Review by Kitty Drexel, New England Theatre Geek: The Taste of Sunrise

Inclusive and Intersectional: THE TASTE OF SUNRISE

photo by Craig Bailey/Perspective Photo

 (Boston, MA) In Susan Zeder’s The Taste of Sunrise, Tuc (Elbert Joseph) grows up poor, black and deaf in an ASL-ignorant hearing community in Ware, IL.  At the behest of the well-intentioned Dr. Graham (Donna Sorbello), Jonas Tucker (Cliff Odle) sends Tuc to a school for the deaf to learn how to speak. After years of social solitude, he finally meets kids just like him. They teach him sign; Tuc learns to communicate and to express himself. With help from friends Maizie (Amanda Collins) and Nell Hicks (Brittany Rolfs), discovers what it means to self-discover, to lose and then rebuild one’s identity.

Wheelock Theatre is no stranger to inclusivity. They routinely host performances for the hearing and visually impaired. Taste of Sunrise is told through spoken dialogue, ASL interpreters, and supertitles. Traditional actors are joined by ASL actors who sign the dialogue as the traditional actors speak. When appropriate, the supertitles are projected onto the stage above all of the action.  A delicate balance is struck as both types of actors share the stage to interpret Zeder’s play. Director’s Johnson and Lement have done an excellent job to gently conveying the great strides this production takes towards equality. This is an inclusive, intersectional production that encourages the hearing audience to learn from the performance. It warmly welcomes the members of the disabled community into the audience, whoever and however they are.

Elbert Joseph delivers a strikingly beautiful and sincere performance as Tuck. With simple movement and gesture, he was able to convey opposite ends of the emotional spectrum. He tells a spirited story with such warmth that it’s specific message instantly reaches across the divide to be universally appealing and inspiring. While the performances of the rest of the cast are excellent, this production would not be as great as it is without Joseph. It is his performance as Tuc that blends all of the separate elements into one successful production. He was a wonder to watch.

It is deeply satisfying to watch a performance that normalizes the experiences of the disabled. In a beautiful contrast, it outs the abled community’s behavior as strange and awkward when the two communities commune. In this production, when Tuc experiences hardships or trauma, it’s regularly because the hearing aren’t paying attention to Tuc’s needs. For example, Tuc is calmly hunting honey in Act 2 when a pair of hearing men see him covered in bees. They assume the worst, try to save him, but their involvement leads to Tuc’s serious injury. This episode is a brilliant metaphor for the abled community’s influence on the disabled community. Had they regarded Tuc’s behavior first or, heaven forbid, trusted Tuc’s experience, the bees wouldn’t have stung anyone.

There are dramatic moments in this production that some might find disturbing. In one scene, Tuc is bound to his hospital bed. Johnson and Lement make it abundantly clear to the audience that Joseph could break character and walk away at any moment. Rather, these scenes carry weight because of the emotional trauma Tuc experiences. Just as Tuc is casually stripped of his humanity in earlier scenes that depict him engaging the people of Ware, he is similarly but more traumatically stripped when he is bound by his hands to a bed by doctors. Tuc isn’t just restrained, his voice is silenced. The hearing community has denied Tuc agency and expression. It’s disturbing because it should be.

All of humanity shares an innate need to connect, to understand and to be understood. While The Taste of Sunrise is specifically about a deaf child learning to live in the world around him, it is also about Man’s need to self express in order to understand and be understood. It is a complicated production but Wheelock has divided its heavy material into bite sized, manageable chunks for viewers young and old to enjoy

 

Review by Jeremy Goodwin; Boston Globe: The Taste of Sunrise

An inclusive message from ‘The Taste of Sunrise’

Toward the very end of “The Taste of Sunrise,” there’s an emotionally eloquent argument between Amanda Collins’s Maizie, a teenage girl with a hard-luck life and Hollywood-inspired dreams, and Tuc, a deaf boy who has befriended her, played by Elbert Joseph, an actor who indeed happens to be deaf.

Maizie can hear just fine but was born to deaf parents, she explains, and she doesn’t want her children to be stuck between worlds like she was. With the aid of American Sign Language (ASL) and plenty of nonverbal communication, Tuc insists that she has a home in his hilltop shack.

