What's ASL for "be vigitant, I beseech you"?

Last night I saw the St. Louis edition of Shakespeare in the Park. They're doing "Much Ado About Nothing", set in the 1890's in a frontier American town. It's a fine production, although it is a little strange to hear "the revelers are entering!" and then have "Turkey in the Straw" play while the cast has a hoe-down.

The main cast acquitted themselves well. Hero, appropriately sweet, had a cute "Kristin Chenoweth"-thing with her voice which allowed her to sound young. Benedick was a sort of gangly cowboy who reminded me (at least in movement) of some of the running and jumping of Woody from PIXAR's "Toy Story".

The production stayed away from most of the gags from Kenneth Branagh's film version, which it seemed like most of the audience had seen. Speaking of the audience, it was as diverse a group as a free Shakespeare performance can hope to attract. Fancy chairs up front for the Blue Hair crowd and lots of blanket and chair space in the back and the sides for the younger crowd. And young they were! At times, everywhere I looked was filled with people under 30. They can't all have been dragged there by vindictive parents.

There were a few of the itinerant Renaissance Fest crowd that made their appearance, proving that people will take any excuse to show up in costume in any place that won't COMPLETELY condemn the impulse. It's the same impulse that makes people show up to Ren-Fests dressed as pirates, ninja, and Louis XIV fops, I suppose. In reality, the festival starts to bear resemblance to an 11th-grade history student's term paper. A student who's failing and has a poor memory. Gandalf the Grey was a citizen of Florence, under the Medici, right?

I saw a couple of people in robes that I assumed were the ugly cousins of the costume community: nerds dressed up as Jedi, who also like to show up at public costume festivals, presumably to lord their Jedi-ness over everyone else. Turned out they were Buddhist monks, so it says something when I think "sci-fi fans" faster than I think "actual devotees of a large world religion".

The most entertaining aspect of the evening, aside from the pale and waif-ish suburban daughters covered in Henna, was the interpreters into American Sign Language. They sat off to the left of the stage, with their own spotlights and a crowd of the hearing-impaired at their feet. From the first words, they were off in a stream of complex gestures and finger articulations. It's hard for people to hear Shakespeare and turn it into modern English in their heads. After all, when a character says something about "death, in guerdon of her wrongs", people start looking for iron girders (spell check doesn't have "guerdon". So I can imagine it must be four times as difficult to try to sign at speed with the actors.

The modern performance practice of Shakespeare is to speak it at a fairly rapid clip, attempting to approximate familiarity with the words so that the line-readings seem fresh, not bearing the accumulated dust of four centuries of drama school interpretation. So the actors spoke fast. Very fast. And the translators moved fast. Very fast.

But I have to wonder, is Shakespeare more or less "true" when translated? When Shakespeare uses words like "thou", a modern audience understands what he means, but the words still feel stilted. We don't use "thou" except to highlight arcane concepts with rhetorical jest. But in American Sign Language (ASL), wouldn't "thou" just mean "you"? So, when the play is modified in this manner, does the sign interpretation get closer to the original experience of an audience understanding the play, as opposed to the word choice being a barrier to overcome in the spoken version?

I stopped here to search the Web. I came up with a fantastic article about the "ASL Shakespeare Project" [source], which debuted an ASL translation of "Twelfth Night" in 2000. This production had the signing actors on stage, in costume, with the lines being read aloud from offstage. The article talks about how the character of Malvolio, an uppity prick, used very expansive and elaborate gestures incorporating "excess" motion to create a sort of "accent" for the character. The gestures would read to the deaf as overdone and unnecessary, helping to create a sense of a character who is over-enamored of his own importance. Isn't that cool?

The translators at the St. Louis performance really got into it, though they didn't wear costumes or move around off of their stools. There were two signers, and I assumed that they were there to switch off when signing became too tiresome. Luckily, they have much more imagination than I did. The two translators put on a show of their own. They conversed with each other as the characters did on stage, allowing for fast interplay and interruption. They also "acted" with their faces and postures to help communicate tone and character identification. Watching them through binoculars, I was amazed at how differently the female interpreter acted when she was Hero as opposed to when she was Beatrice. Sometimes she was also Don Pedro (the authority figure) and her posture would change again. Watching the interplay between Beatrice (the female interpreter) and Benedick (the male) was sometimes more entertaining than the actors on stage.

I'm lucky the signers were out of my ordinary field of vision, because if I had been sitting near them, I'm sure I would have spent the majority of my time watching them, to the exclusion of the actors.