National Theatre of the Deaf

Before 1967, there was little professional entertainment for the deaf community. In the cities, organizations for the deaf put on amateur shows and mime presentations. There was no professional group of actors who were deaf or signed. A few productions had included deaf characters in their cast but these were played by hearing individuals and did not give the deaf an avenue for self-expression. Bernard Bragg, who was deaf, performed on stage as a professional mime, at this time; mime was the only route to the professional stage for a deaf person. In 1967, Bernard was the only professional actor available who was deaf to help form the National Theatre of the Deaf.

The impetus for a deaf professional troupe of actors came from the hearing world. The Broadway production of The Miracle Worker, with Anne Bancroft, was accepted as the first production which included signed language

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s to prove that an all deaf cast was capable of developing into a professional acting company. Bernard Bragg was the only professional actor to join the company. The culmination of the group's first effort was the production of Iphigenia in Aulis and the taping of a special on deaf performers using their art for hearing audiences for an NBC Special (Powers 119). The NBC Special opened up the debate on oralism verse manualism in the theatre. Until this point, David Hays had not been aware of the potential problem he faced from the oral camp of the deaf and hard-of-hearing population. Hays had seen the potential for beauty in the joint signing and reading of a play. He did not comprehend that the Alexander Graham Bell Association would protest the airing of the NBC Special as detrimental to the education and prejudicial to the deaf community (Baldwin 21). The Alexander Graham Bell Association viewed the presentation as an indication that signing was inevitable for all deaf children and that signing was an artificial language (Baldwin 21). Hays answered the charges of the Alexander Graham Bell Association by appealing to the cultural aspects of the birth of a theatre movement, the ability of the theatre to show highly gifte
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1449
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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