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    With ‘Echo,’ Alaqua Cox Smashes Boundaries, and Bad Guys’ Faces

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    The actress almost didn’t audition for the Marvel superhero role that now has her playing the lead of a new Disney+ series. Thank goodness for peer pressure.“I thought in the back of my head, There’s no way I’m going to get this.”Alaqua Cox was in her home office in the Green Bay area of Wisconsin, recalling the moment in early 2020 when some friends forwarded her an online link to a casting call for a deaf Indigenous woman in her 20s. At the time, Cox, now 26, had been hopping from job to job — at a nursing home, at Amazon and FedEx warehouses — and had never acted outside a couple of plays in high school.She could scarcely envision clinching any regular TV gig, let alone the role of a Marvel superhero: Maya Lopez, better known as Echo, a Marvel comic book character. But Cox did get it, and soon she found herself flipping and punching her way through the 2021 Disney+ series “Hawkeye” alongside the stars Jeremy Renner and Hailee Steinfeld.Now, just over two years after her professional acting debut, Cox is taking the lead in the five-episode spinoff miniseries, “Echo,” which premiered Tuesday night on Disney+ and Hulu. Picking up where “Hawkeye” left off, “Echo” sees Maya transform herself into a motorcycle-revving, roundhouse-kicking, one-woman army hellbent on vengeance against her former mentor, the criminal boss known as Kingpin (Vincent D’Onofrio), for his role in her father’s murder.Cox, an Indigenous woman who is deaf, played a Marvel superhero with similar attributes in the Disney+ series “Hawkeye,” her first professional acting gig.Chuck Zlotnick/Marvel StudiosGrowing up on the Menominee Tribe reservation in Keshena, Wis., Cox, who was born deaf, couldn’t fathom the idea of seeing someone like herself onscreen. She was used to seeing deaf roles being portrayed by hearing characters — “which was such B.S.!” she said in a video call last month, aided by an American Sign Language interpreter, Ashley Change. She rarely saw Indigenous roles onscreen at all.She wasn’t particularly attuned to the superhero genre. Long before sharing scenes with a full-fledged Avenger, Cox mainly consumed Marvel movies passively, as a means of bonding with her Marvel fanatic father, William.“I remember watching with him, sitting on the couch, chilling on my phone,” she said. “My dad would be like: ‘No, no, look! Something cool is about to happen!’”It was peer pressure that ultimately got Cox to submit her audition video. She recalled lying on a raft on the lake at her parents’ house when yet another friend contacted her, forwarding a screenshot of the casting call.“I knew it was a sign for me to give it a shot,” she said. “I went: ‘Oh, fine! Let’s just try it out.’”Cox’s self-recorded video was one of hundreds that by June 2020 had landed on the desk of Sarah Finn, who has been the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s main casting director going back to the 2008 film “Iron Man.” In search of the perfect fit, she had contacted Native American and deaf schools, organizations and cultural centers across the country. Cox’s tape piqued her interest.“She has this beautiful, open, smiling face, and then she showed us her reading, which made it almost impossible to believe it was the same person,” Finn said. “She was able to switch on a dime and channel this other much more powerful and intense character.”“I know he’s looking down on me from heaven, and he’s just cheering me on,” Cox said of her father, who died on the same week that Maya’s father’s death was portrayed in “Echo.” Elizabeth Weinberg for The New York TimesOnce Finn had narrowed down her selection to Cox and a few others, she got the studio to assign Cox an acting coach, personal trainer and A.S.L. consultant, all of whom were deaf, to help her prepare for her “Hawkeye” screen test. (“It was just so nice to be able to have those one-on-one encounters with people,” Cox said, “and everything went so smoothly.”)The investment paid off; “Hawkeye” had found its Echo — someone with, as Finn put it, the “mental emotional, physical fortitude to go through the rigors of playing a character like this.”But there was still a lot to learn — on all sides. Of all the new experiences that came flying Cox’s way, she most enjoyed stunt training, learning five days a week how to deliver a swift kick and a powerful jab. Cox is an amputee who uses a prosthetic leg, but that had never stopped her from roughhousing, she said.“I have a brother that’s a year older than me, and we were always rough with each other growing up,” she said. “I had to get him; I was very stubborn! He toughened me up a little bit, so it was easy for me to pick up those kinds of stunts.”By the time Finn was casting for “Hawkeye,” there was already talk of a potential spinoff for the character, Finn said. Cox didn’t learn a new series was in the works until she was halfway through filming her “Hawkeye” scenes. The news came as a surprise, to say the least. Filming for “Echo” began in April 2022, and Cox jumped right in.“One of the very first questions she asked when we first talked was ‘Can I do my own stunts?’” Sydney Freeland, the series showrunner, said of Cox. “I was like, ‘Yeah, go for it!’ She was down to get in there, take some lumps and take some bruises.”“Her entire filming experience before ‘Echo’ was a few days on ‘Hawkeye,’” added Freeland, who also directed episodes. “For her to go from that small sample size to being the lead of a Marvel series, that is a tremendous ask for even the most seasoned actor.”Cox did extensive stunt training to prepare for her role as Maya Lopez, better known as Echo, learning five days a week how to deliver a swift kick and a powerful jab.Chuck Zlotnick/Marvel StudiosWhether Cox was peeling out on a motorcycle or leaping from a moving freight train (while wearing a safety harness, of course), Change or another interpreter were positioned in her sightline, ready to relay the director’s next instructions.But Cox had another key preproduction request of Freeland and her team: Take A.S.L. classes.“I said, ‘Be able to communicate in basic sign language with me,’” Cox said. Many of the cast members learned, taking signing classes a few times a week, she said — several characters use A.S.L. onscreen to communicate with Maya — as did many key members of the crew, including Freeland. “It was really nice when we got on set,” Cox added. “They were able to sign ‘How are you?’ and ‘Do you need to go to the bathroom?’ — those kinds of simple things.”Freeland was reluctant to give herself too much credit: “She’s very generous to say that I learned A.S.L.,” she said. “It was probably like talking to a toddler for her. But she’s beyond gracious and beyond patient.”“Echo” was shot in and around Atlanta, far from Cox’s tight-knit community in Wisconsin. Filming took about three months, and Cox didn’t have any family or friends in the area. It helped being surrounded by a predominantly Indigenous cast, which included Tantoo Cardinal, Graham Greene, Devery Jacobs and Cody Lightning. “It just felt so homey,” she said. “They were like cousins or sisters immediately.”Cox considers it an honor to play Marvel’s first deaf Indigenous superhero, and to provide mainstream representation for amputees. But the success has been bittersweet. Her father — the ultimate fan of both Marvel and his daughter — died in 2021, the same week her character’s father (Zahn McClarnon), who is also named William, was shown meeting his untimely demise in “Hawkeye.”“All of a sudden, these two worlds have collided,” Cox said. “And it was so heart-wrenching.”“But he was so proud of me,” she went on, speaking of her father. “I know he’s looking down on me from heaven, and he’s just cheering me on. I absolutely know it and feel it.” More

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      Haptic Suits Let You Feel Music Through Your Skin

