Boffo! Descriptive Services Playing Well on Broadway
By Deborah Kendrick
Each of us has particular iconic attachments to
destinations away from home. Key West might make you think of Hemingway,
Cozumel of Mayan ruins, and various European locales of cathedrals or
castles.
Having traveled to New York to speak at the public library
there in June, it wasn’t surprising that friends asked, “Did you see
a show?” What surprised me was my answer.
“A show” when associated with New York generally
implies Broadway. Broadway generally conjures up thoughts of a musical. And a
Broadway musical equates to lavish stage productions, singing, dancing, rapid
movement, frequent changes of scene. It’s a genre I’ve always loved
but approached with a certain degree of trepidation. ssentially, the question
always hovering over me is whether I’ll be able to follow the action,
appreciate the set and make sense of what the characters are doing as they
dance, sing, leap and twirl their way through a dazzling story.
Live audio description has been available in theaters
across the nation for well more than 20 years now and is a feature that both
enhances and equalizes the theater experience for people who are blind or have
low vision. Typically, a trained describer with a headset is stationed in the
light booth (or sometimes in the back of the audience) and quietly slides
descriptive comments between bits of dialogue
Those comments could be something like, “John throws
the lamp across the room,” or “A figure, dressed in black, creeps
into the room, pulling a small pistol from beneath his coat” or “Mary
folds the love letter and tucks it back into her diary.” The idea of good
audio description is to provide information that cannot be obtained through
other senses. A describer would not, for instance, provide the news that the
phone rang, that the engine roared or that Michael ran up the stairs.
With live description, there is typically one opportunity
in a show’s six- or eightor 10-week run for a theatergoer who is blind to
catch it. Going to New York for only five days, then, I figured the chances of
there being a show that I wanted to see, and of that same show’s single
opportunity for audio description occurring during my visit, were meager at
best.
Then I found a little notice about Sound Associates and
D-Scriptive having recently been installed at the Neil Simon Theatre for
“Catch Me If You Can” – the very show I wanted to see.
There is no single “special” performance for
which you can buy a ticket and hear description. If D-Scriptive has been done,
it is there for a patron for any show, any time, any day throughout the
show’s run.
D-Scriptive (digital description) takes the concept of
description of live theater for blind audiences to an entirely new level. From
the patron’s perspective, it goes like this:
You pick up a small receiver, about the size of a cell
phone, with a single earbud. You take your seat in the auditorium and listen to
a prerecorded description of the set and the actors, which eliminates the
problem of character descriptions that step on dialogue. And then the magic of
the technology kicks in. As the show begins, the prerecorded loop is
immediately interrupted and the describer tells you, clearly and concisely,
what you can’t see for yourself as it unfolds on the stage.
Carl Anthony Tramon, director of special services for
Sound Associates, and the individual who both writes and records the
D-Scriptive script, explained how the process is made to work.
The computer carrying the digital recording of the
D-Scriptive track is plugged into the show’s light, sound and electrics
boards. Everything that occurs on stage has, of course, multiple cues, and when
those cues are sent to the recording Tramon has created, the computer is
signaled to count down the correct number of milliseconds before playing the
clip that informs the blind or low-vision patron what is occurring on
stage.
While the end result sounds simple, it involves hundreds
of hours and plenty of talent. Tramon said he typically sees a show dozens of
times before finishing the D-Scriptive narrative
“After I’ve seen it the first time, I like to
close my eyes and just listen to the audience,” he said. “When they
gasp or laugh, and I’m not seeing why, I know that’s something that
has to go into the script.”
D-Scriptive is only one of three special services devised
by Sound Associates to bring more people into live theater. I-Caption provides
dialogue via infrared on a handheld PDA-like device for deaf and hard of
hearing patrons, and ShowTrans provides language audio translation – on a
device like that used for D-Scriptive – into a variety of languages,
including Japanese, Spanish and French.
Tramon, who also acts and directs, grew up in the theater
and has a strong belief that the joys of the theater should be available to all
audiences. His mother, Anne Tramon, vice president of the company, and Richard
Fitzgerald, company president, began offering assistive listening services to
hard-of-hearing theatergoers in the 1970s. Soon after, the two began their
first foray into audio description with the circus.
Because “The Greatest show on Earth” is, after
all, a smorgasbord of amazing sights as well as a cacophony of sound, Anne
Tramon reasoned that blind children should be able to see the show, too. After
that, the natural next step was to take the concept into Broadway theater
productions for adults who were blind or had low vision. Carl Anthony Tramon
grew up observing his mother’s passion for such services and was a
seasoned describer himself when the marriage of technology and special services
occurred to him.
In May, New York City came through with a grant to provide
the three services – D-Scriptive, I-Caption and ShowTrans – to four
Broadway shows. Before that, the services had been installed for
“Wicked,” “Mamma Mia,” “Jersey Boys” and
“Billy Elliott.” The first show to be completed under the grant was
“Catch Me If You Can”; “The Book of Mormon” currently is
having the services installed. Once completed, a person who needs description,
captioning or language translation can attend any of those shows during
anyperformance and have access to a full theater experience.
Eventually, the company hopes to take these services to
other cities across the country and, indeed, around the world. D-Scriptive for
“Wicked,” for instance, is now in place in Los Angeles and San
Francisco. As of this writing, Carl Anthony Tramon was in discussions regarding
D-Scriptive for “Wicked” at a theater in London. Each production, he
said, is slightly different, so some script changes are needed for each new
venue, but the cost is considerably less for theaters requesting a show that
already has undergone the work of scripting for D-Scriptive, I-Caption or
ShowTrans receivers.
Describing the visual elements of a stage production
requires more than 20/20 eyesight – it is an art form in its own right. To
do it well is to describe only the aspects that a blind person can’t
discern otherwise and to choose words that convey the image seen without
interpretation or condescension. As an actor and director himself, Tramon
understands this fully, and the result is brilliant, yet simple and provides a
seamless experience for a blind person in the audience.
If you ask me if I saw a show in June while in New York,
my answer is yes, I saw “Catch Me If You Can.” And, even though I
still happen to be blind, I genuinely unequivocally mean that I saw the
show.
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Deborah Kendrick is a newspaper columnist, editor and
poet. She is currently working on a biography of Dr. Abraham Nemeth. She can be
reached at Kendrick.deborah@gmail.com. |
