‘Saint Joan’ Captioning

Jana J. Monji attended our premiere of “Saint Joan” at the Deaf West Theatre Company and I feel that I must register a grievance regarding her characterizations of our usage of “supertitles” (open captioning) (“ ‘Saint Joan’ Tries to Adapt to Shaw’s Wit,” Feb. 7).

To the best of our knowledge, Deaf West Theatre is the first and only professional theater in Los Angeles making an attempt to serve this special constituency of hearing-impaired audiences. Monji need not rely on captioned dialogue to experience the show. It is an assistive device, to provide accessibility only, not an artistic element intended to be judged as an integrated production value.

While I realize that many are not informed, the fact is that American Sign Language is a foreign language, based on different syntax and grammatical structure. Therefore, many deaf people do not necessarily “read the same English” at all. Furthermore, we ran a spell check on the computer, and admittedly found a total of 13 errors. This, however, out of a grand total of 15,000 words.

ED WATERSTREET

Artistic Director

Los Angeles