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      Jay Alan Zimmerman, a deaf composer and musician, was used to positioning himself near the speakers at clubs, straining to feel the vibrations of songs he could not hear.So when he was invited to test a new technology, a backpack, known as a haptic suit, designed for him to experience music as vibrations on his skin — a kick drum to the ankles, a snare drum to the spine — he was excited.“With captioning and sign language interpretation, your brain is forced to be in more than one place at a time,” Mr. Zimmerman, who began losing his hearing in his early 20s, said in a recent video interview.“With a haptic system,” he continued, “it can go directly to your body at the exact same moment, and there’s real potential for you to actually feel music in your body.”The type of haptic suit Mr. Zimmerman first tested, now nearly a decade ago, has recently become more accessible to the public. The devices were available at events this summer at Lincoln Center in New York City — including at a recent silent disco night, an event in which people dance while listening to music via wireless headphones — as well as at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, in March, a Greta Van Fleet concert in Las Vegas and a performance at Opera Philadelphia.The devices, which translate music into vibrations that are transmitted to different points on the suit, are designed to be worn by both hearing individuals and those who are deaf or have hearing loss. Developed by the Philadelphia-based company Music: Not Impossible, the device consists of two ankle bands, two wrist bands and a backpack that fastens with double straps over the rib cage. Wearing one of them feels a little like a full-body bear hug from a massage chair.Haptic suits, which are also used in virtual reality and video games, have been around for several decades. But the Music: Not Impossible suits are unique because the devices turn individual notes of music into specific vibrations. Other companies are also producing haptic products designed to capture the sonic experiences of various events. Examples include the crack of a baseball bat at a sporting event transmitted through vibrating seats, or more everyday experiences like the sound of a dog barking translated through a pattern of buzzes on a wearable bracelet.“There’s a revolution in haptic technology going on right now,” said Mark D. Fletcher, a researcher at the University of Southampton in Britain, who studies the use of haptics for supporting people who are deaf or have hearing loss.The development of the suits has benefited from recent advancements in microprocessors, wireless technology, batteries and artificial intelligence, he said, all key components in the emerging market of wearable haptic devices.The device consists of two ankle bands, two wristbands and a backpack that fastens with double straps over the rib cage.Mick Ebeling, the founder of the Los Angeles-based Not Impossible Labs, was first inspired to experiment with haptic suits in 2014 when he saw a video of an event featuring a deaf D.J., with bass-heavy music pulsing through speakers facing the floor and people dancing barefoot. Mr. Ebeling wanted to find a better way for deaf people to experience music.Daniel Belquer, a composer who has a master’s degree in theater, soon came on board to find a way to transmit the experience of music straight into the brain. That mission, Mr. Belquer said, soon expanded to a goal of creating a tactile experience of music that was available for everyone, including people without hearing loss.Mr. Belquer joined the project because he was interested in helping the deaf community, but also because he was intrigued as a composer. He had written a master’s thesis on listening and was already producing sound with vibrating objects in his own shows.Mr. Belquer worked with engineers at Avnet, an electronics company, to produce a more nuanced haptic feedback system for use with musical experiences, which creates a sensation of touch through vibrations and wireless transmission without lag time. But the first prototypes were heavy and not sensitive enough to really translate the music.“As a composer, artistic expression is important, not just the tech side,” he said.He solicited feedback from members of the deaf community, including Mandy Harvey, a deaf singer and songwriter; as well as Mr. Zimmerman, the composer; and the sign language interpreter Amber Galloway.Mr. Zimmerman said that the first version of the device he tested was “not satisfying.”“Imagine having seven or eight different cellphones strapped to various parts of your body, attached to wires,” he said. “And then they all just start going off randomly.”Mr. Belquer worked to perfect the technology, he said, until up to 24 instruments or vocal elements in a song could each be translated to a different point on the suit.By 2018, he had created the first version of the current model, which offers three levels of intensity that can be set individually, as well as a fully customizable fit.Amanda Landers, a 36-year-old sign language instructor at Syosset High School on Long Island who has progressive hearing loss that began around the time she was in high school, said she thinks the suits are a radical way to create access for people who are deaf or hard of hearing.She first wore one of the vests last year, during a private demonstration with Mr. Belquer and Flavia Naslausky, the head of business development and strategy at Music: Not Impossible, after coming across the Not Impossible Labs website while researching emerging technologies for people with hearing loss to show her students.The company played her snippets from the film “Interstellar,” whose composer, Hans Zimmer, was nominated for an Academy Award for best original score. The biggest surprise, Ms. Landers said, was the intensity of the sensations.“When the song was getting lower, not only did the different parts of you vibrate; it actually got softer and more in-depth,” she said in a recent video interview. “And when it was louder, my whole body was shaking. Just the level of precision they put into it was astounding.”Lincoln Center made the Music: Not Impossible haptic suits available at two of its silent disco nights this summer. Attendees also listened to music via wireless headphones.The technology, which has been tested at a range of up to three-quarters of a mile from a stage, works for both throbbing bass tracks and classical pieces (it was mostly dance-pop and electronic music in the mix at a silent disco on a recent Saturday night at Lincoln Center).“What they’re doing is so important,” Ms. Landers said of Music: Not Impossible’s vision of creating a shared musical experience for all concertgoers. “People often look at inclusivity as something that’s like, ‘Oh, that’s so complicated,’ and then they don’t do it, but it’s not that hard.”Music: Not Impossible currently provides the suits to organizations as part of a full-package deal, which includes up to 90 suits; a team of on-site staff members who will assist people with getting them on, answer questions and troubleshoot the technology; as well as a team of “vibro D.J.s” trained to customize the vibration transmission locations for each song in a set.Prices start at a few thousand dollars for a “basic experience,” Mr. Belquer said, which includes a couple of suits and a vibro D.J., and can reach six figures for experiences that absorb a significant part of the company’s 90-suit inventory in the United States.(Lincoln Center, which has made the suits available at a few events each summer since 2021, had 75 suits at two silent disco nights and a Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra concert this summer, up from the 50 it offered per event last year.)“The only requirement that we make on that front is that the deaf and hard-of-hearing never get charged for our experience,” Mr. Belquer said.Attendees at Lincoln Center’s silent disco nights swayed to dance-pop tracks. But the unaffordability for most consumers is one reason that haptic suits, while promising, are currently an impractical option for most individuals who are deaf or have hearing loss.Dickie Hearts, a 25-year-old actor and artist in New York who was born Deaf and counts himself a regular among the city’s club scene, had the chance to try an earlier version of the Music: Not Impossible suits at a concert in Los Angeles around eight years ago. (Deaf is capitalized by some people in references to a distinct cultural identity.)While he appreciates the intention behind them, he said, he prefers having live American Sign Language interpretation alongside captions that convey the lyrics.“Feeling the vibration has never been an issue for me,” he said in a recent video call, conducted with the assistance of an ASL interpreter. “I want to know what the words are. I don’t want to have to reach out to my hearing friend and be like, ‘Oh, what song are they playing?’”Another concern, he said, is that the packs could make Deaf people targets for bullies. At the event where he tested them in Los Angeles, he said, only Deaf people were using them, which made him feel singled out.But, he added, if hearing individuals in the audience were wearing the suits as well, as at Lincoln Center’s silent disco nights, he would be interested in being part of that.Mr. Belquer said that Music: Not Impossible hoped to create a product everyone could use.That vision came to life at the Lincoln Center silent disco. As dusk fell, about 75 people, wearing either red, green or blue flashing headphones had a chance to experience the suits. They bopped and swayed to pulsing dance-pop tracks sometimes alone, carving their own circle of rhythm, and sometimes in groups.“It’s like raindrops on my shoulders,” said Regina Valdez, 55, who lives in Harlem.“Wow, it’s vibrating,” said Lucas Garcia, 6, who appeared surprised as he looked down at his vest. His parents, Chris Garcia and Aida Alvarez, who were also wearing vests, danced nearby.It was — as designed — impossible to tell who was deaf and who was hearing.But Mr. Zimmerman, who first tested the suits, said he was still hoping for a few more tweaks.“I would like to have it be so good that a beautiful note on violin would make me cry,” he said. “And a funny blast of a trombone would make me laugh.”Katie Van Syckle More

