Just a Song at Twilight: A New Play about Growing Up in a Deaf Household
I was about two or three when I fi rst realized that my mother was deaf. It was when the doorbell rang and she didn't respond. I ran to her, yelling, "The door, the door!" There were many other cries like that as I grew older: "The phone, the phone!" "The egg lady's outside, asking for you." "Aunt Mag called and wants to know when you want to meet tomorrow." And so on.
All through childhood I was my mother's ears, a responsibility that seemed quite natural and unremarkable at the time. It was a fact of life, like having to go to school or sharing a small bedroom with my Uncle Louie.
It was the mid-1930s. The place: a three-and-a-halfroom apartment in the Pelham Parkway section of the Bronx. My mother, Henriette, was in her early 30s. She
had been born with good hearing, as had her older sister,
Marion my Aunt Mag. Both of them, however, were
stricken with otosclerosis in their early 20s. The disease
left them with almost no hearing in one ear and only a little
in the other. Of the two, Marion had the better hearing. In
those pre-hearing aid days, they compensated for their
hearing loss by lip-reading their way through life.
This resulted in another thing I took for granted as a kid:
that I should always face my mother directly and manipulate
my face and mouth as emphatically as I could so that
she could "read" what I was saying. Much later I came to
realize that my mother had been bullied into lip-reading
by her sister. Mother, backed up by my Uncle Louie, had
favored studying sign-language, if only because it was
indeed a complete language, one which would have provided
them with the tools to communicate fully not only
with each other, but with the world at large.
Aunt Mag shot this argument down, on the grounds that
American Sign Language, with its gestures and grimaces,
was a dead giveaway that you were deaf a handicapped
and inferior person, according to her.
This confl ict lies at the heart of my new play, "Just a
Song at Twilight," which closed recently in Hollywood at
the Write Act Repertory Theatre after a world-premiere run of seven weeks. The play is personal and autobiographical.
I waited to write it until most of the key characters
my mother and father, Uncle Louie, Aunt Mag
and her husband Carl were safely dead. With them not
around to take issue with or possibly feel hurt by the
way I portrayed them, I had the freedom and license to
write about them as honestly and fully as I could.
Writing "Just a Song at Twilight" was a cathartic and
rewarding experience. Not only was I fi nally able to tell a
long-held, deeply-felt story, the response from audiences
and critics was heartwarming. The Tolucan Times, for example,
called the play "a thoughtful, compassionate look
at hearing impairment and changing family dynamics."
Even more meaningful, to me, was the comment of a deaf
person who attended the opening-night performance. He
sat in the front row, following the action by virtue of his remarkable
skill as a lip-reader. After the curtain came down,
he sought me out and, with tears in his eyes, thanked me
for the play. "It was touching, true and beautiful," he said.
"I'm coming back to see it again."
My only regret is that the production's tight budget did
not allow for signers to be hired to interpret the show for
the larger deaf community in Los Angeles. Not being able
to reach out to them was disappointing, but perhaps that
will be remedied the next time the play is produced. In the
meantime, I will have to be satisfi ed with the knowledge
that I have brought my mother and aunt to life again as
vibrantly and faithfully as I could, and that I have paid tribute
to those courageous and remarkable women and to
every other person with hearing loss who has walked in
their shoes.