Between these two actors and others onstage who unobtrusively interpret for them, the characters’ words are rendered in spoken English as well as ASL. In the swirl of emotion and the swift rat-a-tat-tat of their exchange, it’s almost hard to tell where one language ends and the other begins. They’re all just different voices, different parts of the same story.

It’s in moments like these that this production of Suzan Zeder’s play at Wheelock Family Theatre finds its energetic stride, depicting people in trying circumstances looking for some sort of connection in a world that seems bent on keeping them isolated. If parts of this earnest play, intended for young audiences as well as adults, feel a bit like a nutritious serving of theatrical vegetables rather than a compelling drama, it’s a modest price to pay.

Joseph didn’t start acting until he felt inspired, as a 12-year old, by a production of “Peter Pan” at the Wheelock. His performance as the centerpiece of “The Taste of Sunrise” is sandwiched between turns as the same character in “Mother Hicks” (at the Paramount last month) and “The Edge of Peace,” which opens at Central Square Theater on April 3.

Zeder’s trilogy deals with the evolving state of the deaf experience in America, as seen through the doings in and around Ware, Ill., before, during, and after the Great Depression. This trio of productions is billed as the first time the plays have been mounted in consecutive fashion in (more or less) the same city.

Joseph plays Tuc as a large-hearted simpleton prone to big emotions and forceful mood swings — here he’s terrified, there he’s bursting with anticipation. For all its lack of verbal speech, it’s a very loud performance, suggesting the sublimated frustration of a young man who is frequently silenced. Sure, I would have preferred more nuance, but the many children in the audience at a Saturday matinee seemed to follow everything just fine, and that seems closer to the point.

Co-directors Kristin Johnson and Wendy Lement weave some wonderful moments of understated poetry into a story that otherwise works in broad strokes. The depiction of children being struck by scarlet fever, and, later, of one character’s death, go far with simple props and graceful movement. When Tuc physically leans on the memory of a departed family member in the second act, the visual metaphor is easy for all to grasp, yet quietly pretty.

Costumed onstage interpreters perform much more than a purely functional purpose. They are parallel manifestations of each character’s inner life, and move within the action with grace and wit. (Line by line, the play’s text is also projected at the rear of the stage.) Long gone, Johnson and Lement seem to say, is the sole ASL interpreter relegated to a little oval in the corner of a television screen — or wearing street clothes, bathed in a footlight, at the front of the stage. (In a post-show audience talkback, Zeder said this is the most “inclusive” production of the play she has seen.)

Janie E. Howland’s set and Lisa Simpson’s costumes evoke the Depression, though there’s a notable shortage of the dirt and grime we might expect on a farm or among rural townsfolk who still mistake midwifery for witchcraft.

Though a group of young students from the Horace Mann School for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing in Allston prove a quite welcome addition to the ensemble, the play gathers momentum when it focuses on only a few characters’ stories in the second half. Brittany Rolfs brings a bemused swagger to Nell, the midwife whose fondness for singing to the gravely ill is mistaken as malevolent spell-casting; her efforts to lay aside her own grief do much to aid the show’s climax. As a very likable Maizie, Collins is both street-wise and naive. Cliff Odle projects warm-hearted gravitas as Tuc’s father. Ethan Hermanson is a steady anchor for the audience, as the narrating voice of Tuc.

The heavy-handed nature of this play is hinted at in its title. But with this production Wheelock offers a tasteful model for mixing together the deaf and the hearing — onstage, backstage, and in the audience — to create an entertainment that is coherent to each and panders to neither.

 

Review by Al Chase: The Taste of Sunrise

Some Things Are So Beautiful They Do Not Need Sound

photo by Craig Bailey/Perspective Photo

My heart is full and my head is spinning as I sit down to capture my thoughts and emotions after having attended the opening performance of "The Taste of Sunrise - Part Two of The Ware Trilogy" by Suzan Zeder.  This play serves as a prequel to "Mother Hicks," which was presented recently by Emerson Stage.  You may want to take a moment to read my review of that play using the link below.