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      in Music

      An Unlikely Fiddler’s Dream

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      Michael Cleveland was born blind and mostly deaf. That was only the beginning of his journey to become one of modern bluegrass’s most compelling musicians.Michael Cleveland had been 13 for five days the first time he picked with the bluegrass demigod Doc Watson — in a backstage bathroom, no less, at an awards show in Kentucky.It was September 1993. Peter Wernick, the first president of the International Bluegrass Music Association (IBMA), had assembled a band of young hotshots to provide a pointed rebuttal to a Washington Post feature that argued kids didn’t care about antiquated mountain music. The teenage quintet electrified its audience, sprinting through a Bill Monroe standard with verve that suggested these sounds were vital to fresh generations.After the triumphant ceremony, John Cleveland ushered his son — born blind, with one eye; almost deaf in his left ear and partly deaf in his right — to the bathroom. They found Watson, Wernick and a cadre of other genre giants laughing and jamming there, as though the lavatory were a back porch, and the teenage Michael joined for an hour.“I had no shame, no fear, nothing,” Cleveland, 42, remembered with a hoot by phone from the Indiana home he shares with his father. “I thought, ‘This may be the only opportunity I ever have to hear this person play, to be near them.’ That was pretty much all I wanted to do — raw, high-energy bluegrass.”The nascent teenager didn’t consider how Watson, who had lost his eyesight seven decades earlier at the age of 1, was the counterargument he needed: Teachers had warned Cleveland for years that career prospects for a blind bluegrass fiddler were grim, but he played on.In the three decades since, Cleveland has become a bluegrass star himself, winning 29 IBMA awards and becoming the organization’s most decorated fiddler. He is one of the world’s most in-demand and distinctive players, with collaborators that include Béla Fleck, Billy Strings and Vince Gill. “He plays with such ferocity,” Gill said by phone. “But the amount of emotion he pulls out of that instrument is way more appealing than the amount of notes.”Cleveland has only just begun to funnel his full story into records, documenting the hardships and joys of a difficult life devoted to bluegrass. Alternately woebegone and hopeful, his star-studded “Lovin’ of the Game,” out Friday, is an ecstatic document of what the fiddle has meant to his story — and what he hopes to mean to its history.“For a long time, Michael didn’t want to talk about being blind. He never wanted to be the little blind boy that played fiddle, for people to like his music because he was handicapped,” his father said. “He’s past that, and I’m glad — he might open up this music for somebody, to inspire them.”Cleveland was a boyhood bluegrass zealot, not a prodigy. When he was six weeks old, his parents began toting him to bimonthly Saturday concerts his grandparents hosted at an American Legion in Henryville, Ind. In his stroller, friends remembered, he would bounce to the music in perfect time. As a toddler, he became so obsessed with the staple “Rocky Top” that his parents drove him to Tennessee to meet the couple who had written it; even now, he keeps the cassette they gave him, an hourlong compendium of assorted versions.Still, Cleveland couldn’t play. A nearby fiddler struggled to show his first blind student how to hold the bow or the instrument. Teachers at the Kentucky School for the Blind fared better with a contraption that kept the bow at the proper position, but they were more interested in the Suzuki method and classical music than Flatt & Scruggs. “On the first day, they asked me what I knew about violin,” Cleveland said, catching his breath from laughter before offering his reply. “‘Well, I don’t know much about the violin,’ I said, ‘but I know a lot about the fiddle.’”Those first few years remained a struggle. One night, though, Cleveland dreamed about playing “Soldier’s Joy,” a mirthful fiddle number about payday he’d heard countless times. When he reached for his instrument the next morning, the tune was there.Though he balked his first fiddle contest, he kept trying, even joining Monroe, the bluegrass fountainhead, onstage at age 9. Soon after he delighted that awards-show crowd in Kentucky, he made his Grand Ole Opry debut with Alison Krauss. But it wasn’t Cleveland’s back story that people found compelling, like some cloying “American Idol” package.“You can feel his timing and pulse so well, like the drive of a banjo player,” the multi-instrumentalist Sam Bush said in an interview, listing Cleveland as one of perhaps three bluegrass fiddlers ever to have that quality. (The others? Benny Martin and Paul Warren.) “Then he adds finesse, and he will surprise you.”As a child, Cleveland was obsessed with fiddle music.Andrew Cenci for The New York TimesAs Cleveland’s fiddle prowess ballooned, the rest of his life deflated. Though the young musician felt welcome and encouraged in bluegrass, he understood he was different. By 12, he’d endured 30 separate surgeries to correct a cleft palate and lip, to insert a prosthetic eye and to reroute a blood vessel in his brain. He suffered serial bouts of spinal meningitis, and his eardrums were permanently perforated. His parents were then in the middle of an acrimonious divorce that would alienate him from his mother for decades.“Bill Monroe lost his mother at 10, his father at 16. There are similarities there with Michael you can feel,” said Ronnie McCoury, who began playing with his own father, the bluegrass pizazz magnate Del, at 14. “Michael’s life has been hard. Those feelings come out on his fiddle.”Cleveland forwent college, hitting the road soon after his high school graduation in 1999, and emerged as an exciting sideman, passionate about bluegrass’s history and quick-witted, too — “a good hang,” as Gill put it. He made several solo records and assembled a band, Flamekeeper. The group kindled unapologetic traditionalism, its intensity making it a fast favorite within staunch bluegrass circles.But six years ago, while enjoying one of Sam Bush’s freewheeling shows, Cleveland considered how bluegrass crowds were aging and shrinking, and how he might do well to adapt, like Bush or Fleck. His subsequent album, “Tall Fiddler” from 2019, flirted with spirited jazz and hardscrabble balladry. With Bush singing about running from the law, he even dipped into rockabilly.“Lovin’ of the Game” reinforces that openness. There’s a playful romp about high-stakes love alongside Billy Strings, and a country lamentation for small-town settling with Charlie Starr, of the Southern rock band Blackberry Smoke. The most vulnerable moment in Cleveland’s catalog comes with “Temperance Reel,” a centuries-old tune updated with lyrics about a musician struggling with alcoholism, as Cleveland did for many years. His strings sing with unbridled joy, as if animated by possibility.“There’s no mistaking I’m a bluegrass player. That’s the biggest part of what I do,” Cleveland said. “But these are ways to push the envelope that, 10 years ago, I wouldn’t have been into.”After 40 years of bluegrass fixation, Cleveland has become a de facto archivist. Not long before his parents split, an area aficionado handed him a box of 20 mixtapes of great fiddle performances — each dutifully labeled in Braille, with introductory listening instructions. They form the core of his vast basement tape trove. Cleveland has a recording of that bathroom jam with Watson, too, though he will never listen. He was, as he likes to say, “wearing it out,” playing every lick he knew as hard as he could to prove his worth. The youngest inductee into the National Fiddler Hall of Fame, he’s done that.He’s now focused on what’s next. He tracks fiddle parts for most anyone who asks through the online service AirGigs; John will often hear him alone in the basement, playing through dinner for 10 hours at a time, dabbling in pop and jazz. And, at Fleck’s request, he’s even learning some Bach for their first duo record.“Bach’s Violin Sonata No. 3 in C major,” he sighed, chuckling at the irony of how being the best bluegrass fiddler brought him back to the classical violin he’d quit. “I know just enough to be dangerous. But yeah, I thought, I can do that.” More

