Signs of Success

Photograph by Ed Kreiger

As a child, Ed Waterstreet did not enjoy seeing the play A Christmas Carol with his family. Deaf since age 2 because of pneumonia, and unable to follow the story line, he felt isolated during the show. Mr. Waterstreet, now 60, resolved to one day to make theater a more inclusive experience for people who are deaf or have other hearing troubles.

In 1991 Mr. Waterstreet and his wife, Linda Bove, started Deaf West Theatre, in North Hollywood, Calif., the first resident American Sign Language theater company on the West Coast. The group performs in its own 90-seat theater for two or three annual shows, and has a $1.3-million annual budget, more than half of which comes from a five-year grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services.

The group had its break-out success last year with Big River, a musical retelling of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The show features equal numbers of hearing and deaf actors, including a deaf Huck and a hearing Jim, the runaway slave with whom Huck travels down the Mississippi River. Hearing actors sign their own lines and songs, and they often sing and speak out loud for deaf actors. Big River may move to Broadway this summer, says Mr. Waterstreet.

The show appeals to hearing as well as deaf people, says Mr. Waterstreet. “I have gotten letters from hearing audiences who experience this for the first time and are very positive,” he says through an interpreter. “They think theater is even better through sign language, when it becomes more visual.”

Here, Jim, played by James Black, and Huck, played by Tyrone Giordano, are featured in a scene from Big River. Holding the guitar is Bill O’Brien, playing the part of Mark Twain, the musical’s narrator, who also speaks and sings Huck’s lines out loud.