Music to All Ears
'Nobody's Perfect' Explores Childen's Attitudes About Deafness

By Jane Horwitz
Special to The Washington Post
Wednesday, October 10, 2007

In a small rehearsal room deep in the Kennedy Center, four actresses playing 9- and 10-year-olds shriek in delight at an imaginary purple pizza: "Purple! Disgusting! Yeah!!!" Later in the scene they burst into song about their pal Megan's "perfect purple party" for her 10th birthday.

Megan is deaf and her friends communicate with her in American Sign Language (ASL) or when apart via the Internet. The new girl in school, the perfect-acting Alexis, puts a dent in Megan's jaunty self-confidence by seeming to be put off by her deafness and turning down an invitation to her party.

And thereby hangs the pigtail in "Nobody's Perfect," which explores in a lighthearted way how kids treat kids with disabilities.

Based on the kid-lit book by deaf actress Marlee Matlin and Doug Cooney, the world premiere musical marks a joint venture between the Kennedy Center's Theater for Young Audiences and VSA Arts. It will run Oct. 19-Nov. 3 at the center's Family Theater. Cooney, a Los Angeles-based author, playwright, teacher and performer, adapted the book for the stage and wrote the lyrics. Deborah Wicks La Puma composed the tunes.

Cooney and director Coy Middlebrook, who earned his ASL chops assistant-directing Deaf West's hit version of the musical "Big River" on Broadway, on tour and at Ford's Theatre, speak of the complexity of staging any such show.

There are "three different languages flying through the storytelling" at all times -- music, speech and sign language, explains Middlebrook. In rehearsals, ASL experts help the hearing actors refine their signing and, in the case of Middlebrook's longtime collaborator Alexandria Wailes, translate the dialogue into ASL that is "in sync with either the dialogue or the musical measure," Middlebrook says.

Cooney notes "the unique challenge of adapting it for the stage was trying to figure out how to make it a musical and comprehensible by the sign language community . . . and the hearing community at the same time." The show should also make clear, he adds, "the hurdles in communication that Megan would experience in the authentic world."

In an e-mail to Backstage about lessons from her own childhood that infuse her Megan books, Matlin, now a mother of four, writes, "Being deaf was not a handicap to me, so why should others fret about it, or treat me any differently . . . I want kids to be able to enjoy, revel and embrace their uniqueness . . . the real 'handicap' of deafness isn't in the ear; it's in the mind."

A sign-language novice when he began working with Matlin on the trilogy based on her childhood, Cooney kept it that way "so that I would see it with a child's eyes . . . a hearing child's naivete." In the process, he came to understand why younger hearing kids easily glom onto signing. "Kids are particularly drawn to the code. . . . Can you imagine, a child being able to speak sign language in a classroom? It's a blast." (The author of a popular kids' novel, "The Beloved Dearly," Cooney jokes that "in certain fourth- and fifth-grade classrooms, I'm a rock star.")

In the role of Megan, deaf actress Tami Lee Santimyer sometimes signs and sometimes speaks. In only one scene does Megan sign without anyone interpreting into the spoken word, giving the audience a chance "to see her in her true language, in a situation where she can express herself without having to reach beyond her own language," Middlebrook says.

If kids come away from "Nobody's Perfect" with nothing else, he says, they should realize that "the only real thing you need to communicate with somebody else is the willingness . . . just that intention, [and] you'll get the job done."

Headed in Many Directions

Newly free of his duties as artistic director of Theater Alliance after six years, Jeremy Skidmore has been following his ambition to go freelance and direct on as many stages as possible.

At the moment, he is back at Theater Alliance as guest director of "Ambition Facing West," Anthony Clarvoe's saga about a family pursuing its dreams ever westward, from Croatia circa 1910 to Wyoming in the '40s and Japan in the '80s. After day-long rehearsals at H Street Playhouse, where the show will run Friday through Nov. 4, Skidmore zips over to College Park to stage a University of Maryland student production of Friedrich Duerrenmatt's "The Physicists" (Nov. 1-11).

Later this season he will stage David Hare's transcript-based drama about the Iraq War, "Stuff Happens," at Olney Theatre Center and will be the assistant director to Aaron Posner for "Macbeth" at the Folger.

The 30-year-old Skidmore sees his challenge in directing Clarvoe's intimate, poetical 1997 play as finding the clarity within its intricate story. The narrative often loops back on itself and sometimes characters from all three eras are onstage simultaneously, their dialogue overlapping.

Clarvoe's script, says Skidmore, has no "huge, major pyrotechnic plot devices. It's purely people-based and conversation-based. When you're directing it, every single moment has to be completely clear, simple and honest. . . . It's completely reliant on complicated human interaction."

Skidmore has previously told Backstage of his fondness for nonlinear narratives that offer opportunities for highly visual, movement-based theatrics -- "things that make plays uniquely theater, that would never work as film." But now that he's a director for hire, "people are asking me to do things, rather than me picking them all myself. So it's diversifying the work I'm doing."

Follow Spots

¿ Citing scheduling conflicts, Keegan Theatre is replacing David Mamet's "Glengarry Glen Ross" as its fall show, even though the company is now touring it in Ireland. The possibility of a national tour based on the 2005 Broadway revival means the small Keegan troupe has lost the rights to do the play locally for the time being, says Jeremy Skidmore, who directed. The company will instead reprise last season's "Mojo Mickybo" by Owen McCafferty Nov. 15-Dec. 1 at Church Street Theater.

¿ Film actress Karen Black ("Five Easy Pieces," "The Great Gatsby," "Nashville") will kick off Ganymede Arts' fall festival with the premiere of her one-woman show, "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Sing the Song," Oct. 19 at Church Street Theater. The festival, which runs through Oct. 28, will include play readings, choral music and dance. Visit http://www.ganymedearts.org.