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      in Theater

      How These Sign Language Experts Are Bringing More Diversity to Theater

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      As productions increasingly include characters and perspectives from a variety of backgrounds, deaf and hearing people who translate the shows for deaf audiences are trying to keep up.Zavier Sabio didn’t have much exposure to theater growing up. But when he was asked to join the Roundabout Theater Company’s production of “A Soldier’s Play” and help make the show — about race relations in the military in the segregated South — accessible to deaf theatergoers, he decided to give it a shot.“I really wanted to present this story, as well as the interpretation, through a Black lens,” Sabio, who is Deaf and Black, said through an interpreter. To do that, he also relied on his knowledge of Black American Sign Language (a variation of American Sign Language) and Black Deaf culture.Sabio joined the 2020 production as a co-director of artistic sign language, or DASL, a position that some shows fill in order to create a more cohesive theater experience for deaf audiences. DASLs collaborate with American Sign Language interpreters who specialize in theater, translating the script into ASL and establishing how to perform the signing — while staying true to the spirit of a show. That also entails accounting for representations of race in source material and casting.Amid a racial reckoning in theater, the work of DASLs and theatrical interpreters from a variety of backgrounds has become increasingly sought after in the past few years — both by deaf audiences and theatrical productions. But while there have been efforts to recruit more diverse interpreters, the push for better representation is not without challenges.That became evident in November, when Keith Wann, who is white, filed a lawsuit against the Theater Development Fund and its director, Lisa Carling, accusing them of discrimination. In the suit, Wann charged that a job offer from TDF — for theatrical interpreting for “The Lion King” on Broadway — had been retracted because of his race. A spokesperson for TDF, a nonprofit organization focused on making theater more affordable and accessible, declined to comment. The show, which has a racially mixed cast, draws on African imagery.Some deaf people took to social media when news of the lawsuit (which was eventually settled) broke, calling for more alignment along racial lines between productions and those providing interpreting services.“The interpreting field itself is very white-dominated,” said Kailyn Aaron-Lozano, who has worked as a DASL for “My Onliness” at the New Ohio Theater and “Sweeney Todd” at IRT Theater, speaking through an interpreter.Aaron-Lozano, who is Deaf and Afro-Latina, explained that having theatrical interpreters and DASLs who are BIPOC (an acronym that stands for Black, Indigenous and people of color) can have a big impact on the audiences of the productions that focus on those groups. “We are screaming for more BIPOC individuals to be in these positions,” she said. “There are not enough BIPOC interpreters who can fit the roles — and to better understand those nuances and those cultural pieces.”Jina Porter, a hearing theatrical interpreter and a person of color, said that when there is a mismatch between the interpreting team and what is happening onstage, it can be jarring for deaf viewers. “I feel like you should look at the team and then look at the show and feel like they would all kind of be in the same place together,” she said.Porter said that ensuring more diversity in theatrical interpreting is also a matter of providing equal access and opportunity. “That’s just the way the world should be,” she said.Patrice Creamer, a Black and Deaf theater artist who also works as a DASL, says that not every show requires a perfect racial match of actors and those making the show accessible. (She is currently a DASL for “The Lion King” but was not named in Wann’s lawsuit.)But having that alignment, Creamer said through an interpreter, can help the viewer form a more immediate connection with a show. That was the case, she added, with her work in the 2000 Broadway revival of “Jesus Christ Superstar,” where she interpreted for the role of Mary Magdalene, played by Maya Days, who is Black.“I played that character so that the Deaf audience could really take everything in with their eyes,” she said, “since their focus isn’t as much on what is happening on the stage, but on what’s happening with the interpreter.”Having deaf people whose first language is ASL working in artistic sign language direction brings a whole other perspective — a deaf one — to a production, Michelle Banks, a Black actress, director and writer who is Deaf, said through an interpreter. DASLs can also have a say in hiring, and can choose interpreters who are a better fit for the characters, the culture represented and the chosen signing style, Banks added.Banks has served as a DASL on shows including Camille A. Brown’s Broadway revival of “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf,” which starred Alexandria Wailes, a deaf and mixed race actress, and incorporated ASL into the fabric of the show.“I worked with Deaf actors, but I also worked with hearing actors,” Banks said of “For Colored Girls.” “So it’s not just Deaf culture that I brought to the production, but also the Black Deaf culture. And I did that with signing that showed that specific culture that is specific to the Black Deaf community.”She described one scene, for example, in which Wailes signs in Black American Sign Language, or BASL, which relies in a unique way on body language and rhythm. Onstage, Wailes’s signing became almost sensual, she said. “It was totally different from everyday conversational ASL.”“It became a lot more emotive,” Banks added. “There was a lot more feeling in that.”Sabio, who also incorporated BASL in the interpreting for “A Soldier’s Play,” said that for authenticity, he also researched and used signs from the historical period in which the play is set.Monique Holt, a professor in the theater and dance program at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., who also works as a director, actor and DASL, said that although more diversity exists in theater these days, there are not enough interpreters from diverse backgrounds — especially those who, like her, are Asian and Deaf.Offering more training opportunities and scholarships for those hoping to have a career in the field could make a difference, added Holt, who also mentors people interested in becoming artistic directors for sign language.Banks believes that theatrical interpreters can also be more thoughtful when booking interpreting roles and “really do some self-assessment: Am I the right person for this role? Am I the right interpreter for this job?”Theaters that provide interpreting should be part of the solution, too, Creamer said, adding that some of them tend to rely on a narrow group of established interpreters who are predominantly white. “They don’t have people of color on their list,” she said. “And there are excuses: ‘We can’t find them. We don’t know where they are.’ But how hard are those people really looking?” More

