A Sign of the Times

Smiles, waves, hugs. As they gather for rehearsal, cast and crew greet one another and launch into cheerful conversation. Some use sign language; others speak. Stephen Sachs walks among them, speaking with this group, using sign language with the next.

Sachs is author and director of “Sweet Nothing in My Ear,” about a hearing husband and deaf wife who must decide whether their 6-year-old son should receive a cochlear implant--an invasive yet incredible bit of technology that would partially restore the boy’s hearing. The play opened this weekend at the Fountain Theatre in Hollywood, where Sachs is managing artistic director.

“I think we all communicate pretty well,” Sachs says of his cast of five hearing and five deaf actors.

He ponders that statement for a moment, then amends it by adding that, occasionally, the strain of simultaneous speaking and signing leads to mind overload--and humorous mistranslations. “You think you’re telling an actor to cross to the table and have a drink of water, and instead you’re signing ‘Go to the table and drink from the fishbowl.’ ”

He laughs. “When they all suddenly look at me, I realize, ‘Oh, I’ve done it again.’ But they have been very patient with me.”

Gianni Manganelli, 6, enters with Terrylene, his mom in real life and in the play, and heads straight for Bernard Bragg, who plays his grandfather, to show off a toy helicopter. Freda Norman, who plays Terrylene’s mom, maternally combs her fingers through the younger woman’s windblown hair. As everyone settles down to business, Terrylene kneels and plants a kiss on Gianni’s cheek.

“Sweet Nothing” aims to create an inclusive kind of theater. Sometimes, actors simultaneously speak and sign their dialogue; other times, the sign language is translated by “voice” actors who sit at the sides of the stage. All of the spoken dialogue is, similarly, translated into sign language.

Sachs’ involvement with deaf theater dates to 1987 and his staging of his own adapted play “The Baron in the Trees” at the Ensemble Studio Theatre. While readying a special sign-language interpreted performance of that acclaimed production, he became captivated by American Sign Language.

“It was that experience that really got me excited about what ASL can do,” he says, miming starbursts of ideas exploding in his head. “The energy and the passion of the language, the theatricality and the vivid visual reality of it. Ever since then, I’ve just had this little bug in my brain--in my heart, rather--of wanting to do more of that kind of work.”

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Shortly after co-founding the Fountain in 1990, Sachs helped orchestrate a deaf writers’ workshop there. About that time, he linked up with others looking to found a deaf theater company, and Deaf West Theatre was born at the Fountain, moving on to its own home in 1993. Sachs directed Deaf West productions of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and “ ‘night, Mother,” while with the Fountain he fostered an ASL poetry workshop and an outreach program to deaf teens.

Ever sensitive to his deaf friends and colleagues, Sachs, 37, is quick to say that he has been “very careful” about what he’s written in “Sweet Nothing.” “I don’t want to appear to be a hearing person speaking for the deaf community. I’m just a theater person trying to tell a story.”

Communicating through an interpreter, lead actress Terrylene says, “I think that this play is very fair. It’s not about right or wrong. It’s about people and perspectives; it’s about sensitivity and respect for others.”

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It was a photograph accompanying a 1990 story in The Times about cochlear implants that got Sachs thinking about a play.

“There was a photograph of a boy wearing one; he had this device sticking on the outside of his head, behind his ear, with the wires coming down.” Sachs touches his own skull in that place. “It was that image of that innocent little boy, with this thing hanging off his head, that startled me--and it made me stop and stare at this picture for the longest time. And when I read the article, which described the controversy involved in the implant issue, I realized that this would be great theater. Because the conflict is very hot and very strong and complicated. Both sides are very passionate about their beliefs.”

The device consists of a small component implanted in the inner ear and an external microphone, speech processor, transmitting coil and battery pack. Sounds are collected, analyzed, coded and digitized, then converted to electrical signals that are passed along to the implanted electrodes. The electrodes stimulate hearing hair cells and nerve fibers, which the brain recognizes as sound.

