Taper personnel now hear with their eyes

For the next few weeks, things may be a little quieter backstage at the Mark Taper Forum. That’s because some Taper staff members have begun signing to each other instead of speaking -- busily practicing their new skills in American Sign Language in preparation for the Nov. 14 opening of Deaf West Theatre’s musical “Big River -- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” performed by a cast of hearing and deaf actors using music, voice, sign language and dance.

Since early August, staffers involved in everything from ticket sales to costume-fitting have been offered the opportunity to attend weekly lunch-hour classes in ASL to better serve deaf and hard-of-hearing theater patrons and members of the “Big River” cast.

Most classes are taught by Megg and Michael Davis, who are hard-of-hearing and Deaf (Michael prefers the capital D), respectively. Michael Davis, who portrays Tom Sawyer in “Big River,” has been filling in for the pregnant Megg when morning sickness renders her hard of teaching. Both Davises teach ASL as a total-immersion course: all signing, all the time. No interpreters. Production manager Jonathan Lee has a leg up on ASL newcomers: The Taper veteran learned to sign during the Taper’s 1979-80 season, when the theater produced “Children of a Lesser God.” Lee says communication with the deaf has been rendered easier with the advent of e-mail, text messaging, pagers and other electronic gadgets. But the quick-start program in ASL has remained essentially the same.

“When we were doing it with ‘Children of a Lesser God,’ we didn’t know whether it was going to work,” he said. “We now know that hearing actors can be taught how to sign in a relatively short period of time.”

Phyllis Frelich, who starred in “Lesser God” and has a role in “Big River,” used e-mail to offer this observation: “Sign language and deaf actors have gone from being novelties in ‘Children of a Lesser God’ to becoming integrated into the many theatrical elements of a large music production like ‘Big River.’ ”