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      in Music

      When Technology Makes Music More Accessible

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      In Britain and Ireland, a series of recent projects show the rich possibilities when disability and neurodiversity are considered in the creative process.LONDON — As the audience at Cafe OTO, a venue here, settled down to hear Neil Luck introduce his ambitious new piece, “Whatever Weighs You Down,” bemused smiles flickered across many faces.The evening’s performances had already featured an intriguing selection of musical technologies, including sensor gloves, text-to-speech software and recordings of bird song processed by artificial intelligence.So when Luck launched into a low-tech étude, raucously inflating a balloon while gasping into a microphone, audience members couldn’t help but laugh.A dark humor punctuated “Whatever Weighs You Down,” a bizarre, violent 40-minute work for piano, video, electronics and sensor gloves. It was the centerpiece of an evening that presented works made with Cyborg Soloists, a multiyear, 1.4 million-pound ($1.6 million) project, led by the pianist and composer Zubin Kanga, to advance interdisciplinary music-making through new interactions with technology.“Whatever Weighs You Down” is one of several experimental works that recently premiered in Britain and Ireland that show the rich musical possibilities when disability and neurodiversity are incorporated into the creative process. These works also point to newly developed technologies as both malleable tools for expressing diverse perspectives in experimental music, and as potentially enabling greater accessibility to composition, which traditionally has been a rarefied and exclusive world.In recent years, increasing attention has been paid, particularly in Britain, to making classical music more accessible. This includes the widespread adoption of what are called relaxed performances in concert halls — where audiences are allowed to make noise — and the creation of professional ensembles for disabled musicians, such as BSO Resound, part of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, and the Paraorchestra, which is based in Bristol, England.For “Whatever Weighs You Down,” Luck worked closely with the Deaf performance artist Chisato Minamimura, who in the piece appeared on a video screen and used sign language to retell her own dreams about falling, one of the main themes of Luck’s work.More About on Deaf CultureUpending Perceptions: The poetic art of Christine Sun Kim, who was born deaf, challenges viewers to reconsider how they hear and perceive the world. Language in Evolution: Ubiquitous video technology and social media have given deaf people a new way to communicate. They’re using it to transform American Sign Language. Seeking Representation: Though deafness is gaining visibility onscreen, deaf people who rely on hearing devices say their experiences remain mostly untold. Name Signs: Name signs are the equivalent of a first name in some sign languages. We asked a few people to share the story behind theirs.In “Whatever Weighs You Down,” Minamimura wanted to express a deaf perspective on sound and music. “I have hearing loss, but I can feel things — I can feel sounds,” she said in a recent video interview via an interpreter. Workshops to develop the piece involved Minamimura responding to vibrations wherever she could find them: pressing her full body against the lid of the piano, feeling the underside of the soundboard and even biting the strings of certain instruments.As the performance of “Whatever Weighs You Down” drew to a close, it reached a striking semi-synthesis. Onscreen, Minamimura’s gestures mirrored Kanga’s onstage hand movements. Both performers provided a kind of accompaniment for each other, experienced in entirely different ways by audience members, depending on their relationship to sound.“Traditionally, music is just heard in an auditory sense,” Minamimura said, “but, of course, we can see someone playing a piano or playing a flute. For me, technology means incorporating a film, visuals, or a general feeling of something else; we’re adding more sensory experiences for an audience.”Chisato Minamimura’s 2019 piece “Scored in Silence” was created with the aim of giving deaf individuals a comparable experience to hearing individuals.Mark PickthallZubin Kanga leads Cyborg Soloists, a multiyear, 1.4 million-pound project to advance interdisciplinary music-making through new interactions with technology.Kalpesh Lathigra for The New York TimesCreating music that incorporates multisensory experience is just one of the areas Cyborg Soloists explores. The project, supported by the government-funded U.K. Research and Innovation Future Leaders Fellowship, also involves new types of visual interactions, including virtual reality, the creation of new digital instruments and the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning.The next frontier for Kanga, he said, is finding a way to translate brain activity from electroencephalogram caps into sound. And in Ireland, a recent installation explores a similar process.The visual artist Owen Boss described the first time he heard the sonic reproduction of a brain mid-seizure as “an absolutely extraordinary moment,” describing “a very low-end bass sound, kind of rhythmic, it just emerges in these sweeping, intense bass noises that whoosh in and whoosh out.”The sound files were created by Mark Cunningham, a professor of neurophysiology of epilepsy at Trinity College Dublin, who analyzed slivers of removed brain tissue that had been put through a process that simulated a seizure. He translated the analysis into binary code, and then into sound. Inspired by those deeply jarring reverberations and his family’s own experience, Boss then began piecing together an installation, “The Wernicke’s Area,” which is named after the part of the brain involved in understanding speech. The installation is showing at the Irish Museum of Modern Art.In 2014, Boss’s wife, Debbie Boss, had surgery to remove a brain tumor. The procedure was successful — the tumor was removed from her brain’s Wernicke’s area — but there were some side effects: The former soprano developed epilepsy and also now finds communication challenging.The violist Stephen Upshaw and the mezzo-soprano Rosie Middleton took performance directions for “The Wernicke’s Area” from diaries Debbie Boss kept about her seizures.Pat RedmondWith his wife’s permission, Boss and the composer Emily Howard created what he calls “a portrait of Debbie,” a multimedia work including details from the diaries she kept of her seizures, images of her brain, warped snippets of her favorite Handel aria and a variety of electroacoustic music drawn from data produced by artificially induced brain seizures.For all involved, the first performance of “The Wernicke’s Area” was an extremely moving experience, particularly for the Boss family. Debbie Boss became emotional “watching people do what she couldn’t do anymore,” her husband said. Yet, because she wasn’t directly involved in shaping the work, there’s a slight distance to “The Wernicke’s Area.”Lived experience plays a large role in the work of the composer Megan Steinberg, which places neurodiverse and disabled practitioners in all aspects of the creative process.Steinberg’s “Outlier II,” created with the Distractfold ensemble and the artists Elle Chante and Luke Moore, explores, in musical form, how artificial intelligence, or A.I., can exclude disabled people by working off a generalized understanding of human experience. “Outlier II” involves an A.I.-generated melody that generalizes over time, gradually losing nuance before being disrupted by a series of chance-based improvisations.Steinberg considered accessibility from the start of the creative process, and produced scores that were tailored to each performer’s needs.“That’s so rare in arts environments,” said Chante, a vocalist with hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, a condition affecting her joints. “Normally, it’s like, ‘Oh, we’ve got this thing, and we want it to be accessible.’ Here, it’s, ‘We want to be accessible, and here’s this piece we’re trying to create.’ And that made a giant difference.”A graphic score created for Megan Steinberg’s “Outlier II.”via Megan SteinbergProjects like these also produce music that is more representative of the breadth of human experience, according to Cat McGill, the head of program development at Drake Music, an arts charity focused on music, disability and technology. These projects “force us to challenge our thinking around disability and neurodiversity,” she wrote in an email interview.“If we approach a situation with the assumption that each individual has a unique contribution to make, rather than feeling like we need to fix them,” McGill added, “we embrace the differences as a natural part of humanity.” More

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      Louise Fletcher, 88, Dies; Oscar Winner for ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’

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      She was largely unknown to the public when she was cast as what the American Film Institute called one of cinema’s most memorable villains.Louise Fletcher, the imposing, steely-eyed actress who won an Academy Award for her role as the tyrannical Nurse Ratched in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” died on Friday at her home in the town of Montdurausse, in Southern France. She was 88.The death was confirmed by her agent, David Shaul, who did not cite a cause. Ms. Fletcher also had a home in Los Angeles.Ms. Fletcher was 40 and largely unknown to the public when she was cast as the head administrative nurse at an Oregon mental institution in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” The film, directed by Milos Forman and based on a popular novel by Ken Kesey, won a best-actress trophy for Ms. Fletcher and four other Oscars: best picture, best director, best actor (Jack Nicholson, who starred as the rebellious mental patient McMurphy) and best adapted screenplay (Bo Goldman and Lawrence Hauber).Ms. Fletcher’s acceptance speech stood out that night — not only because she teasingly thanked voters for hating her, but also because she used American Sign Language in thanking her parents, who were both deaf, for “teaching me to have a dream.”The American Film Institute later named Nurse Ratched one of the most memorable villains in film history and the second most notable female villain, surpassed only by the Wicked Witch of the West in “The Wizard of Oz.”But at the time “Cuckoo’s Nest” was released, Ms. Fletcher was frustrated by the buttoned-up nature of her character. “I envied the other actors tremendously,” she said in a 1975 interview with The New York Times, referring to her fellow cast members, most of whom were playing mental patients. “They were so free, and I had to be so controlled.”Estelle Louise Fletcher was born on July 22, 1934, in Birmingham, Ala., one of four hearing children of Robert Capers Fletcher, an Episcopal minister, and Estelle (Caldwell) Fletcher; both her parents had been deaf since childhood. She studied drama at the University of North Carolina and moved to Los Angeles after graduation.She later told journalists that because she was so tall — 5 feet 10 inches — she had trouble finding work in anything but westerns, where her height was an advantage. Of her first 20 or so screen roles in the late 1950s and early ’60s, about half were in television westerns, including “Wagon Train,” “Maverick” and “Bat Masterson.”Ms. Fletcher married Jerry Bick, a film producer, in 1959. They had two sons, John and Andrew, and she retired from acting for more than a decade to raise them.Ms. Fletcher and Mr. Bick divorced in 1977. Her survivors include her sons; her sister, Roberta Ray; and a granddaughter.She returned to movies in 1974 in Robert Altman’s “Thieves Like Us,” as a woman who coldly turns in her brother to the police. It was her appearance in that film that led Mr. Forman to offer her the role in “Cuckoo’s Nest.”“I was caught by surprise when Louise came onscreen,” Mr. Forman recalled of watching “Thieves Like Us.” “I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She had a certain mystery, which I thought was very, very important for Nurse Ratched.”Ms. Fletcher in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” “She had a certain mystery,” said Milos Forman, the film’s director, “which I thought was very, very important for Nurse Ratched.”Herbert Dorfman/Corbis via Getty ImagesReviewing “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” in The New Yorker, Pauline Kael declared Ms. Fletcher’s “a masterly performance.”“We can see the virginal expectancy — the purity — that has turned into puffy-eyed self-righteousness,” Ms. Kael wrote. “She thinks she’s doing good for people, and she’s hurt — she feels abused — if her authority is questioned.”Ms. Fletcher is often cited as an example of the Oscar curse — the phenomenon that winning an Academy Award for acting does not always lead to sustained movie stardom — but she did maintain a busy career in films and on television into her late 70s.She had a lead role as the Linda Blair character’s soft-spoken psychiatrist in “Exorcist II: The Heretic” (1977) and was notable in the ensemble comedy “The Cheap Detective” (1978), riffing on Ingrid Bergman’s film persona. She also starred with Christopher Walken and Natalie Wood as a workaholic scientist in “Brainstorm” (1983). But she was largely relegated to roles with limited screen time, especially when her character was very different from her Nurse Ratched persona.After a turn as an inscrutable U.F.O. bigwig in “Strange Invaders” (1983), she appeared in “Firestarter” (1984) as a fearful farm wife; the police drama “Blue Steel” (1990) as Jamie Lee Curtis’s drab mother; “2 Days in the Valley” (1996) as a compassionate Los Angeles landlady; and “Cruel Intentions” (1999) as Ryan Phillippe’s genteel aunt.Only when she played to villainous stereotype — as she did in “Flowers in the Attic” (1987), as an evil matriarch who sets out to poison her four inconvenient young grandchildren — did she find herself in starring roles again. And that film, she told a Dragoncon audience in 2009, was “the worst experience I’ve ever had making a movie.”Later in her career, she played recurring characters on several television series, including “Star Trek: Deep Space 9” (she was an alien cult leader from 1993 to 1999) and “Shameless” (as William H. Macy’s foulmouthed convict mother). She also made an appearance as Liev Schreiber’s affable mother in the romantic drama “A Perfect Man” (2013). She appeared most recently in two episodes of the Netflix comedy series “Girlboss.”Although Ms. Fletcher’s most famous character was a portrait of sternness, she often recalled smiling constantly and pretending that everything was perfect when she was growing up, in an effort to protect her non-hearing parents from bad news.“The price of it was very high for me,” she said in a 1977 interview with The Ladies’ Home Journal. “Because I not only pretended everything was all right. I came to feel it had to be.”Pretending wasn’t all bad, however, she acknowledged, at least in terms of her profession. That same year she told the journalist Rex Reed, “I feel like I know real joy from make-believe.”Mike Ives More

