Inclusivity at the Stratford Theatre Fest

            The 2014 Stratford Theatre Festival brought a lot of underrepresented groups to the center stage, quite literally. Two plays in particular, “Mother Courage” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” feature sign language and deaf characters throughout.

            In Bertol Brecht’s “Mother Courage,” the title character’s daughter, Katrin, is mute and communicates through hand motions and shouting. She became my favorite character throughout the festival because of her ability to act and create emotions and dialogue without actual words. Towards the ending of the play, she resolutely beat a drum to warn the village of an attack, but was sadly killed for it. Even though Mother Courage’s other two children also died in the play, I didn’t feel the same sense of sadness.

Katrin truly shined in the play and showed me how many feelings and emotions can be communicated without words. Although Katrin did use hand motions at times, in other scenes she was silent and relied just on facial expressions and body language to speak for her.

“A Midsummer Night’s Dream” also used sign language throughout the play, except that was a special feature to this interpretation. During a question and answer talk back, Bethany Jilliard, who plays Hermia, mentioned that the cast included two hard of hearing members. Adding sign language to the play not only helped include all cast members, it also made the play feel more modern.

At first I didn’t understand this element of the play; I wasn’t really familiar with the plot and thought that Jilliard was signing the entire play. While that would have been incredible on its own, it turns out that the signing was more woven into the play by featuring Egeus, Hermia’s father, as a deaf character.            

Not only did including deaf and hard of hearing characters create an interesting and unique take on the play, it also made the play much more inclusive and representative. In fact, Jilliard mentioned that they cast was working at a version of the play with all dialogue signed to make Shakespeare accessible to an audience that has not really been able to enjoy Shakespeare before.