onstagepittsburgh.com: It was no exaggeration when City Theatre announced that Another Kind of Silence, the world-premiere play that leads off its 2025-2026 season, “is one of the most ambitious shows the company has taken on.”
Bilingual and bicultural, the plot unfolds simultaneously in English and American Sign Language (ASL), along with some Greek Sign Language, as Evan and Chap, two already-partnered queer women, cross paths in modern-day Greece and find themselves falling in love.
3 comments:
The tv show Ginny and Georgia includes a deaf character and his family is hearing and they all sign. There are multiple scenes where the family is having a conversation in English and ASL simultaneously which is just so awesome and I’m excited to see that also happening in live theater. While having an interpreter or twin for the deaf/hard of hearing audiences is definitely necessary, having it be ingrained into the characters and story is amazing. I am thrilled that it is opening in Pittsburgh and I will be attending (at least) one show. This is the kind of theater I want to see and be a part of creating. I want to hear and also help tell the stories of all different kinds of people. I also like the concept of the love story being non-conventional and one not often represented in media are the complexities of human emotions and relationships.
This was such an exciting show to learn about, especially because it is in Pittsburgh. I really appreciated the article's note of the linguistic challenges when working with a spoken and signed language. When I first started to study ASL as an English speaker and hearing individual, I came in with the assumption that ASL would be a direct translation of English. However, I quickly learned that that could not be farther from the truth. ASL is a language completely different from English with its own grammar, syntax, and nuances. I am also really glad that they are choosing to hire a hard-of-hearing actor who is fluent to play their signing character. Something that I think is pretty interesting that I have learned when interacting with my local Deaf community is that unless you are D/deaf, hard of hearing, or a child of a deaf adult (CODA), you will have a very prominent “accent” that distinguishes you as hearing. I actually saw Fidelio with Dudamel and Deaf West Theatre with my ASL class at the Walt Disney Concert Hall and loved it so much and hope to get out and see Another Kind of Silence as well.
I love the idea of this show. It is full of things that are not usually shown on stage (american sign language, greek sign language, and queer romance). I am curious to see how the playwright navigates the complexities of having a multilingual show while still allowing the audience to understand what is going on. I wonder if they will have any closed captions or if that is part of the experience to only understand what you know. They mention that there is multimedia so that “aesthetic accessibility” is built into the show which in my mind means that there will be closed captions, but I think it could be an interesting experience for those who only speak one of the languages to be left in the dark about a lot of what is going on in the show and have to derive from context clues the plot like many people who are deaf often have to do since they either have to lip read or communicate in sign language.
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