The Right Interpretation Sometimes Leads to Love

It began in 1980 with “Children of a Lesser God,” Mark Medoff’s Tony award-winning play about the troubled love affair between a deaf woman and a hearing man.

That story, which sensitized theater audiences to the ways in which the hearing-impaired can feel excluded from the rest of the world, generated a series of programs around the country in which shows were “interpreted” by people simultaneously translating the actors’ words into sign language for deaf patrons.

Now the San Diego Theatre League, which experimented with a series of interpreted performances last year, will sponsor 10 such shows this season.

It seems fitting that this year’s inaugural interpreted presentation, the Feb. 25 showing at the Lyceum Stage of “As Is,” the poignant story about AIDS, will be ushered in by a couple who compare their own courtship to the one depicted in “Children of a Lesser God.”

Rico Peterson, who will interpret, and Freda Norman, who will lead a half-hour pre-show discussion, met at the National Theatre for the Deaf in 1973. There, Norman was an actress and Peterson an actor hired to provide narration for hearing members of the audience.

“We met, we fought, we fell in love,” Peterson recalled. “I didn’t know sign language and didn’t want to learn. We wound up hating each other. Then she had to interpret for me for a deaf audience, and it sensitized each of us to the other’s predicament.

“People say, ‘How did you get interested in deafness?’ I never did. It wasn’t something that made me say, ‘Gosh, I have to know this.’ I just had to know it to know this person. Freda is from a deaf family, and everyone in her world is deaf. I just learned sign language like someone would learn French. You take things where you find them.”

The interpreted theater series continues with “Alice in Wonderland” at the Christian Youth Theatre on March 4, “Sleeping Beauty” at the San Diego Junior Theatre on April 22, “Amadeus” at the La Jolla Stage Company on May 6, “The Sound of Music” at the Starlight on July 13, “Joseph & the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat,” at the Lamb’s Players Theatre on Oct. 20, “Hay Fever” at the Gaslamp Quarter Theatre on Nov. 17 and “The Grapes of Wrath” and “Macbeth” at the La Jolla Playhouse at times to be announced.

The Sushi Performance Gallery will open its seventh annual Neofest, April 29-June 3, with a bang--literally. “Maria on Highway 94,” scripted by local artists Carla Kirkwood and Deborah Small, tells the tragic tale of a freeway shooting. Like Sledgehammer Theatre’s living movie, “Blow Out the Sun,” “Maria” will be staged in a downtown warehouse through which a car will be driven to heighten the realism.

Lynn Schuette, the artistic director of Sushi, likens a season ticket to Neofest--an intense six-week version of what Sushi normally spreads out over a year-- to enrollment in a “a crash course” in the interdisciplinary arts. Just as Sushi’s offerings are unique in their melding of contemporary disciplines, the organization’s attitude toward individual artists makes it the last refuge of the solitary performer, unaligned with any major organization and working from commission to commission.

So far, Schuette has paid two San Diego artists to create material for this festival. Don Victor may have done portions of his comic monologue, “Picture Postcard,” at the Gaslamp Quarter Theatre and Underground at the Lyceum. But the piece had its genesis as a commission by Sushi, which plans to present the world premiere of the completed piece May 11-13. The other commissioned San Diego artist, David Keevil, will present “Really Seeing Bert,” an audience event in which the members will learn how to do a performance on three successive Mondays: May 1, 8 and 15.

Rounding out the festival are Thought Music, a trio of female artists from New York presenting a multimedia piece called “Teenytown” on May 4-6; the Joe Goode Performance Group, unveiling the Disaster Series, an interdisciplinary dance piece that uses natural disasters as metaphors for contemporary relationships, May 18-20, and playwright Holly Hughes, author of last year’s Neofest offering “Dress Suits to Hire,” who will perform a new monologue, “World Without End,” on May 25-27. A work of visual art is still scheduled to be commissioned. All of the presentations except “Maria” and the Stephen Petronio Company, which closes the festival, will be presented at Sushi. The Stephen Petronio Company will present a dance piece, “In Amnesia,” June 2-3 at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art.

Talk about non-traditional casting. Two of the 10 performers in “Growing Up Male in America” at the Underground at the Lyceum this weekend are female: Judy Milstein, who plays a boy and her partner, and Loren Hecht, who plays the piano. If Milstein, who also coordinates the Underground, doesn’t look out of breath at the show, she should. She will be sprinting from her role in “Six Women With Brain Death, or Expiring Minds Want to Know” at the Sixth Avenue Playhouse (which has two shows at 6 and 9 p.m. Saturdays) to the Underground shows at 10:30 p.m. Friday and 11:30 p.m. Saturday. The show will return March 10-11 after skipping Feb. 24-25 for “White Whines,” a spoof of yuppie life, and March 3-4, for “Sexes and Others,” a gander at the gender gap. Women will get equal time at “Girl Talk,” a look at America from the female perspective that is scheduled to open March 31 and run through April.