience. And the melody doesn't just linger; it seems to keep swelling.

This goosebump-making moment has been carefully prepared for in "Big River," which opened last night at the American Airlines Theater. Up to that point, which arrives toward the end of the second act, every number in this show from Deaf West Theater has been simultaneously sung and rendered in American Sign Language -- and so seamlessly that you no longer make a conscious distinction between the two styles of performance.

Then comes the reprise of the musical's spiritual center of a ballad, "Waitin' for the Light to Shine," when the sound, so to speak, is switched off. As the ensemble members noiselessly sign the refrain in perfect synchronicity, you may be surprised to realize that by now you already know the lyrics as they are presented in this form. Those much-quoted words from Keats start to make new sense: "Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter."

For hearing audience members at least, nothing else in this interpretation of "Big River" achieves the magic of that moment of quiet, in which a bridge is crossed into a different realm of perception. But this is by no means to dismiss the considerable achievement of the rest of the show.

Presented by Roundabout Theater Company and Deaf West (in association with the Mark Taper Forum, where the musical was seen last year) and directed by Jeff Calhoun, this adaptation of Twain's epochal account of an American odyssey makes the crucial point that there's more than one way to tell a story and to sing a song. Though the coordination and integration of signed, spoken and sung language are surely a matter of great complexity, you're never allowed to sense the effort.

As a narrative that sticks close to William Hauptman's original adaptation, this production is unfailingly energetic, good-tempered and sparklingly clear. It cannot be said that it makes much of a case for "Big River" as a major American musical or does full justice to a great novel that still inspires heated debate.

Like the first Broadway production, which swept the Tony Awards in what was admittedly a dry season, this version doesn't avoid shrinking Twain's multidimensional book into a folksy, tuneful morality lesson, heavy on homilies and inspirational hymns. In some ways this is even more apparent than it was 17 years ago. The show inevitably lacks the diversionary visual impact of the original breathtaking scenery by Heidi Landesman. And much of Miller's lively score, performed by a versatile six-member band, more than ever has the feeling of incidental instead of integral music.

What the Deaf West production wisely emphasizes is the story theater aspect of the show and a sense that the telling of tales can assume many, equally valid forms. Ray Klausen's modestly ingenious set is a wonderland of oversized book pages, with text and illustrations from "Huckleberry Finn," that wind up having all sorts of unexpected uses as they shift and open to frame scenes.

The implicit idea is that the book is being translated before our eyes into live action, which in turn is translated into signed and spoken speech. The role of Twain as the evening's central narrator acquires a newly vital reason to be. Twain (Daniel Jenkins, who played Huck on Broadway in the original production) now also provides the spoken and sung voice of Huckleberry Finn (Tyrone Giordano), who delivers his performance in sign language.

Variations on this teaming of speaking and nonspeaking performers are often inspired. Huck's no-good drunkard of a father is embodied by two actors, Troy Kotsur and Lyle Kanouse (which ties in with observations Huck makes on the duality of his father's nature).

These men serve up what is surely the most fascinatingly linked teamwork in a musical since Alice Ripley and Emily Skinner played Siamese twins in "Side Show." They later show up, to memorable effect, as the swaggering con men who temporarily share (and take over) the raft navigated by Huck and his traveling companion, the runaway slave Jim (the rich-voiced Michael McElroy).

Many of the other cast members also work in symbiotic pairs. (Mr. McElroy and Michael Arden, as a perky Tom Sawyer, both speak and sign their parts.) Such interdependence deepens the show's emotional texture, echoing and enhancing the central relationship between Huck and Jim.

Huck's increasing empathy with Jim, a man he once regarded as only a white man's property, takes on new resonance. By its very form, this "Big River" is asking theatergoers, whether hearing or nonhearing, to try to understand the world through an unfamiliar point of view.

It could be argued that the two-level interpretation of every line gives an overly emphatic quality to a show that was not known for understatement to begin with. Yet this heightened demonstrative air should also make the show even more accessible to children than it was before.

Among the singing performers, Mr. McElroy and Gwen Stewart (as a mother whose daughter is sold into slavery) give vibrant accounts of gospel numbers, while Melissa van der Schyff has a Dolly Parton-ish honeyed nasality that is ideally suited to the funeral lament "You Oughta Be Here With Me," a charming bluegrass pastiche that I had forgotten about.

Yet it's the facial and body language of the nonspeaking performers that is most memorably eloquent. Playing several roles, Phyllis Frelich, who won a Tony for "Children of a Lesser God," has a naturally incisive comic piquancy that makes you wish she were seen more often on New York stages. Christina Ellison Dunams radiates a haunted sense of accumulated losses as a slave girl. Mr. Kotsur's Duke conveys barnstorming theatrical grandeur with stiffly squared shoulders and a phony English accent with the pursing of his mouth.

As for Mr. Giordano, he suggests a Caravaggio model who somehow wound up posing for Norman Rockwell, and the contradiction lends a valuable hint of sensuality to the musical's sanitized Huck. It is he who leads that extraordinary reprise of "Waitin' for the Light to Shine." Though its melody builds into evangelical fervor, this is one song you are likely to remember less as you heard it than as you saw it.

Music and lyrics by Roger Miller; book by William Hauptman; adapted from the novel by Mark Twain; directed and choreographed by Jeff Calhoun. Sets by Ray Klausen; costumes by David R. Zyla; lighting by Michael Gilliam; sound by Peter Fitzgerald; music direction and special musical arrangements, Steven Landau; music coordinator, John Miller; associate director and choreographer, Coy Middlebrook; A.S.L. heads, Linda Bove and Freda Norman; production stage manager, Peter Hanson; technical supervisor, Steve Beers; hair and wig design, Carol F. Doran; associate artistic director, Scott Ellis; general management, Don-Scott Cooper and Greg Backstrom. Presented by the Roundabout Theater Company, Todd Haimes, artistic director; Ellen Richard, managing director; and Deaf West Theater, Ed Waterstreet, artistic director; Bill O'Brien, producing director, in association with Center Theater Group/Mark Taper Forum. At the American Airlines Theater, 227 West 42nd Street, Manhattan.

WITH: Michael Arden (Tom Sawyer), Christina Ellison Dunams (Alice's Daughter/Slave), Phyllis Frelich (Miss Watson/Sally), Tyrone Giordano (Huckleberry Finn), Daniel Jenkins (Mark Twain/Voice of Huck), Lyle Kanouse (Pap/King/Voice of Silas), Troy Kotsur (Pap/Duke), Michael McElroy (Jim), Gwen Stewart (Alice/Voice of Alice's Daughter/Slave), Melissa van der Schyff (Mary Jane Wilkes/Voice of Miss Watson/Voice of Joanna Wilkes) and Alexandria Wailes (Joanna Wilkes).