How to craft a script in a language that can’t be written
“But there came a point when I had to turn off the radio play running in my head. I was never going to hear these lines; I was going to watch them. My old way of working was irrelevant. I was writing for a language that only existed visually. I had no idea if my jokes would work.
I needed people who knew better than I did. Enter: Alexandria Wailes and Anne Tomasetti, my directors of artistic sign language. An ASL director is a creative collaborator who functions almost like a dramaturge. Alexandria and Anne are both Deaf and artists themselves, with extensive theater backgrounds, who have a deep understanding of Deaf culture and history. We circled up, using my script as a launching pad to bring the language to life.”
At our first meeting, Alexandria and I spent five hours at the kitchen table, working on the translation line by line. She would ask about the subtext, what the character was feeling, my intention behind every exchange. She would show me possible sign choices, and we would discuss their meaning. Sometimes a sign didn’t feel right, and we would change it. Sometimes the English line changed instead. I watched Alexandria sign a line of Ruby’s, “Do you want me to die here?” and the sign for “die” didn’t capture the anger I wanted the character to feel. I needed something sharper, more staccato, that would help the actress channel rage. We played around until Alexandria found, “This is killing me.”
Throughout this process, Alexandria took notes in ASL gloss — a form of notation for ASL that uses English words along with diagrams and drawings. She made videos for the actors. But mostly, it was muscle memory. She was keeping the language in her body.