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      Who Can Play the King? Representation Questions Fuel Casting Debates.

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      Should Shakespeare’s Richard III be reserved for disabled actors? Does the character have to be played by a white man? By a man at all? Three recent productions took different tacks.When three of the most prestigious Shakespeare companies in the world staged “Richard III” this summer, each took a different approach to casting its scheming title character in ways that illuminate the fraught debate over which actors should play which roles.At the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, Richard was played by the actor Arthur Hughes, who has radial dysplasia, which means he has a shorter right arm and a missing thumb. The company said it was the first time it had cast a disabled actor to play the character, who describes himself in the opening scene as “deformed.” The production’s director, Gregory Doran, who was until recently the Royal Shakespeare’s artistic director, told The Times of London earlier this year that having actors pretend to be disabled to play “Richard III” would “probably not be acceptable” these days.The Stratford Festival in Ontario, Canada, took a different tack: It cast Colm Feore, who is not disabled, to play a Richard who has a deformed spine but who is not a hunchback. And in New York City, the Public Theater’s Free Shakespeare in the Park went in yet another direction, casting Danai Gurira, a Black woman who does not have a disability, as the duke who schemes and kills his way to the throne of England.Their varying approaches came at a moment when an intense rethinking of the cultural norms around identity, representation, diversity, opportunity, imagination and artistic license have led to impassioned debates, and battles, over casting.It has been decades since major theaters have had white actors play Othello in blackface, and, after years of criticism, performances by white actors playing caricatured Asian roles are growing rarer in theater and film, and are being rethought in opera and ballet.Now there are questions about who should play gay characters (Tom Hanks recently told The New York Times Magazine that today he would, rightly, not be cast as a gay attorney dying of AIDS, as he was in his Academy Award-winning role in the 1993 film “Philadelphia”) or transgender characters (Eddie Redmayne said last year that it had been a “mistake” to play a trans character in 2015’s “The Danish Girl”) or characters of different ethnicities and religions. (Bradley Cooper faced criticism this year for using a prosthetic nose to play the Jewish conductor Leonard Bernstein in a forthcoming biopic.)Tom Hanks recently said that today he would, correctly, not be cast as a gay attorney dying of AIDS, as he was in the film “Philadelphia,” which he starred in with Denzel Washington.TriStar PicturesWhile many celebrate the move away from old, sometimes stereotyped portrayals and the new opportunities belatedly being given to actors from a diverse array of backgrounds, others worry that the current insistence on literalism and authenticity can be too constraining. Acting, after all, is the art of pretending to be someone you are not.“The essential nature of art is freedom,” said the Oscar-winning actor F. Murray Abraham, whose many credits include Shylock, the Jewish moneylender of Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice,” though Mr. Abraham is not Jewish. “Once we impose any kind of control over it, it’s no longer free.”And while the recent insistence on more authentic casting promises greater diversity in some respects, it threatens less in others — coming as many women and actors of color are getting more opportunities to play some of the greatest, meatiest roles in the repertory, regardless of whatever race or gender or background the playwrights may have initially envisioned.More About on Deaf CultureUpending Perceptions: The poetic art of Christine Sun Kim, who was born deaf, challenges viewers to reconsider how they hear and perceive the world.‘Coda’: The Oscar-winning film showcases deaf actors and lives. But some deaf viewers found its hearing perspective frustrating. Seeking Representation: Though deafness is gaining visibility onscreen, deaf people who rely on hearing devices say their experiences remain mostly untold. Name Signs: Name signs are the equivalent of a first name in some sign languages. We asked a few people to share the story behind theirs.Sometimes such casting is considered “colorblind,” in which case audiences are asked to look beyond an actor’s race or ethnicity, or other features. But in recent years the trend has been toward “color-conscious” casting, in which an actor’s race, ethnicity or identity becomes part of the production, and a feature of the character being portrayed.The casting of Mr. Hughes in a production by the Royal Shakespeare Company in Britain was hailed as the first time the company had cast a disabled actor in the title role.Ellie Kurttz, via Royal Shakespeare CompanySome of the varied approaches were underscored by this summer’s productions of “Richard III,” and the different directions each theater took when choosing an actor to play Richard.Richard tells the audience in the opening scene that he is:Deformed, unfinish’d, sent before my timeInto this breathing world, scarce half made up,And that so lamely and unfashionableThat dogs bark at me as I halt by themThe remark by Mr. Doran, the director of the Royal Shakespeare Company production, that it would “probably not be acceptable” these days to have actors pretend to be disabled to play Richard caused a stir in theater circles.Not only is Mr. Doran a renowned Shakespearean, but his husband, Antony Sher, who died last year, was one of the most memorable Richards of recent decades, using crutches in an acclaimed 1984 production and writing a book about his portrayal.Mr. Doran, whose production in Stratford-upon-Avon was critically lauded, later clarified his thinking about its casting, explaining that while any actor might be a successful Richard, he believed the role should be reserved for disabled actors until they “have the opportunities across the board now more widely afforded to other actors.”The new staging in Stratford, Ontario, featuring Mr. Feore, listed a “disability consultant” in its credits. His depiction was inspired by the discovery of Richard’s bones nearly a decade ago — the skeleton suggested a form of scoliosis — and rested on the idea that his physique “was less of a medical disability than a social and cultural one,” the company’s spokeswoman, Ann Swerdfager, said in an email. The critic Karen Fricker wrote in The Toronto Star: “As much as I admired Feore’s performance, it did lead me to wonder if this will be the last able-bodied actor making a star turn as a disabled character on the Stratford stage, given crucial conversations currently happening around deaf and disability performance.”And in New York, Ms. Gurira, who has appeared in “Black Panther” and the television series “The Walking Dead,” tried to explore the underlying reasons for Richard’s behavior. “There is a psychological reason for what he becomes,” she said in an interview. “He’s looking at the rules in front of him, and he feels he’s most capable, but the rules disallow him from manifesting his full capability.”The production’s director, Robert O’Hara, said that they made Richard’s difference key to the interpretation. “Richard’s otherness becomes an entire reason for his behavior,” he said in an interview. “He feels like now he has to play a part people projected onto him.”Ms. Gurira, left, said her approach to Richard aimed to get at the “psychological reason for what he becomes.” She appeared with Daniel J. Watts, right.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe rest of the cast for the production, which ended its run earlier this month, was notably diverse, and included several actors with disabilities in roles that are not usually cast that way. Ali Stroker, a Tony-winning actress who uses a wheelchair, played Lady Anne; Monique Holt, who is Deaf, played Richard’s mother, the two typically communicating onstage via American Sign Language.“I wanted to open up the conversation from ‘Why isn’t Richard being played by a disabled actor?’ to ‘Why isn’t every role considered able to be played by a disabled actor?’” Mr. O’Hara said.Ayanna Thompson, a professor of English at Arizona State University and a Shakespeare scholar in residence at the Public Theater who consulted on its “Richard III,” argued that the growing embrace of color-conscious casting reflected contemporary understandings of how different attributes inflect both actors’ identities and audiences’ perceptions.“All of our bodies carry meaning on stage, whether or not we want to acknowledge that. And that’s going to affect storytelling,” Ms. Thompson said.She pointed to an example from another play: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, friends of Hamlet’s, whom other characters often confuse for each other. “If Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are played by Black actors and the Hamlet family is all-white,” she said, “the inability to distinguish carries a whole set of different meanings.”Many productions upend traditional casting to interrogate classics. Women played every role in a trilogy of acclaimed Shakespeare productions directed by Phyllida Lloyd at Donmar Warehouse in London, seen in New York at St. Ann’s Warehouse. A “Julius Caesar” directed by Mr. Doran reset the scene from ancient Rome to modern Africa. Even Hollywood has reimagined some blockbusters, as with the gender-swapped 2016 “Ghostbusters.”Harriet Walter, with hands outstretched, in a 2013 production of “Julius Caesar,” in which all of the roles were played by women. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut as there is a push for greater casting freedoms in some areas, there is an argument for more literalism in others, especially from actors with certain backgrounds who lack opportunities.Some disabled actors are upset when they see Richard III, one of the juiciest disabled characters in the canon, go to someone else. “We all want a level playing field where everybody can play everybody,” said Mat Fraser, an English actor who is disabled and has played Richard, “but my entire career I’ve not been allowed to play hardly anybody.”In 2016, while accepting an Emmy for his turn as a transgender character in “Transparent,” Jeffrey Tambor said that he hoped to be “the last cisgender male to play a transgender female.” Now, with a “Transparent” stage musical being created in Los Angeles, its creator, Joey Soloway, vowed in an interview: “No trans person should be played by a cis person. Zero tolerance.”The conversation on casting has been evolving in recent years.“It used to be that part of the measurement of greatness was your ability to transform yourself,” said Isaac Butler, the author of “The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act,” a new history of Method acting. “Is versatility still the hallmark of good acting? And how do you approach it if there are certain identity lines you cannot cross? And which are those identity lines?”Gregg Mozgala, left, an actor with cerebral palsy, says he has to bring his “full humanity to every character I play.” He appeared with Jolly Abraham in 2017 in a production of the play “Cost of Living.” Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesGregg Mozgala, an actor with cerebral palsy, has played roles that are not traditionally portrayed as disabled, as he did playing two monarchs in “Richard III” in New York, and sometimes plays characters written as having cerebral palsy, as he will this fall in a Broadway production of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Cost of Living.”“I spent years trying to pretend my disability didn’t exist in life and onstage, which is ridiculous, because it does,” Mr. Mozgala said.“Every character I ever play is going to have cerebral palsy — there’s nothing I can do about that,” he added. “I have to bring my full humanity to every character I play.”Some still hold out hope for a day when identity will recede in the conversation.“A hundred years from now, do I hope white actors could play Othello?” said Oskar Eustis, the Public Theater’s artistic director. “Sure, because it would mean racism wasn’t the explosive issue it is now.” More

