STAGE REVIEW : Theatre of the Deaf’s Merry ‘King of Hearts’

The National Theatre of the Deaf is touring seven Western states with a stage adaptation of Philippe de Broca’s cult film classic, “King of Hearts.” The production is a beguiling, wizardly carnival that contributes a fresh dimension to visual-language theater.

By that, we’re not talking about expressive sign language, which the NTD has been illuminating as a performing art for 21 years. The company’s new experiment is scenery that’s painted before your eyes as part of the play. The result is sublime, comical reinforcement of the kinetic thrust of this gifted troupe.

Willy Conley enacts the hero, a Scottish soldier who finds love and sanity among mental inmates abandoned in wartime. He arrives to dismantle a bomb. Instead he’s crowned the King of Hearts by the escapees who, in a nice touch, are seen merrily building a huge house of cards.

The liberated characters transform themselves into town denizens--a barber (the effusive Adrian Blue), the town whore (the delightful Elena Blue), a duchess (the elegantly raunchy Sandi Inches), an archbishop (Mike Lamitola), a tightrope walking waif (Camille L. Jeter), among others.

The show, seen Wednesday before hundreds of the hearing-impaired in the packed, 750-seat Garrison Theater at the Claremont Colleges, opens with offhanded ease. Stagehands wheel out huge panels tacked with yards and yards of white wrapping paper. An actor playing a burly French painter (Chuck Baird) dips his brushes into an array of buckets and in mercurial, childlike strokes paints a picture of a barred window and then, coyly, the capital letter K followed by the Cupid outline of a heart.

The 11-member cast, costumed in loony-bin white garments, peers curiously at the creation of their own world. Soon the ornate gate to their asylum is splashed with flourish across a pair of newly papered panels. Later the dexterous Baird (who created the mobile set with NTD artistic director David Hays) wields a couple of 10-foot brushes to paint a big clock on a tower booby-trapped by the Germans to blow up the French town at the stroke of midnight.

At one point, the relentless Baird unfurls a wooden bar with triple brushes and in a flash paints the impression of marching regiments, even distinguishing between German and Allied helmets.

Meanwhile, the play’s lunacies, including a circus, proceed with deceptive cohesiveness and ineffable Gallic charm. Some of the visual signatures are new, created for the story’s theatrical purposes. Like an actor’s voice, sign language too, needs to hit the back row. Often these “words” seen spinning in the air convey moments of unexpected beauty.

But Theatre of the Deaf is not wordless theater. The language here, in fact, is bilingual (both visual and aural). Two hearing actors (Marcia Tilchin playing a child and John C. Eisner portraying a bass musician) verbally echo, in synchronization, the sign language of the deaf and hearing-impaired actors. Words assume a double resonance.

Director J Ranelli and his cast developed the piece improvisationally at the NTD’s headquarters in a remodeled mill in Chester, Conn. The production sticks to the core and theme of De Broca’s 1967 film, but it’s not the letter of the movie. An addition in the play, an obsessed Shakespearean character, is ill-conceived. But the rest is woven with ensemble panache.

“King of Hearts” continues its local tour at UCLA’s Wadsworth Theater tonight, at Cal State Long Beach Saturday and in Visalia Sunday. Hearing and non-hearing patrons alike will find it enthralling.

Tonight at UCLA’s Wadsworth Theater, 8 p.m. Tickets: $7-$15. (213) 825-9261; Saturday at Cal State Long Beach, 8 p.m. Tickets: $10. (213) 985-5526; Sunday at L.J. Williams Theatre in Visalia . (209) 625-1520.