Sachs filed the information away, returning to it a few years later. By then, he’d become a father, which gave him a new appreciation for the responsibility involved in making decisions about a child’s well-being.

The hearing father in “Sweet Nothing” believes he has fully accepted life’s circumstances. His wife of seven years is deaf, and although their boy was born hearing, he began losing that sense at age 4 and now, at age 6, is entirely deaf. When a doctor suggests an implant, the father dismisses it.

“But then he begins to think about what it was like having that hearing boy,” Sachs explains. “And when he gingerly presents the idea to his wife, it sends the marriage into a tailspin that they have to struggle very hard to control. Both of them can argue, ‘I’m just trying to do what’s best for our son,’ and both of them are right.”

Sachs says that as he researched the play, he, too, “flip-flopped back and forth on the issue.” He linked up with the House Ear Institute, a Los Angeles clinic specializing in hearing disorders, where, among other things, he studied videotapes about cochlear implants. In a documentary about a child who had just received an implant, he would witness that wide-eyed moment when the youngster suddenly hears sound. “And I cried,” he says, miming the tears trickling down his cheeks. “I was so moved, and I’d think, ‘It’s a miracle. Hallelujah!’

“And then I would put in another tape, and it would be a tape showing the surgical procedure--in full color--with them drilling into the skull. The invasiveness of that surgery really startled me. And then I would think, ‘No. There’s no way I would let anybody do that to my son.’ ”

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Some people might think that if there’s a possibility that a deaf person could hear something--anything--by receiving an implant, then of course the person should get one. But that, according to Sachs and his performers, is like assuming that a person of color would rather be white, or a gay man or lesbian would rather be heterosexual.

“Not everybody wants to or has to or should be like everybody else,” says Bob Kirsh, who plays the husband-father.

Terrylene, who is the third in four generations of deafness, says, “I cannot become used to the idea [of the implants]. I believe that I am deaf because I have something to contribute to the community, and I don’t feel the need to be changed.”

As for her son, she says, “Gio was born hearing and became hard-of-hearing at the age of 3, and I can’t imagine doing that to him.” The boy himself weighed in on the issue at a recent rehearsal, she adds. He was watching the scene where the parents visit a doctor to discuss a cochlear implant. “He told Freda, ‘I don’t want wires in my head. I don’t want a cochlear implant.’ ”

“The implants do not restore normal hearing,” Sachs points out. “It’s still diminished hearing. It has a mechanical, computer-like sound to it. So, a parent has to weigh: How much are you really gaining by putting this device into the skull of your child?”

Which leads to another of the play’s themes: the price humankind is paying for technology.

Sachs describes another image that haunts him: It’s a Newsweek photo of a man standing in the grazing lands of Tanzania’s Serengeti. The man has a cracked face, ornamental jewelry and an old, torn, sun-bleached robe. “His culture is all over his body,” Sachs says. “In one hand, he’s holding this shepherd’s staff, and, in the other hand, he’s holding a cellular phone. I stared at that picture, too, and I thought: What is happening to us? The world is changing so rapidly. What’s going to happen to the jewelry and the staff and the ceremonial garb? We’re going to lose that, someday, I fear.”

Some fear that cochlear implants will quicken a similar loss of deaf culture.

Although the cochlear device was first implanted in an American child in 1986, one deaf child in 10 in the U.S. already has an implant, and that number is expected to grow in the next decade to one in three. “This fear of the implant wiping out a culture is real,” Sachs says. “It’s not just paranoia.”

He isn’t interested in making speeches, however. He has something else in mind. “Let’s set up for Act 1,” he calls out. “Let’s make magic.”

* “SWEET NOTHING IN MY EAR,” Fountain Theatre, 5060 Fountain Ave., Hollywood. Dates: Thursdays to Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 3 p.m. Ends July 27. Prices: $18-$22. Phone: (213) 663-1525 (voice), (213) 663-1098 (TTY).