Lights, Gestures, Action! How to Stage a Broadway Musical With Deaf Actors

The ladder jump was not quite working.

As he began a fierce song in which his character determines not to mourn a life-altering rejection, Daniel N. Durant, an actor in the new Broadway revival of “Spring Awakening,” leapt off a rung onto the stage. The goal, as conceived by the director and choreographer, was that he would land just as other members of the cast, externalizing the turmoil expressed in the song “Don’t Do Sadness,” would knock over chairs.

The coordination between movement and music was easy for many of the actors — in a pause between “You just sail away” and “ ’Cause you know,” furniture would fly. But Mr. Durant, a 25-year-old deaf actor signing in the spotlight, cannot hear musical cues, and on more than one occasion he missed it.

The solution: Alex Boniello, a musician who provides the voice for Mr. Durant’s character, would thrust an arm in the air. To the audience, it would be essentially invisible, lost in the frenetic stage action, but to Mr. Durant, it would be the signal. Jump.

Staging a Broadway show is always a three-dimensional chess game. But this “Spring Awakening,” which uses eight deaf actors, eight hearing actors and seven onstage musicians, has added another layer of complexity and sparked a burst of theatrical innovation.

Musicals, after all, are built around sound, and ordinarily it is a beat, a lyric or a spoken phrase that signals to an actor when to walk on or walk off, when to begin a speech or a song, when to start a step. But for this “Spring Awakening,” the director Michael Arden, the choreographer Spencer Liff and the actors themselves have devised an array of silent cues: hidden lights, coded gestures, timed touches and prompting props.

“Spring Awakening,” a darkly tragic drama about adolescent sexuality in a repressive community, was written as a play by Frank Wedekind in 1891, and then adapted into a rock musical by Steven Sater and Duncan Sheik in 2006. The adaptation was a hit on Broadway — it won eight Tony awards, including for best new musical, provided starmaking roles to Lea Michele (“Glee”), Jonathan Groff (“Hamilton”) and John Gallagher Jr. (“American Idiot”), and ran for just over two years.

Mr. Arden, who has been collaborating with the Los Angeles troupe Deaf West Theater since appearing in their Broadway revival of “Big River” in 2003, thought that “Spring Awakening,” which he viewed as “a cautionary tale about the perils of miscommunication,” would have great resonance with a deaf cast. Both “Big River” and this “Spring Awakening” had two productions in Los Angeles before transferring to Broadway.

Without altering the Sater-Sheik book or lyrics, Mr. Arden has added a new context for the story. The deaf actors portray deaf students in a school that does not allow the use of sign language, implicitly nodding to a historical event (contemporaneous with the play’s setting in late 19th-century Germany) in which an international conference of educators called for the mandatory and exclusive use of oralism (lip reading and speech) when teaching deaf students.

In one scene, a teacher, played by Patrick Page, can be seen threatening students who use sign language, attempting to train the deaf to speak by having them feel, and then mimic, the movement of his mouth and throat, and by having them watch the impact of vocalizations on a feather held in front of the face.

In this “Spring Awakening,” which opened to good reviews on Sept. 27, the deaf actors are at the center: Mr. Arden has asked the cast, and is now expecting audiences, to focus attention on the signing, not the singing. The deaf actors are often downstage and lighted from the front; their hearing partners are generally lighted from behind, and in ensemble numbers the cast members look toward the signers.

“It is highly important that the performance is the deaf actors’, and the hearing actors are following their intention — we get in trouble if we get ahead of them,” said the actress Camryn Manheim, a onetime sign language interpreter who is making her Broadway debut playing several adult women in the show.

Ms. Manheim, like the other hearing actors, has found ways to prompt deaf actors in her scenes; for example, at one point she opens a letter to indicate to Sandra Mae Frank, a deaf actress playing her daughter, that it is time for her to start signing.

“It is remarkable what they have built into the show, without your knowledge, to give people cues — all the hearing actors are doing double duty, giving cues that are cleverly woven into the show,” she said.

The devices used are myriad. The stage manager, T. J. Kearney, has installed red lights on the balcony rail, blue lights at stage entrances, and a white light in a trapdoor, all to alert deaf actors; during rehearsals, a large flashing light was used whenever the director called “Hold!” Key messages from the creative team (“Cast to stage”) are closed-captioned on video screens in dressing rooms.