In this play, the playwright fills in the back story of Tuc.  We learn how he became deaf after a bout with scarlet fever that almost took his life.  We learn of his struggles to communicate with his father, the mixed blessing of his years at the deaf school in Carbondale, and his return home to be with his dying father.  Wheelock Family Theatre is hosting the second segment of this World Premiere event - the first time that all three plays in the Ware Trilogy have been produced in the same city.  All three of the plays are performed bilingually in English and American Sign Language (ASL).

If this is Tuc's play, then it is also certainly Elbert Joseph's play.  He is the deaf actor who portrays Tuc. We see his words projected on the upstage wall, we hear his words being spoken by Ethan Hermanson and Cliff Odle, who also plays Tuc's father.  And Mr. Joseph conveys his words with ASL.  As effective as these triple means of communication may be, they are almost redundant.  For the actor's expressions and movement and stage presence are so compelling and so clear that there is never any doubt what thoughts and feelings and intentions he is radiating.  This is one of the finest performances by an actor I have seen on a Boston stage.

 Suzan Zeder has created something special in this trilogy.  At one level she is recounting the history of a particular community - Ware, Illinois.  At a more significant level, she is addressing the common human hunger for a sense of belonging to a community.  Tuc is the central figure desperately striving to connect and to fit in and to communicate, but there are many other characters in the trilogy whose longing is similar.  At another level, the plays recount the bumpy history of the efforts by the deaf community to define itself despite the well-meaning machinations of educators who "know what we are doing" who forbid the use of gestures or signs because they believed it would stand in the way of learning to read lips and express ideas orally.  At the end of the day, Tuc manages to create his own community - his own family, not bound by genetic ties or geographic propinquity, but forged by a mutual desire for meaningful connection and communication across formidable barriers.

At a crucial juncture near the end of the play, Tuc and Nell Hicks are thrown together and needing to depend upon one another.  But he is deaf and communicates in signs - what Nell calls "air pictures."  And Nell is hearing and does not understand Tuc's signs.  They reach out to one another and plead "Teach me - Teach me - Teach me!"  Nell screams the message in words; Tuc screams in gestures and signs.  And they begin to teach one another. As the level of their connection and communication deepens, Tuc asks Nell, "What does the sunrise sound like?"  Nell ruminates for a moment, and then responds with the answer: "Some things are so beautiful they do not need sound."

The same things must be said of Mr. Joseph's performance.  It was so beautiful that it did not need sound.

 In leaving my seat following the standing ovation and the deaf community's enthusiastic waving of hands to indicate applause, I found myself part of an instant community.  It was the community of those of us - dozens of men and women - who needed to pause, remove our glasses and wipe the tears from our eyes so that we could see to find our way out of the theater.

Go see this show and be moved as we were.

Interview with Kristin Johnson, co-director The Taste of Sunrise

KRISTIN JOHNSON TALKS ABOUT INCLUSION AND CO-DIRECTING THE TASTE OF SUNRISE WITH WFT PRODUCER WENDY LEMENT

 

Having been born Deaf to hearing parents, WFT Inclusion Coordinator Kristin Johnson has a special perspective on accommodating people with disabilities or additional needs.  As co-director of The Taste of Sunrise she also has a unique take on aspects of the drama that focus on the hearing child of Deaf adults (CODA)—her daughter, Ingrid, is a CODA. (See Ingrid’s reflections later in this study guide.)

 

What do you do as Inclusion Coordinator?

Are you familiar with AD -  Audio Description? People who have any kind of visual limitations or are blind are able to come and listen to what is happening on stage, which is narrated to them by an AD team - this may include a description of the set, what the characters are wearing, what they look like, what they are doing. They can hear that through a headset so it does not interfere with the spoken dialogue. AD typically describes what is happening during some kind of down time on stage, filling in all of the gaps; it doesn't, of course, include the dialogue itself.  So the AD team typically will have a script ready and they will just read live to the people who are wearing the headsets. AD and the ASL team are very similar in what they have to do. They have to prepare their work well in advance to provide the accessibility.

