San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Switch to digital spurs push for accessibility
As I prepared to listen to the first episode of Aurora Theatre Company’s audio drama “The Flats,” I turned off my lights, hid my laptop’s screen and began letting fade away all the visual data my eyes were feeding my brain.
Then I thought, “This is comforting and relatively novel for me, a sighted person. But what’s it like for a blind or lowvision audience member?”
As the pandemic has prompted much theater to go digital, my own very unscientific survey suggests an attempt to make shows more accessible to audiences with disabilities — and not just mobility disabilities. In my own theatergoing, accommodations such as captioning, American Sign Language interpretation and audio descriptions have been more prominent — either because they’re more numerous or because companies are publicizing them more — in the past six months than they were before.
But as an ablebodied person, I didn’t feel qualified to evaluate those initiatives. So I asked actor Marilee Talkington, one of just a handful of blind actors across the country to have an MFA in acting, to talk about “The Flats” with me. ( Full disclosure: Talkington has previously worked at the Aurora.) I also asked Antoine
Hunter, director and founder of the Bay Area Deaf International Dance Festival and artistic director of Urban Jazz Dance Company, to do the same with the first episode of TheatreFirst’s serial season, which offers ASL translation.
“This is an assumption: I think that fully sighted folks may not trust that we can hear and process a lot faster than we think,” says Talkington of listening to “The Flats.”
Talkington is a voracious reader of audiobooks, but she — like a lot of other lowvision folks, she says — typically plays recordings at 1.7 times to 2.5 times their default
“The Flats”:
Written by Lauren Gunderson, Cleavon Smith and Jonathan Spector. Directed by Josh Costello. $ 20 for all three episodes. www. auroratheatre. org
TheatreFirst’s Serial Season:
New episodes released monthly through June. $ 60 for entire season. theatrefirst. com
speed, because that’s how quickly she processes sound.
“In radio plays, when you have actors overarticulating everything, for me it can be really hard to listen to,” she says. “If you have actors that are flying through, that are in conversation the way we really speak, then I can be taken with the story.”
So she found herself trying to find a way to accelerate “The Flats.”
When I listened to the show, about three neighbors in a Berkeley triplex during a global cataclysm, I found myself appreciating in a new way the voices of actors I’ve long known. Like the way Lauren English gives her whole self over to the smallest phrase, the natural warmth of Khary Moye, the way Anthony Fusco’s voice is so richly textured I could feel it making impressions on my skin — leathery, then rusty.
But for me, part of the appeal was novelty; I could also see Talkington’s point. In this way, as with so much other theater, this show was made more for my ears than hers.
She also points out, “My question for theaters is now, if you’re going to be doing this accessible art form, where are your disabled artists?” ( Now, when blind artists don’t have to leave their homes to work, is a prime time to employ them.)
With TheatreFirst’s serial season — the first episode of which comprises three distinct narratives, created by
different teams — I, as a hearing listener, enjoyed how the ASL interpreters’ facial expressions often reflected what was happening in the stories.
But I could watch them only when I wanted to. For Hunter, constantly toggling his eyes up and down was wearying.
“We are mostly up here,” he says, gesturing to where faces typically appear in a film frame. The ASL interpretation, by contrast, was in a box in a lower corner, nowhere near where our eyes rest when we watch a movie.
Keeping interpretation on the same horizontal plane as the action helps deaf audiences miss less, he says. He also mentioned that background color behind an interpreter can either serve or detract from a piece, as can an interpreter’s ability to reflect the context of a line — to find a figurative equivalent, as opposed to a literal translation, for poetry, say.
If theaters have been attempting to be more accessible to audiences with disabilities during the pandemic, Claudia Alick, a local producer, performer and inclusion consultant, is realistic about why.
“A larger portion of the population now explicitly has those needs,” she says, “and their pain is connected to institutional survival.”
“I don’t believe in universal access,” Alick adds. She points out that some access needs can even be in conflict; a chat feature that one participant needs for digital theater can be disruptive to someone else who uses a screen reader, for instance.
When a theater company wants to bring her on for a project, it’s typically “way too late” in the process, she says. In work she produces, she asks everyone involved — ideally both artists and audiences — what their access needs are in advance and then designs the whole process striving to meet them. She asks herself, “How many populations am I going to be able to serve, and at what level am I going to be able to serve them?”
For Melissa Hillman, a diversity, equity and inclusion consultant and former artistic director of the nowdefunct Impact Theatre, the pandemic era, when theaters are empty of audiences and sets, ought to be the ideal time to assess how they can make themselves more accessible. Not every change is expensive, she says; sometimes you can make someone’s life better just by moving a table to widen an aisle. ( She herself has a mobility disability with a pain management component.)
In inclusion work, she says, “part of what we need to focus on in order to get past our resistance and our fear is that we will screw it up. We will. You will. I will. Everyone will. You have to be able to learn from your screwups and keep going forward because there is no finish line in this work. There is no ‘ I’m done.’ ” A better target, she says, is to “fail better.”
For Hunter, when his access needs aren’t met, the feeling is, “I don’t have a place in the world. Theater is supposed to be a place where you can be anything and leave the reality world.”
He doesn’t think of accessibility as a series of obstacles for a venue to overcome, but this way: “I would love for the environment to be set free so that we can breathe.”
Lily Janiak is The San Francisco Chronicle’s theater critic. Email: ljaniak@ sfchronicle. com Twitter: @ LilyJaniak