 Signs of Shakespeare in 3-D
It is act three, scene four in Peter Novak’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Sir Toby Belch and Maria are on stage, planning a ruse to trick Olivia.
The actor playing Sir Toby — dressed in a typical period costume with a feather plume in his cap and stockings on his legs — bends forward to address Maria and, extending his arms, performs a rapid succession of hand signs, his mouth opening and closing to mime speech. Maria answers in kind, pretending to write on her hand as a sign for the letter she will forge in Olivia’s script. As they continue, moving faster than the untrained eye can follow, signs doubleback and interact, giving new meaning to the words and puns, a flick of the eye or turn of the head evoking the subtlest shadings of the playwright’s words.
Shakespeare would have loved it. Too bad he wasn’t born deaf.
“Signing can call attention to similarities in Shakespeare’s language,” said Novak, a new professor in the department of fine and performing arts. “It’s very complex, very deep.”
That subtle language — a kind of super-acting — is what originally drew Novak to theater of the deaf as a graduate student at Yale. “What I like about it is it’s a performance language,” he said. “You use your whole body to communicate. It makes you think visually.”
Later as a professor at Yale, Novak received a grant from the university to work on a translation of Twelfth Night into American Sign Language (ASL). The project took two years and a team of four to complete.
“We’d sit around a table for hours discussing how to translate one line,” Novak said. The reason the team worked so slowly, he explained, is because he wanted the signing to be streamlined for aesthetic reasons and to call attention to the double and sometimes triple meanings of Shakespeare’s language. Normally deaf actors would interpret the lines for themselves, taking a couple of days to work through their parts. In Novak’s translation, many signs first had to be created and then agreed upon in order to be used throughout the play by a whole cast.
Last October, Novak’s troupe of deaf actors performed his translation for the first time in Philadelphia, to great reviews. Actors off-stage spoke the lines for the hearing audience.
Part of Novak’s grant also allowed for a digital video recording of the translations his team had created, because a simple graphic or a description in words would be too vague. He hopes to produce the video into an educational CD.
“There’s no way to transcribe sign language. The two dimensions of paper can’t capture the spatial distinctions. It’s a three-dimensional language,” Novak said.
Novak became interested in sign language because of his older sister who is deaf in one ear. His parents learned ASL in case his sister lost her hearing totally. Novak picked up his first signs from them. Later he learned more of the language volunteering at the Michigan School for the Deaf, where his father worked as an eye doctor.
Part of the reason Novak wanted to translate Shakespeare and then mount a production in sign language was to help dispel the idea that deafness is a disability and not a whole culture in itself with its own grammar and syntax he said. This same concern for social equity brought him from Yale, where he was dean of Trumbull College, to USF.
“I was attracted to the program here on theater and social justice,” Novak said. “I’m very committed to social justice issues.”
This year Novak is teaching two classes, including one on theater and social issues which will partly focus on deaf theater. He is also directing the fall play, The Fever, a monologue by Wallace Shawn, which will be performed by eight actors at the same time all over campus.
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