Also this issue:

Not Your Average Joe
Gallery Joe has exhibits by two impressive sculptors on display.
-Susan Hagen

5'5" & and Under
-Deni Kasrel

Mixed Media
-A.D. Amorosi

Razing the Bard
-Toby Zinman

Pop Garde
-Deni Kasrel

May 16-22, 2002

theater

Culture Clash

by David Anthony Fox

Falling on Hearing EyesThrough May 19, Walnut Street Theatre, Studio Five, 825 Walnut St., 215-569-9700

Willy Conley’s Falling on Hearing Eyes certainly has a lovely title -- poetic and paradoxical, evocative and at the same time inconcrete. It suggests general syntactical and metaphoric confusion, and on one level the play gestures at broad issues of cultural miscommunication.

More precisely, the title, of course, riffs on "falling on deaf ears." Conley's specific aim is a flip-yet-serious examination of the connections and difficulties between deaf and hearing people. Eyes demonstrates and debunks myths about sign language, as well as the technologies and techniques that hearing people have offered to the deaf in the spirit of "improving" their lives.

Eyes is structured as Waiting for Godot-ish vaudeville. On a stage strewn with weird gizmos, two clownish characters appear. One is The Guide (Dennis Webster), a signing actor who will explain the use of all these contraptions. The other is his mousy and often befuddled technical assistant (John Zak). Together they take us through a history lesson, focusing in particular on a series of grotesque if well-meant preconceptions that hearing people have about the needs of the deaf. Hearing aids and cochlear implants are subjected to particular scorn.

The politics of the play are complicated and controversial, and frankly beyond me. I can more easily respond to Eyes as a piece of theater, and here I'm of two minds. Many of the individual bits are captivating. Webster is not only a master signer -- he's a superb physical comic, and it's a treat to watch him enact an entire film, or to mime an aborted telephone call, with every frustration and triumph visible through his face and body. (John Zak is equally gifted, but here he tries too hard and is less ingratiating.)

Each of these sequences has a particular point, though, and the moral lessons are delivered in the simplistic, sugarcoated pill style I associate with elementary school filmstrips on venereal disease. It's a pity, because so much of the evening is delightful. But honesty compels me to say that when Eyes turns didactic, it also turns deadly.

Still, there's a lot to enjoy. Like other Amaryllis productions, Eyes remarkably would work equally well for deaf and hearing audiences -- likewise for children and adults. Adrian Blue has directed skillfully.