WPSD partners with Little Lake Theatre

A community theater in Washington County is hoping to break a milestone for the area.

The Little Lake Theatre in Canonsburg is partnering with the Western Pennsylvania School for the Deaf, based in Edgewood, to put on a production that could be one of the first community theater shows in the area to feature both spoken English and American Sign Language, making it accessible to a broader audience. It will cast hearing actors from the Little Lake community and deaf or hard of hearing actors from the School for the Deaf.

That type of production is more common on a professional level, said Jena Oberg, the artistic director of Little Lake Theatre. But she’s not aware of any community theaters doing the same, especially for student actors.

“This production and this project started simply with the definition of the word community,” Ms. Oberg said at a news conference announcing the new project Friday. “We defined that as being accessible and welcoming to anyone in our area, which started a discussion about whether we truly were that.

“As a community theater, we started to dream about what we could do to make it possible to bring deaf and hard of hearing accessible theater to our space and our community,” she said.

At Little Lake, “we just strive to be really good quality theater in your backyard,” she said. “And so now we get to be quality theater in your backyard that everybody can experience.”

To put on the show, Little Lake Theatre received a $30,000 grant from LaCarte Enterprises, a uniform fulfillment, rental and cleaning services company based in Charleroi. That funding was made possible through tax credits and support from Pennsylvania’s Department of Community and Economic Development.

Speaking at the event Friday, John LaCarte, one of the six members of the LaCarte family that runs the business, told the audience he had a son who has a disability. Now, he is attending the Rochester Institute of Technology, where the school recommends every student learn ASL in order to better communicate with all their classmates.

Mr. LaCarte’s daughter, who is studying drama at Carnegie Mellon University, told him: “I believe theater can change the world.”

“The inclusivity that the arts provides, the ability to overcome barriers and challenges, is truly a gift that the theater gives us in all of our lives everyday,” Mr. LaCarte said.

The grant money will help Little Lake fund the usual aspects of a production — props, costumes and equipment — as well as initiatives specific to a show that aims to break barriers, Ms. Oberg said.

It will fund training for the hearing actors to learn American Sign Language and deaf culture, as well as similar training for box-office staff at Little Lake so the theater can accommodate more audience members.

It also will fund a deaf consultant, or someone who uses ASL as their primary language. ASL uses a different sentence structure, so the consultant will help craft the play in both languages.

“We aren’t going to sign every word literally, word for word,” Ms. Oberg said. “So how do we tell this story? How do we make it clear to our audiences? What’s the best way to express this thought or this idea or this image?”

In Pennsylvania, roughly 1.1 million people are deaf or hard of hearing, according to estimates from the Pennsylvania Office for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, part of the Department of Labor and Industry.

The Western Pennsylvania School for the Deaf serves more than 350 children, from kindergarten to age 22, across five sites.

“At WPSD our goal is to create opportunities, and open new doors for deaf and hard of hearing children,” said Steven Farmer, CEO for the school.

“This [project] is a tremendous value not only for the students, and new opportunities that will be offered to our deaf and hard of hearing children, but also for increasing awareness regarding deaf culture [and] American Sign Language here in our region,” he said.

At Little Lake, the actors will tell the story of Captain Louie Jr., a play based on the children’s book “The Trip” by Ezra Jack Keats. It follows a young boy after he moves to a new neighborhood and takes a magical flight back to his old home to learn more about making new friends and the importance of old ones.

The theater will put on five shows, as well as two or three for student audiences, and already has an opening date set for next October.

Auditions will begin at the Western Pennsylvania School for the Deaf soon, but the theater already has cast a group of 12 hearing actors from the Little Lake community, Ms. Oberg said. That group has work to do right away; they will start taking ASL classes in January.

Lauren Rosenblatt: lrosenblatt@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1565.

First Published December 10, 2021, 9:11pm

Source: Post-Gazette