Scenesaver have proudly partnered with the Ukraine Fringe to showcase a selection of unique projects online which could not be performed in Ukraine this year. The festival is running until 3 September 2023 and all shows are free to watch, with the option to make a donation towards the war effort and creative practitioners in Ukraine.
Listen… Can you hear me now? is a one-women show written and performed by Gloria Rosen and directed by Suzanne Bachner which tells the story of Rosen’s life growing up as a hearing child with two deaf parents. As mentioned last time, I have experienced some hearing loss myself, and always find creative explorations of the d/Deaf and hard of hearing communities interesting and think it’s really important to raise awareness of how the loss of hearing in a hearing world can impact people. The show is available to watch with sound, with American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation and Captions, or with ASL interpretation only.
The play opens with Rosen’s description of a plane crash which happened close to her childhood home after which she had to wake both of her parents who couldn’t hear the accident. The sense of panic from the time is excellent and creates a real sense of time and how overwhelming being the family’s ears was for her.
There are descriptions of different experiences of d/Deafness and hearing loss, as Rosen’s mother was born hard of hearing and her father experienced complete hearing loss as a young child. Children may be seen as “ignoring” the adults around them meaning that their issues with hearing can be put down to problems with behaviour or intelligence, especially if they have naturally developed lip reading skills and so only appear to have these issues when they can’t see the person speaking to them.
I didn’t realise how much I actually had begun to rely on lip reading for a while, but eventually I started to notice I couldn’t hear people if they covered their mouths or spoke facing away from me. I had one (particularly lovely…) manager in a previous job role who, when I told him I couldn’t hear him if he wasn’t looking at me, snapped that we “listen with our ears, not our eyes”. Nice bloke.
Rosen describes how her mother and father both attended schools for the d/Deaf, with very different experiences, her mother being essentially banned from signing and needing to learn how to get on in a hearing world primarily using lip reading for communication and her father’s school teaching him ASL exclusively. Lip reading of course has its own limitations, and Rosen describes how she often needed to interpret conversations and even the television and music for her mother using a blank face and clear diction to ensure her mother could read her lips. The requirement to keep her face neutral often led to her parents questioning her mood.
Rosen portrays a number of people in addition to herself, as is common in one-actor pieces, and does an excellent job of altering her characterisation to represent the different individuals around her. Her portrayal of her mother in particular is brilliant and the strength of her mother’s presence in her and the rest of the family’s lives is palpable. Rosen herself was primarily seen as the interpreter and the family’s link to hearing world, as her brother’s future was seen as more important with his needing to study to get a good job and successful marriage.
Her mother’s strong presence also comes across in her determination to marry a d/Deaf man from a hearing family as marrying a hearing man would be seen as a betrayal of the community, but she also wanted to have hearing children so that they wouldn’t go through the same difficulties she had. This of course causes its own difficulties for Rosen and her brother, whose mother believes they have nothing to complain about, as they can hear.
Snippets of love letters between Rosen’s parents enrich the sense of their relationship and their fight to keep their children when their family didn’t believe they could raise two hearing children without help creates a sense of poignancy. The decision to raise their children without teaching them sign causes the sense of a rift between the children and their father, whom they can only communicate with via their mother.
There are also some interesting observations on “passing” with Rosen’s mother wanting to use her lip reading to “pass” as hearing and Rosen wishing to “pass” as d/Deaf in the clubs her parents take her to so that she can fit into the tight knit d/Deaf community. Interesting progressions occur in the narrative as technology such as text phones develop which expand Rosen’s mother’s methods of communication.
Listen… Can you hear me now? is an incredibly poignant piece which is brilliantly written and performed by Rosen and does a fantastic job of showing someone’s journey in finding their place and their voice when they have spent their life caught between two worlds. I highly recommend watching this moving drama which is a wonderful addition to this amazing fringe festival.
Next time I’ll be talking about the history of sign language in the next edition of my The History of… series and I’ll then be covering my own experience of the concept of “passing” within the disabled community.
Take care,
Donna
Self-care snippet
I’m currently partway through the Retreat West Storytelling with the Tao Te Ching course and it’s really helped me to reflect more on myself as a writer and develop the spiritual connection I have with my work.
Amanda has recently started a new Substack on the same subject, and I highly recommend giving it a follow.
Things I’ve seen, heard, read and talked about
Read to Me Another Ukraine Fringe show, I reviewed this one for North West End. It is a criminal drama exploring how far someone would be willing to go for love, told from the point of view of Rollin who has dyslexia and has recently been imprisoned at Strangeways.
Wearing AFO splints as an adult with cerebral palsy An interesting piece about the role of AFO splints in the management of cerebral palsy and why the author, Chloe Tear, chooses to wear them in adulthood.
Ministers skip UN meeting on disability rights I knew this was coming, but that obviously doesn’t make it any better. It just goes to show how little disabled rights mean to the government today. Actions speak louder than words.
Health board admits mental health and disability patient records 'missing' A very upsetting incident about lost paper medical records.
Disability Cricket Team looking for Funding to Purchase Sports Wheelchair Ending on a positive note, this is a request for support to help with buying a specialist wheelchair for the Isle of Wight Disability Cricket Team.