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      Study Shows Disability Representation Onscreen Is Increasing, but Still Falls Short

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      The study published Tuesday also showed that television continues to lag behind film when it comes to representation of characters with disabilities.“CODA,” a film about the hearing child of deaf parents, won this year’s Academy Award for best picture, and one of its stars, Troy Kotsur, became the first deaf man to win an acting Oscar when he took home the award for best supporting actor. Lauren Ridloff became the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s first deaf superhero in “Eternals.” The Hulu mystery-comedy series “Only Murders in the Building” won acclaim for an almost entirely silent episode that highlighted the perspective of a deaf character (played by James Caverly).Even with these prominent examples of disability representation onscreen, relative to the approximately 26 percent of adults in the United States who have a physical or psychological disability, representation continued to lag behind, a new study released Tuesday by Nielsen found. The report, whose release was timed to the 32nd anniversary of the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, analyzed the representation of disabled characters on film and TV shows released from 1918 to 2022.The titles came from a Nielsen database that included about 164,000 films and TV shows that premiered over the past century. Of those, about 4.2 percent, or 6,895 titles, were tagged as having significant disability themes or content.Disability inclusion was highest, the study found, in 2019, when 518 productions with disability themes were released.Across the board in this year’s report, films again fared better than television — of the 6,895 titles that featured significant disability themes or content, about 59 percent (4,066) were feature films, and 18 percent (1,209) were regular series. (The remaining depictions were in other categories like short films, limited series, TV movies or specials.)Those numbers represent a slight shift toward television from last year, when a Nielsen report showed that 64 percent of depictions of disabled characters were in feature films, and 16 percent were in regular television series.A survey of more than 2,000 smartphone users on disability representation in media conducted in the first quarter of 2022 also found that people with disabilities were much more likely to take issue with portrayals of disabled characters. Viewers with disabilities were 34 percent more likely to say there was not enough representation of their identity group in media, and they were 52 percent more likely than those who did not identify as having a disability to characterize a TV portrayal of their identity group as inaccurate.Lauren Appelbaum, a vice president at RespectAbility, a nonprofit organization that participated in the Nielsen study last year, told The Times then that though the number of disabled characters continued to increase, approximately 95 percent of those roles were still portrayed by actors who did not have disabilities.But there have also been positive representations, as on the HBO series “The Sex Lives of College Girls,” which features a character who uses a wheelchair (played by Lauren Spencer, known as Lolo), a confident student who attends the show’s iconic nude party. Alaqua Cox also won acclaim for her performance as Maya Lopez/Echo, a deaf Cheyenne woman who has the ability to imitate other people’s movements, in the Disney+ series “Hawkeye.” More

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      Singing, and Signing, Beethoven’s ‘Fidelio’ in Los Angeles

