When two actors utter their opening lines during this season’s Chicago Shakespeare Theater production of Richard II, two women in black launch into their own silent performance. Joyce Cole and Liz Bartlow Breslin sit at audience level, their chairs facing out from the right corner of the stage. Professional sign language interpreters, they’ve spent evenings and weekends for the last six weeks preparing for this one night.
Before this meeting, Breslin had divided the characters up between them. “I do a character breakdown line by line and scene by scene to figure out which characters play off each other the most and should not be interpreted by the same signer. Obviously, one of us will be Richard and the other will be his rival, Bolingbroke. After I come up with two groups of characters, we toss a coin to see which of us will get which group. Even so, scenes will inevitably come up in which one of us will have to sign for two or even three characters who are speaking to each other.”
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Tonight Breslin hears actor Mike Nussbaum on tape, playing the Duke of Gaunt, deliver this angry line to Richard: “Live in thy shame, but die not shame with thee.” Breslin’s plain-English translation reads, “You will live in a shame that will live on past you.” To the right of the line Breslin has made a notation, or gloss, of the ASL signs she’ll use in this case: “Warn U [you] Predict UR [your] sin shame continue forever.” But Breslin’s gloss omits the rage with which she’ll interpret these lines during the performance. When she and Cole sign their interpretation Thursday night, their hands, faces, and bodies will have to deliver all the emotion most audience members will hear in the actors’ voices.
The name signs for the rest of the large cast remain the same throughout, but with so many characters it will still be easy for a deaf audience to become confused. Cole comes up with an ingenious way to suggest characters’ alliances with the two rivals: the interpreters will display the name signs of Richard’s courtiers from the chin down, and the signs of those loyal to Bolingbroke from the chin up.
In the deaf audience is first-time viewer Jennifer Hart, 33, an ASL instructor and deaf mentor at Columbia College. Through an interpreter, Hart says that her deaf friends urged her to attend. Ermelinda Ponticelli, 37, an interpreter for the deaf at John Hersey High School in Arlington Heights, has come to watch the signers, among the best in the area.
