E-Mail This Article to a Friend Song and sign Deaf West’s Big River to flood the Wang BY LIZA WEISSTUCH

There’s a story Ed Waterstreet has told countless times. It’s one he tells with his hands in American Sign Language in response to a question he’s regularly asked: what possessed him, as artistic director of the Los Angeles–based Deaf West Theatre, to undertake a musical? The abbreviated answer is that when he was a child, he often felt himself the outsider in a family in which no one else was deaf. Holidays when everyone would sing were especially frustrating; he fantasized that, someday, he would be integrated into such activities. That vision was realized in 2003 on Broadway in the form of Deaf West’s re-creation of the 1985 Tony-winning musical Big River: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Beginning November 16, the show will dock at the Wang Theatre for a six-day run, fresh from a stint in Japan.

"Watching mouths move and bodies gyrate, I thought, ‘Someday I’m going to sign music,’ " Waterstreet said at a press conference two weeks back in the Wang Theatre’s Metropolitan Room. The integration of sign and speech is precisely what he and wife Linda Bove had achieved in various plays since Waterstreet founded DWT in 1991. Then, in 2000, the company, which employs hearing, deaf, and hard-of-hearing actors, produced Oliver! under the direction of Jeff Calhoun, who most recently directed Brooklyn: The Musical on Broadway.

Calhoun returned to direct Big River, which premiered at DWT before it transferred to LA’s larger Mark Taper Forum and then to Broadway. Mark Twain’s classic novel, you’ll remember, has travel pals Huck and Jim reflecting the smooth union of disparate cultures on their journey down the Mississippi River. The DWT production amplifies the cultural rifts by casting Huck’s character as deaf and Jim’s as hearing. DWT leans toward plays that embody its own mission of bridging hearing and non-hearing cultures. (It’s looking next to produce a Romeo and Juliet in which one of the star-crossed lovers is deaf.)

The first thing you need to know about a DWT production is that the actors’ words are not simply interpreted in ASL by translators positioned at the sides of the stage. The show is signed by all actors, deaf and hearing, throughout the dialogue, choreography, and song. "Seeing it and having deaf and hearing people laugh at the jokes at the same time — that was my goal, to make it 100 percent accessible," said Waterstreet. But reaching that goal wasn’t easy. The hearing actors had to be taught ASL; even Calhoun had to learn the new language. Then there was the translation of the script into ASL by a team of experts led by Bove, who came into the public eye in the 1970s as deaf librarian Linda on Sesame Street.

Translation was followed by integration, which Calhoun, who’s also the choreographer, achieved by making each ASL gesture appear as just another natural movement in the dance numbers and the general staging. Even the cues had to be accounted for — a hearing actor might be required to nudge a deaf one as a signal that a dance was about to start.

Josiah A. Spaulding Jr., president and CEO of the Wang Center, says that when he saw the show at the 4000-seat Fox Theatre in Atlanta, "it was automatic that we wanted the Wang to produce it." It struck him as an obvious match for his theater’s aim to bring in widely accessible programs — an effort for which the Wang has been honored with the VSA Arts MetLife Foundation Award of Excellence in Arts Access. And just to open the doors a little wider, Spaulding secured a grant to reduce all ticket prices for this show by half.

Big River: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is at the Wang Theatre, 270 Tremont Street in the Theater District, November 16 through 21. Tickets are $12.50 to $32.50; call (800) 447-7400.