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      The Los Angeles Philharmonic and Deaf West Theater are working on an innovative production conceived for both hearing and deaf operagoers.LOS ANGELES — DJ Kurs has been the artistic director of the Deaf West Theater, a theater company created here by deaf actors, for the past 10 years. But he had never seen the Los Angeles Philharmonic or been to the Walt Disney Concert Hall, its renowned home, even though he grew up in Southern California.He will be there this week, though, leading seven actors from Deaf West in an innovative production of “Fidelio,” Beethoven’s opera about the rescue of a political prisoner, in a collaboration with a cast of singers and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The actors — along with a chorus from Venezuela whose members are deaf or hard of hearing and will also be signing — will be center stage on opening night Thursday, expressively enacting the lone opera of a composer who had progressive hearing loss while writing masterpiece after masterpiece. In this “Fidelio,” the singers will stay in the background.“Opera itself as an art form, it has not been accessible to our world,” Kurs, 44, said the other day through a sign-language interpreter. Deaf West, he said, had been approached in the past about collaborating on operas but had always declined.But after nearly two years of not performing because of the pandemic — and after watching an energetic tape of Leonard Bernstein conducting “Fidelio” — Kurs decided to accept this offer to work with the Philharmonic and its music director, Gustavo Dudamel.Indi Robinson and Gregor Lopes, deaf actors, rehearse a scene from Beethoven’s opera “Fidelio.”Michael Tyrone Delaney for The New York TimesThe extraordinary nature of the endeavor was clear as singers and actors gathered last week for rehearsals at a United Methodist church in Toluca Lake, in the San Fernando Valley, some 10 miles from Disney Hall. Each day was a mix of languages, movement and simultaneous translations — between voiced German, Spanish and English and signed American Sign Language and Venezuelan Sign Language.For the production, 135 singers, actors, choir members (singing and signing), and orchestra players, along with Dudamel, who will conduct the production, will fill a stage that usually just accommodates an orchestra.“We are creating the dance of the double-cast,” said Alberto Arvelo, the director of the production, in which each character is portrayed by both a singer and an actor. “We have been conceiving ‘Fidelio’ for both audiences — we want to create to create an opera for a deaf audience as well. From the first bar of the opera.”For the actors, who are accustomed to performing in musicals including “Spring Awakening,” which has been part of Deaf West’s repertory, adapting to a more operatic style has been something of an adjustment.“It’s a challenging and terrifying experience,” said Russell Harvard, the actor playing Rocco, the jailer, after rehearsing a scene where he took Leonore to the dungeon to see her husband (husbands: a singer and an actor) sleeping on the floor. “I have never done anything like this before.”Josh Castille, a deaf performance artist acting the role of Florestan, left, worked with the director, Alberto Arvelo, center, and Ian Koziara, the tenor singing the role of Florestan.Michael Tyrone Delaney for The New York TimesThe actors have to translate German (the language of Beethoven’s opera, and one that few of them know, so lip-reading is not an option for most) into American Sign Language. And they have to get used to the florid, multiple repetitions of a single word or line in the score, all of which are second nature for opera singers used to coloratura runs, and find ways to convey, with signs, the big moments when a singer sends a single note soaring through the hall.“Oh gosh — it is stressing me out,” said Amelia Hensley, the actor portraying Leonore, who disguises herself as a man named Fidelio to get a job in the jail where her husband, a political prisoner, is being held, in the hopes of saving him.“I have to hold my sign for an incredibly long time because the note is held that long,” she said. “It’s difficult for me to understand because I don’t hear. And I want to make sure that the deaf audience will understand me and understand why I’m holding this out, because it’s not natural to the language to hold a sign that long.”This production of “Fidelio” is opening less than a month after “CODA” won the Academy Award for best picture, and Troy Kotsur, who used to be member of Deaf West, won the Oscar for best supporting actor, the first deaf man to be so honored by the academy. Deaf West is developing a musical version of “CODA.” (Dudamel and his wife, Maria Valverde, said in an interview they had seen the movie three times.)This production is steeped in classical music history, since Beethoven experienced hearing loss in the last decades of his life. (“Ah, how could I possibly admit an infirmity in the one sense which ought to be more perfect in me than in others,” the composer and musician wrote in 1802 in an anguished letter addressed to his brothers that came to be known as the Heiligenstadt Testament.)María Inmaculada Velásquez Echeverria, the artistic director of White Hands Choir.Michael Tyrone Delaney for The New York TimesThat history intrigued Dudamel as he was arranging a 250th anniversary celebration of Beethoven’s birth just before the pandemic. “It was how to make the opera be part of these two worlds — the two worlds of Beethoven,” he said.And it is what drew Deaf West to this project; its members considered what Beethoven faced writing and conducting while dealing with a steady decline in his hearing.“Maybe he did it through feeling the vibrations of the music?” Kurs said. “I don’t know Beethoven’s exact process, but there’s a similarity to how I experience music. I’ve never heard music in my entire life, but I think that I understand it.”There is much debate among biographers and musicologists about Beethoven’s level of hearing at various points in his career. He wrote and revised “Fidelio” over the course of nearly a decade, from its first performance in 1805 to the substantially revised version of 1814. By 1813, he had several ear trumpets made. By 1818, he began carrying pads of paper for people to write down what they were saying to him. While he was able to continue composing as his hearing deteriorated, it became increasingly difficult for him to perform and conduct.“It never really affected his ability to compose or orchestrate because he was wildly creative throughout his life,” said Theodore J. Albrecht, a retired professor of musicology at Kent State University, who has written extensively about Beethoven.Jan Swafford, a Beethoven biographer, said the composer began reporting hearing loss as early as 1798. “He would not have lost pitch as much as color,” he said of its onset.In the original plan, before the pandemic, this production was to be presented in Europe, with Dudamel conducting the Mahler Chamber Orchestra along with the White Hands Choir, a group of deaf and hard of hearing performers associated with El Sistema, the music education program in Venezuela where Dudamel trained. After the tour through Europe was canceled, Dudamel revived the idea here in Los Angeles, this time working with his own orchestra and Deaf West, the renowned Los Angeles-based theater.Dudamel is familiar with the complexities of leading an orchestra, singers and a choir; he is also the music director for the Paris Opera. But this week, he will also be leading the deaf and hard-of-hearing actors from Deaf West and choir members from Venezuela.The conductor Gustavo Dudamel, left, worked with members of the opera’s cast and chorus at a recent rehearsal.Michael Tyrone Delaney for The New York TimesDudamel told Kurs he had to some extent been prepared for this because of his work at the podium, especially as someone who conducts orchestras all over the world, with players who speak many different languages. (Some orchestra players disdain overly verbal conductors in any language, preferring to work through the music.)“In a way, a conductor needs to have sign language conducting the orchestra,” Dudamel told Kurs during a break in a rehearsal. “You cannot say anything. You can only show them.”Valverde, an actress and filmmaker, is producing a documentary about the White Hands Choir, whose members wear distinctive white gloves, and was there filming the choir as her husband led it in rehearsal.The aspirations of this performance will be signaled from first notes of the overture.The Venezuelan choir will use choreography and facial expressions to convey the power of the overture which opens the opera: The other day, it was wide smiles and hands raised to the air in a representation of fireflies. “Fidelio’s overture is especially optimistic,” Arvelo, the director said. “In such a dark story, the overture starts with this moment in major tones. We were like: How can we transmit this with images?”During the spoken stretches of the opera, the audience will hear nothing: the actors will communicate the dialogue in sign language, which will be translated on supertitles cast above the stage.The production will last for three nights.“I think it’s going to be a mixed audience,” said Chad Smith, the head of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. “There will be a lot of the L.A. Phil audience who are coming to hear Gustavo and the LA Phil perform one of the great works from the canon.”Smith added that the hope was to also have people who are deaf or hard of hearing, who are in the space for “perhaps the first time.”The experience has proved to be as powerful for the opera singers as for the actors. Ryan Speedo Green, the bass-baritone who appeared as Uncle Paul in “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” at the Metropolitan Opera last year, and is the singing counterpart to Russell Harvard’s Rocco, said this was the most inclusive opera he had ever witnessed.“People want to see themselves onstage,” he said. “For once in my life, I’m going to be someone’s voice and they’re going to be my action. He is my body and my action and my intent and my physical interpretation. And I am his voice to the audience, to the hearing audience. We are one entity — Rocco. He is attached to me, as much as I am attached to him.” More