Big River: Stars Onstage and Offstage

Just saw "Big River: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" at the Ford's Theatre. The Deaf West Theatre production was truly as good as the reviews had it, with excellent acting and choreography. The room was packed. The entire cast was good. I finally had my chance to see both Michelle Banks and Linda Bove perform onstage...and their professionalism was obvious. The actors playing Huck and Jim were so full of energy and mesmerizing to watch onstage.

States my boyfriend Robert Goodwin, "The sets were well-done. Some set pieces didn't act as backgrounds, they had double, triple, even quadruple uses. For those of you who have read the book, Tom and Jim are on a raft. The raft set became a frame, a dream sequence with a bed, besides just a plain performing platform. Humor abounded here and there, sometimes bringing down the house. Set pieces were moved to give the illusion of the stage having more depth than it did."

The offstage star? The I-Caption devices from Sound Associates, Inc. Without the handheld computers that scrolled captions matching the dialogue perfectly, I would not have been able to understand the play. I neither hear nor can understand sign language well - which is true for many deaf people who grew up oral, or are oral or cochlear implant users. For us, captions in the theater are essential to being able to understand and get the full experience. At one point, a character was signing what I thought was "brave" but the captions indicated was "almighty." Some of the more experienced deaf performers used straight ASL, which not everyone understands.

Indeed, Friday night at the Deaf Professional Happy Hour near the theater, I ran into a fairly oral deaf acquaintance who complained to me that she wished she had known about the I-Caption devices before the play because the "signing was fast." She had been unable to understand the play well.

Unfortunately, the theater has only about ten of these useful devices, plus the network plus the network had a glitch which didn't show the captions for 20 minutes. I stopped by the box office a few days prior to the performance, and learned that the devices are only on loan for this one performance. They "might" return for a future performance. Darn. I really need captions to be able to understand the theater. This was my first time going to a theater performance outside of Gallaudet University, in Washington, DC - sign language interpreters won't do it for me. Goodwin, whose techniques are described in the article on Low-Cost Theatre Captoning, stated: "I could build a computer for Fords and they can use a big monitor on the side of the stage like I did with NVCC's Macbeth."