At one moment of the show, in which a group of actors forms a shiplike cluster and carries an actor across the stage, the hearing actors use their hands as metronomes, squeezing the shoulders of the deaf actors to synchronize the forward motion with the musical beat.

“It can be a blink of an eye, a shrug of a shoulder, a tap of a leg — little ways we all know what we need to know,” said Treshelle Edmond, a deaf actress who is making her Broadway debut as Martha, a schoolgirl who is abused by her father. Ms. Edmond said that not only did she study the mouth movements of the actress, Kathryn Gallagher, who sings and speaks for her character, but she also spent time holding Ms. Gallagher’s guitar as it was played, learning from vibration to understand her songs’ rhythm.

Joshua Castille, who plays a student named Ernst, said he and other deaf cast members tried to better understand the role of music in the play by gathering around portable speakers in a shared apartment “to feel the moments.” He said similar senses were used in the staging; for example, he said, in one scene a group of deaf actors gathers around a piano, feeling its vibration and using that as a cue to emerge from a crouch.

It is not just movement and sound that need to be coordinated. Language, too, proved challenging, because the show unfolds not only in English, but also in American Sign Language, and the creative team, including three A.S.L. masters, an A.S.L. consultant and a deaf associate choreographer, Alexandria Wailes, was determined that the signing mirror the spoken English in timing, meaning and, to the extent possible, style.

“The big challenge is that A.S.L. is not a very abstract language — it’s more concrete, it’s visual and spatial,” said Shoshannah Stern, one of the A.S.L. masters. Noting that the show’s lyrics are poetic and metaphor laden (a sample lyric, alluding to adolescent sexual behavior: “Mares will neigh with stallions that they mate/Foals they’ve borne/And all shall know the wonder of purple summer”), she said the sign language team had tried to create “the equivalent visual landscape” while still being clear for deaf audience members.

Clarity of communication has guided production decisions, affecting costumes (certain shades and patterns were rejected because they were thought to create “visual noise”) and choreography (hand movement is primarily for language, not just aesthetics, and, for obvious reasons, signers need to face the audience). During rehearsals, the A.S.L. masters coached actors on expressiveness and negotiated with choreographers (for example, they insisted on limiting how far fingers could extend from the head when actors made the sign for “dream”) while interpreters relayed stage directions and translated conversations back and forth (“Patrick, Daniel wants you to know there’s no way you can hurt his ears by screaming into them”).

At the start of each show, actors use printed signs to inform the audience to turn off their cellphones, and to point out emergency exits. During the show, when two deaf actors are signing (and there is no sound) or two hearing actors are speaking (and there are no signs), supertitles are employed, projected either onto a chalkboard or the back wall of the stage. At many performances, deaf members of the audience can be seen applauding by raising their hands and twisting their wrists.

The revival’s cast includes the nation’s best-known deaf actress — Marlee Matlin, who won an Academy Award in 1987 for “Children of a Lesser God” — and its A.S.L. consultant is a matriarch of contemporary American deaf theater: Linda Bove, who introduced a generation of children to sign language with her long-running role as Linda the Librarian on “Sesame Street.”

But most of the cast members have never appeared on Broadway before, and several said they had never even seen a Broadway show; Ms. Matlin has been using Twitter to encourage other productions, including “Hamilton” and this fall’s “Misery,” to host interpreted performances that the “Spring Awakening” cast might attend.

Like Ms. Manheim, who learned A.S.L. to satisfy a language requirement for college after failing French and Spanish, some of the other hearing members of the cast knew sign language already — most strikingly Austin P. McKenzie, who learned it as a counselor at a summer camp for children and adults with special needs, and who pulls off the complicated feat of singing and signing simultaneously in the show’s lead role, Melchior.

But many of the hearing actors knew no sign language, and many of the deaf actors had no relationship with music.

“When I got the role in a musical, I imagined myself not even being able to do this — I hadn’t any prior experience with music,” said Mr. Durant, who plays the troubled adolescent Moritz.

“It was not smooth sailing initially,” he added. “It took practice and rehearsal. And I’ve learned so much more about music and rhythm and timing, and feeling the power of expressing yourself, and I love it.”