February 8, 2007
A French Theater Where Even Those Who Can't Hear Share One Language

By ALAN RIDING

PARIS, Feb. 7 - Emmanuelle Laborit is a strikingly expressive actress. While her lively face is conveying her feelings, her fast-moving hands and arms elucidate her thoughts. Being deaf since birth has never deterred her. Talented and determined, she has built her stage and screen career around her gift for communication. Now, at 35, she is embarking on her greatest theatrical adventure so far.

The International Visual Théâtre, founded here in 1976 to promote the use of sign language and to present deaf actors onstage, has for the first time found a permanent home in a renovated 185-seat theater near Pigalle. And Ms. Laborit is its director and its main star.

Her aim is simple: To build a bridge between deaf and hearing people by demonstrating that they can communicate perfectly with one another onstage as well as with an audience also made up of the deaf and hearing.

The company's opening production, "K. Lear," an adaptation of Shakespeare's tragedy, with Ms. Laborit in the role of Cordelia, goes a long way toward proving her case. Imaginative, moving and eminently theatrical, the production drew full houses for three weeks in Paris before recently going on tour.

No doubt part of the attraction was Ms. Laborit herself, who has been something of a household name here since 1993. That year she won a Molière, the equivalent of a Tony Award, for her performance in "Les Enfants du Silence," a French version of Mark Medoff's award-winning play "Children of a Lesser God." It led to roles in numerous other plays and a dozen movies.

The attention, which gave her access to government circles, was a factor in helping her raise $3.4 million in official grants to restore the crumbling century-old theater in a cul-de-sac called Cité Chaptal, which the company took over in 2003. By assuming the project, however, Ms. Laborit was also repaying a debt of gratitude to the International Visual Théâtre. Almost 30 years ago it changed her life.

Since the late 19th century French education policy had banned sign language and required deaf children to be taught to lip read and, where possible, to use hearing aids and learn to speak. One early argument was that God could not be expressed in sign language. Later it was claimed that sign language further isolated the deaf.

"It is a fantasy of hearing people who want the deaf to hear," Ms. Laborit said through an interpreter, "as if deafness were a handicap that should be cured."

This was still official policy in the early 1970's when Ms. Laborit's parents realized that their daughter was deaf. Doctors told them that she should learn to speak, but her parents were not persuaded. When Emmanuelle was 7, they heard about the International Visual Théâtre, founded two years earlier by a deaf American theater director, Alfredo Corrado, and a French colleague, Jean Grémion.

With the help of two other Americans, Bill Moody and Ralph Robbins, both adept at American Sign Language, they began training deaf French actors and holding workshops for deaf children. It was there that Ms. Laborit discovered sign language. "From that day on I became a chatty and happy little girl," she recalled.

In 1980, when she was 9, she appeared onstage for the first time in a play created and directed by Mr. Robbins. Though she would not devote herself to acting for another decade, she remained in contact with the International Visual Théâtre, which then occupied space in the Château de Vincennes outside Paris. With limited resources, the company concentrated on teaching French Sign Language and was able to produce only about one play a year.

After her success in "Les Enfants du Silence" Ms. Laborit rejoined the troupe to play the lead role in "Antigone," which was presented at the 1995 Avignon Festival and toured Greece and several Asian countries.

In 2002, when local authorities wanted to use their space and the theater had to leave Vincennes, Ms. Laborit was invited to join Jean-François La Bouverie as the company's co-director. The following year she became its sole director and began planning its rebirth in its own theater in the heart of Paris. Encouragingly, French policy also changed. In 1991 schools were authorized to teach sign language; and in 2005 sign language was recognized as an official language.

While deaf theater has long existed in the United States and in some European countries, the International Visual Théâtre is unusual in that it also teaches sign language to about 800 students a year. But it is through its stage productions that the company, which has an annual budget of $2.2 million, now hopes to reach out to both deaf and hearing audiences. Surprisingly, the deaf public may prove harder to attract.

"Hearing people are more used to going to the theater," Ms. Laborit explained. "For obvious reasons the deaf don't normally go to the theater. So, yes, it's normal that more hearing people attended 'K. Lear.' It will take time for the deaf to learn about this theater and to get used to coming here."

"K. Lear," adapted and directed by Marie Montegani, involved both deaf and hearing actors, some of whom also learned sign language for the occasion. Yet while the "speaking" gestures of the deaf actors had to be interpreted, either by other actors or occasionally on a screen behind the stage, the pace of the play never faltered, with the sign language doubling as a passionate form of choreography. This is similar to the approach of the Deaf West Theater Company in North Hollywood, Calif., which brought an acclaimed production of the musical "Big River" to Broadway in 2003.

In the French troupe's version of "King Lear" the premise is that Lear, played by Clémentine Yelnik, and Ms. Laborit's Cordelia are living a flashback of the tragedy that ends in their deaths. At the same time the play's subplot involving Gloucester and his two sons, Edmund and Edgar, has been eliminated in order to focus attention on Lear's troubled relationship with his daughters.

For the company's first season at the Cité Chaptal, Ms. Laborit has scheduled seven more productions, including plays by Beckett and Dario Fo, a new one-man show by Mr. Corrado interpreted by Mr. Moody, and a staging of La Fontaine's fables for a young audience.

"I want this theater to have a long life here," Ms. Laborit said. "What's great is that people who are learning French Sign Language here can see it in action in the theater. And they can see that it is not owned by the deaf. It can be used by everyone. I once used sign language as an act of resistance, but it is really just one more language."