Aspiring to conquer crossover acting path
It didn’t take much rehearsing for Russell Harvard, who plays the deaf son of a loquacious and argumentative British family in the Off Broadway play Tribes, to get inside his character’s skin.
Like his character Billy, the 30- year- old actor is himself partially deaf. And while, unlike Billy, he grew up in a deaf family, the early rehearsals for Tribes gave him a crash course in the isolation that Billy often feels among his cacophonous relatives.
The producers had hired a sign- language interpreter to help ease communication among Mr Harvard and the other cast members and the director, David Cromer, but in the rehearsal room, where many people were often talking at once, Mr Harvard said he sometimes felt lost.
“I couldn’t pick up on a lot of the overlapping conversation going on,” Mr Harvard said in an interview late March, adding, “I was like, ‘ I’m Billy — right there, right now. It was funny, and then frustrating.” ( Mr Harvard wears a hearing aid and conducted the interview without an interpreter, occasionally leaning forward to ask that something be repeated.)
Tribes, written by Nina Raine, opened in March to glowing reviews, and has since been extended at the Barrow Street Theatre until September. The play, in which Mr Harvard acts opposite stage veterans like Jeff Perry and Mare Winningham, is about, among other things, different kinds of inclusion and exclusion. When Billy brings home a girlfriend whose parents are deaf, and who is teaching him sign language, his father challenges her, suggesting that sign language creates a cultural and linguistic ghetto. ( Surprisingly, she agrees.)
But, for regular theatregoers, it may be hard to watch Mr Harvard’s performance in Tribes without becoming more conscious of another, little- noted form of exclusion — namely, how rarely deaf actors, and actors with other disabilities, appear on New York stages.
Only two Broadway productions have featured deaf actors in recent decades: Children of a Lesser God, a 1980 drama by Mark Medoff set in a deaf school; and Big River, a 2003 adaptation by Deaf West Theatre of a musical based on The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that used both deaf and hearing actors.
Producers, meanwhile, sometimes balk at casting deaf actors. In the past few years two productions — a New York Theatre Workshop one of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, adapted from the novel by Carson Mccullers, and the Broadway production of The Miracle Worker — have angered some deaf people because the productions cast hearing actors in deaf roles.
“When you’re not even allowed to play yourself,” said Sharon Jensen, executive director of Alliance for Inclusion in the Arts, which advocates for diversity in casting, the “opportunities are extraordinarily limited.”
Mr Cromer, whose hit production of Our Town played more than 600 performances at the Barrow Street Theatre, said there was never a question of not casting a deaf actor to play Billy. ( The London production of Tribes had done so as well.) With help from Ms Jensen, the play’s casting director, Pat Mccorkle, auditioned roughly 50 deaf actors from around the country and Canada via video. She found Mr Harvard in Austin, where he grew up and now works part- time as a substitute teacher at the Texas School for the Deaf, which he also attended.
Mr Harvard speaks clearly, although with what he called a “deaf accent” that he is self- conscious about, and with the deliberateness of someone speaking a language that is not a mother tongue. The most challenging part of playing Billy, he said, was mastering a British accent, and he said he worried that he slips in and out of it during the show. “I have had a dialect coach work with me, but I don’t think that’s enough,” he said, adding that he thought the only way he could absorb the accent would be by full immersion — that is, by sitting day after day in a London cafe and listening to people. If he didn’t have the level of hearing he does, he said, it would probably be impossible to learn another accent. “I’m grateful,” he said, “but it’s still hard to pick up.”
To his director, however, the way Mr Harvard speaks is less memorable than the way he listens.
“One of the most interest- ing things is to watch what’s going on his face when he’s paying attention,” Mr Cromer said. “You have this actor who is soaking up stimuli and just responding to it in an unedited fashion, and it’s really, really readable.”
That expressive face, his broad shoulders and boynext- door looks have in the past helped him land a couple of significant film roles: in There Will Be Blood , as the older incarnation of HW, the deaf son of the oilman Daniel Plainview ( played by Daniel DayLewis), and, more recently, in an independent film, The Hammer, based on the life of a deaf college wrestler. He has also appeared on CSI: NY, worked with Deaf West Theatre, and done two films with a production company specialising in films in American Sign Language.
Because there are so few roles written for deaf actors, though, it has been hard to find work, Mr Harvard said. The agent who took him on after There Will Be Blood eventually parted ways with him. He has an agent in Austin, but said that he goes on only about two auditions a year.
“I wish my agent would allow me to audition for hearing roles,” he said, “just to let them be aware that, ‘ This actor just happens to be deaf, you should just check him out.’ And sometimes they would see: ‘ Oh, I really like him. I’ll just rewrite the character and makes some changes.’”
That happened, he said, to Shoshannah Stern, his friend and co- star in The Hammer, when she was cast in the postapocalyptic CBS drama Jericho.
But he said he was not comfortable enough with his agent to ask her to do that. “We’re not there yet,” he said.
In any case, the good word of mouth about Tribes has, at least for now, led to increased opportunities. He had had two auditions in the weeks before this interview — one for a hearing role — and has participated in a reading of Children of a Lesser God, which may be headed for a revival.
Asked how it was different to act in American Sign Language versus in spoken English ( in Tribes he does both), he said signing was necessarily easier.
“The comfort of your primary language, you know — mine is signing, obviously,” he said. Still, he added, at this point he is eager to do anything and everything.
“I want to work,” he said. “Speaking? Sure. Signing? Fine. Whatever — just bring it on.” By arrangement with the New York Times