Photo: Signature Theatre.
A behind-the-scenes look at the rehearsal process for the musical Private Jones, featuring deaf and hard-of-hearing artists.
When we were watching the Hulu series Only Murders in the Building, we noticed efforts by the producers to be inclusive. For example, a key character is deaf. When he is on, he uses sign language and we read subtitles. A few other characters use signing for his benefit. He can also read lips.
A push for diversity and inclusion is not happening only in streaming services. At the Signature Theatre in Virginia, for example, deaf and hard-of-hearing characters powered a whole musical.
As Thomas Floyd has the story at the Washington Post.
“Signing, singing and soundscapes are intermingled on a late-January afternoon at Signature Theatre’s Arlington, Va., rehearsal studio, where the cast of Private Jones is marching through the world-premiere musical’s opening scene.
“Loosely inspired by Gomer Jones, a deaf sniper who fought in World War I, the show opens in rural Wales with an 8-year-old Jones getting a lesson from his gruff father in sharpshooting and hard truths. As the only scene before Jones loses his hearing, it uses radio-play-like foley effects to create the sounds that will echo in the character’s head through the rest of his life — and give deaf and hard-of-hearing audiences visual cues to associate with those sounds.
“When Johnny Link, the hard-of-hearing actor playing Jones, raises a prop rifle, another performer flaps an umbrella to conjure the sound of birds fluttering overhead. A ratchet replicates a rifle cocking. A snare drum stands in for a gunshot. All the while, two actors narrate — one in spoken English, one in American Sign Language — and writer-director Marshall Pailet reminds his cast to be aware of the open captions that will flank the stage at every show. …
“Accessibility is a guiding principle for [writer-director Marshall Pailet], the hearing playwright and composer who wrote the book, music and lyrics for Private Jones. … The musical features a cast of hearing, hard-of-hearing and deaf actors performing dialogue in three languages — English, ASL and British Sign Language — while also delivering Pailet’s Celtic-inspired score. To Pailet and Alexandria Wailes, the show’s director of artistic sign language, no scene should be staged without careful consideration of how narrative intent is both seen and heard.
“ ‘If the piano does something that is supposed to evoke an emotion and there’s not a visual equivalent of that, we haven’t done our job,’ Pailet says. ‘Theater is taking psychology and turning it into behavior. So everything is visual, everything is behavioral, and it’s also therefore a perfect medium for sign language, which is a visual language. It exists to be seen.’
“Pailet acknowledges that the origins of Private Jones are fairly mundane: He was interested in writing a World War I trench warfare story — specifically exploring how being asked to commit violence can reorient a person’s worldview — when he came across an article with a couple of sentences about the deaf Welsh sniper. …
“After traveling to Wales … and tracking down war records he believes belonged to Jones, Pailet took an early iteration of the show to Connecticut’s Goodspeed Festival of New Musicals in January 2020. He subsequently connected with Wailes, the ASL master on the Oscar-winning film CODA, and the duo began swapping ideas during the pandemic on how to better integrate deaf and hard-of-hearing perspectives.
“While the show features a narrator performing in ASL, Wailes pitched the idea of also incorporating British Sign Language during dialogue exchanges between characters who would have spoken in that wholly different dialect. …
“Finding the right actor to enlist as Jones — a deaf character who tricks his fellow soldiers into thinking he’s hearing and carries much of the show’s vocals — also proved critical. As a musical theater performer who has used hearing aids since childhood, Link came with connections to the hearing and deaf worlds that the character bridges. …
“ ‘I have never felt so seen in a character,’ Link says. ‘Truly, this is one of the most special projects I’ve ever worked on because it pulls from different parts of my life. I feel a lot of the things that Gomer feels. I just knew I had to do it.’
“Pailet says unfamiliar perspectives are at the core of Private Jones, which uses its innovative soundscapes to place the audience in Jones’s shoes while interrogating how people empathize with or dehumanize those they don’t understand. …
“Having spent the better part of five years developing the show, Pailet hopes this isn’t his last shot at envisioning Jones’s journey onstage.”
More at the Post, here.
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