Deaf actors to perform Ibsen play

Actors are required to have some sort of basic knowledge of music. There's a lot of music in many plays, after all, and there's even an entire genre devoted to Broadway-style musicals.

But to the deaf actor, music is a challenge.

And for the members of The National Theatre of the Deaf, set to perform Peer Gynt at 8 p.m. today at Eisenhower Auditorium, the music played a large part in their choice of production, said Will Rhys, artistic director of the theater company.

"When we choose plays, we look for a variety of things," Rhys said. "First of all, is it a good play? Is there a challenge for my actors? In this case, it was the dances in the play. You've got to remember, these are deaf actors studying music."

That angle has influenced the performance itself, Rhys said.

"We try to pick music (whose) reproduction is physical," he said. "We have actors miming the percussion and the woodwinds in the score so the deaf audience can experience the sound visually. The challenge in choosing what plays to do is looking for that visual equivalence."

The NTD's choice of Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt is a classic one, said John Franceschina, associate professor of theatre arts.

"It really is a play that details the birth and death of a character -- about his loves and battles with maturity," Franceschina said. "This is really sort of one of Ibsen's heroic sagas."

The nature of the play makes it readily adaptable for the deaf performers, he said.

"There's a very long musical score, so a lot of times it's really done as a ballet," Franceschina said. "The play is very epic in its scope, very heroic in its themes, unlike later Ibsen plays. This play really has more episodic, broad scopes."

Those episodes will be "simulcast" by performers signing in American Sign Language and by others speaking the words at the same time. This practice itself should not detract from the performance, Rhys said, but should instead make the show more enjoyable.

"Think of it as physical, tactile subtitles, but also think of the verbal subtitles as well," Rhys said. "The two languages work simultaneously, working together. The audience could expect to see the production as accessible or as exciting as any other production."

An artistic viewpoints discussion will be held at 7 p.m. today in the Eisenhower Auditorium Conference Room. Tickets for the performance are $18 for students and children and $22 for the general public.