The open caption system is very similar. Open captioning has to be preprogrammed in a computer.  The script that the actors are using is put into the system. They have a laptop set up that this program runs on. And the open caption operator (typically a Wheelock College student) will listen to the characters for their lines, and they will hit a button that lines up the captioning that shows up on the sides of the stage. And so they will time it up nicely.  It is not a live captioning system. The operator who is there sure is live, but they have input all the information beforehand.

Now with the ASL interpretation that is a live sign language performance, something they have practiced long in advance. The AD system as well is a live person reading their script, something they have prepared beforehand. Those three things are what I’m involved in coordinating.

 

Is this unique to Wheelock Family Theatre?

Yes. The services that WFT provide have been ongoing for 34 years.  They are very loyal and very committed to providing accessible theatre. All of the services that are included are very visible to everyone who comes. They aren’t hidden at the back of the house or the side, so everyone can see the accessibility we are providing. For The Taste of Sunrise we actually have our captioning system right there in the center of the stage, not off to the side.  The interpreters will be on stage with the actors. It’s wonderful. And Wendy has been so supportive of our services. She’s very involved in the inclusivity we provide. It’s just what we have been talking about – this one world of inclusion, of deafness, blindness, everything. Some other directors, other theatres really like to keep things separate. Not Wheelock.

 

Have you directed or co-directed a play before?

I direct my own ASL team. I have been the director of our ASL performers. But I have never been a director for the whole cast. But it’s truly an honor to be able to work with Wendy.  She is someone who has been mentoring me. And she is my ears in this, and I am her eyes. So it’s such a perfect combination of the two of us.

 

What sort of things will you do as a co-director of this production?

The set we are using is a raked stage. And we have both been really involved in trying to figure out what we are doing for specific trap doors. We are adding real dirt, gravel. We are using real water. We are trying to do something with a little bit of fire. As well as lighting design -- whether we need certain moments to be warm, cool. I’m also involved in designing what the actual rake will look like. Right now we’ve decided on wooden planks. There is a Deaf artist named James Castle. He was an artist during the Depression. We’ve taken a lot of his moods, his textures that he used back then, and we’ve really incorporated them into the show. It fits very nicely.

Also, we have been influenced by how Deaf people used to react during audiological exams. You know there is an old instrument called a tuning fork. A Deaf person would sit there and an audiologist would ring it and put it all over their head. And if it is your first time experiencing something like that it’s very traumatic.  Of course it’s something these people had to go through over and over again, with always the same result. They’re still Deaf at the end of the appointment. But these kinds of things are something that I, as a co-director, bring to the table, this bit of perspective that someone who is not Deaf would not have.

 

Were your parents Deaf or hearing?

Both of my parents were hearing. Ninety percent of Deaf people have hearing parents. Within that group of Deaf people, 10 percent will have Deaf children, but 90 percent will have hearing children. My own daughter is one of the 90 percent of the CODAs that you will see. It’s a misunderstanding that a Deaf person will always have a Deaf child. And really it’s such a small amount. Ten percent.

How does this play speak to you?

I’ve been working with Amanda Collins, who plays Maizie.  I love and hate this character Maizie.  I love her because she does so much for Tuc. And Tuc, he comes from a very clueless home with very limited communication and very little social background, whereas Maizie has access. She has access to movie palaces, she has access to the hearing world – everything that’s spoken – and she also has access to her parents through sign language, whereas Tuc has nothing, except communicating with the birds, the wind, and the water.  And having those two characters together, where Maizie introduces Tuc to the world—I’m so grateful for that in her character. Tuc does try to prove to Maizie that two worlds are OK. But it’s a pretty big conflict. So yes, Maizie is a young girl, she’s sixteen, and she has the mind of a child. I do understand her desire to experience the world before she is tied down with a baby.

And you have Tuc’s father, who winds up passing in the show. And that is something I’ve also experienced, that grief of losing a parent. And Tuc is put into the Deaf School, a whole new experience for him, which is something I experienced as well. When I was four years old I was put into a residential program where I slept overnight. So I have a lot of ties to all of these characters. I can relate to almost all of them.