Deaf West Theatre Company is a North Hollywood, California-based cultural institution serving as a model for deaf theatre worldwide. Founded in 1991, by Ed Waterstreet, it is noted for being the first professional resident Sign Language Theatre in the western half of the United States. Deaf West Theatre productions, actors and directors have won more than 80 theatre awards for artistic merit.
Under the artistic direction of its founder, Ed Waterstreet, the company’s art-deco complex in the NoHo Arts District of North Hollywood includes a 90-seat theatre, complete with a state-of-the-art sound system, sub-woofers under the raked seating, an infrared headphone system, and captioning capabilities. The theatre is within a ten-minute drive of many major film production studios including Disney, Warner Bros., Universal, NBC, and Columbia/Tri-Star.
Deaf West Theatre Inc., was founded to directly improve and enrich the cultural lives of the 1.2 million deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals who live in the Los Angeles area. DWT provides exposure and access to professional theatre, filling a void for deaf artists and audiences.
DWT serves the cultural, educational, social and employment needs of its constituents. DWT is an institution for the discovery and exploration of artists' identities and stature as artists. Through the medium of Sign Language Theatre, a legacy of deaf culture is created, shared, and preserved.
Presenting adaptations of classics, contemporary and original works, DWT is dedicated to the production of theatre of the highest artistic quality, which nurtures and promotes the talents of its actors, writers, directors and designers. DWT productions are presented in American Sign Language with simultaneous translation in English, providing for all an enhanced theatrical experience.
Deaf West Theatre's most notable accomplishment is bringing a revival of Big River to the American Airlines Theatre on Broadway in 2003.
Famous quotes containing the words deaf, west and/or theatre:
“You are now
In London, that great sea, whose ebb and flow
At once is deaf and loud, and on the shore
Vomits its wrecks, and still howls on for more.
Yet in its depth what treasures!”
—Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)
“Sometimes, because of its immediacy, television produces a kind of electronic parable. Berlin, for instance, on the day the Wall was opened. Rostropovich was playing his cello by the Wall that no longer cast a shadow, and a million East Berliners were thronging to the West to shop with an allowance given them by West German banks! At that moment the whole world saw how materialism had lost its awesome historic power and become a shopping list.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)
“The theatre is the involuntary reflex of the ideas of the crowd.”
—Sarah Bernhardt (1845–1923)