Deafness and dominance: analyzing the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's production of To Kill a Mockingbird.

McDonnell, Maureen

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival's 2011 production of To Kill a Mockingbird offers complicated ways to think about characters' relationships to justice, entitlement, and community. By casting noted Deaf actor Howie Seago as Bob Ewell and reconsidering the character's language use, the production exploits the gap between the playscript and the audience members' interpretations. (1) The casting allows for both gestural and verbal languages in the courtroom, thereby creating a conspicuous interval in the courtroom scene. This layered language usage allows audience members to witness an "open space lying between ... two parts of the same thing; a gap, opening." (2) Any production of To Kill a Mockingbird offers a sinister version of Ewell, certainly. However, Seago uses his character's hearing status and language usage as "intervening portion [s] of something," advancing Ewell's violent agenda in opportunistic ways that expose how marginalization operates in Maycomb. (3) Seago's iteration of Bob Ewell and the performance of Susannah Flood as Mayella Ewell offer additional interpretative possibilities for audience members. The pair's use of home sign, a shared gestural language, offers another vector for onstage characters to see the abuse within the Ewell home--thereby challenging the Ewells' respectability within the courtroom. However, their language usage also clarifies Mayella's resentment of and resistance to her father. Through Seago and Flood's characters' spoken and signed dialogue, this production creates a vital new space to understand the damning and restorative power of language and community.

OSF, a much-awarded Shakespeare Festival, had a long-standing tradition of diverse casts prior to Howie Seagos hiring in 2009. (4) Able to perform in spoken English, American Sign Language (ASL), or a modified ASL, Seago offers a number of linguistic opportunities for his characters. Seagos linguistic flexibility becomes central to the productions exploration of characters' perceived respectability and, as a result, of their deemed credibility. Such credibility is at stake in the accusation that Mayella was raped, a claim that dooms Tom Robinson. Director Marion McClinton cast hearing actor Susannah Flood as Mayella Ewell, (5) established in this production as a CODA (Child Of Deaf Adults). (6) Flood's performance recuperates Mayella, a character frequently demeaned and discounted within the text and in literary scholarship. This Mayella's linguistic affiliation with her father undermines her respectability within the court, as her gestures paradoxically reveal both her father's exploitation and a means of her rebellion. With these casting choices in place, audience members are asked to consider characters that navigate multiple vectors of identity, including those that are racial, gendered, linguistic, or class-based. Susannah Flood speaks to this navigation, reporting that "the director was interested in the idea that two minority groups would have more possibilities for contention because they are both disenfranchised. They're slightly more resentful of the other rather than making it a clear story between Blacks and Whites." (7) The additional identities performed by Seago and Flood--whose Mayella is confirmed as an incest survivor in this production--unsettle easy notions about how Maycomb citizens understand, implement, and are subject to justice. The dramatically central Maycomb court is ostensibly where citizens voice their narratives and where juries evaluate speakers' respectability and credibility. The Ewells' gestural language derails this process, both enabling more complex negotiations between the Ewells and the court and resulting in unexpected leverage for Mayella. This paper focuses on how this production stages these negotiations.

Setting the Stage: Bodies and Language

The OSF production team's casting and stage design reinforce the range of perspectives within the play. The decision to cast Seago and to stage the Ewells' signed communication allows the pair to have both public and private interactions during the trial. The casting of two actors as Scout highlights the historical perspective of Lees adult first-person narrator (as personified by Dee Maaske, who comments on and reminisces about the dramatic action) and Scout as a child (performed by young Kaya Van Dyke). (8) Onstage throughout, Maaske's presence and the occasionally doubled gestures and blocking of Maaske and Van Dyke reinforce that these past events prove worthy of reflection to an adult Scout. The possibility of a distorted past seems literalized through the stage design, whose shadow projections of the Radley place create unrealistically large silhouettes, making the children's fantasies visible to audience members. (9) Questions of proportion, the past, and the dubious relationship between what is projected and what might be real surface as major dramatic themes.

Some questions of perception have to be determined practically when designing dramatic spaces and in determining who occupies them. When casting actors whose identities are not closely aligned to how those characters are traditionally imagined--a female Hamlet, a French Henry IV--the artistic team needs to determine how to negotiate that perceived gap. That interval might be unremarkable or might add dramatic possibilities to a production, as it does in this case. Casting a Deaf actor sparks a range of practical questions: To what extent will the character engage with written or spoken English? Will the actor speak, a performance choice that can raise critiques within some Deaf circles about assimilation to hearing cultures? If the actor uses ASL in everyday life, can that language be incorporated into the performance--or does the actor's language require modification due to the character's geography and time? These communication choices engender subsequent decisions for hearing characters, whose interactions with Deaf characters offer audience members possibilities for how they too might understand and respond to the Deaf actors language(s).

Theatre companies decide how to use the linguistic opportunities afforded to them by Deaf actors in light of production needs. OSF artistic director Bill Rauch states that "each director or playwright has to figure out how his [Seagos] deafness becomes part of the fabric of the story." (10) Often, the anticipated needs of the audience mean that Deaf actors use American Sign Language (ASL) in productions performed within the United States. Although this linguistic choice may be at odds with the dramatic world--for instance, British Sign Language would be "correct" for British characters (11)--this practice makes practical sense, given the actors' and audiences' location. (12) Choosing ASL is not only a practical choice, however, but also a theoretical one. When a play performed by hearing and Deaf actors features ASL, this practice privileges the Deaf actors' experiences over concerns about dramatic or geographical precision. Such considerations of actors' culture may prevent stereotypical representations of dramatic characters that belong to historically marginalized social groups, particularly when those characters have been created by writers who are cultural outsiders and in a position of dominance. When imagined by hearing authors, Deaf characters often serve as literary devices or as a means of utility for hearing characters rather than as persons in and of themselves. (13) Although Bob Ewell's white supremacy is a terrifying avenue of self-determination, the choice to have an aggressive and deaf Ewell resists the simplistic tradition of Deaf characters functioning only as foils for hearing characters. Ewell's bigotry is offensive; so, too, are fantasies that predetermine Deaf characters' submissiveness.

Such assumed dependency is part of the tradition of misrecognition that Deaf actors inherit. Political scientist Melissa V. Harris-Perry writes that "misrecognition subverts the possibility of equal democratic participation. It is psychically painful to hold an image of yourself while knowing that others hold a different, more negative image of you." (14) Because of audist traditions that assume a person "is superior based on one's ability to hear or behave in the manner of one who hears," it is rare for Deaf characters to be imagined as privileged. (15) It is therefore innovative to imagine the repeatedly aggressive and hostile Bob Ewell as deaf and thereby challenge this limited stereotypical view of Deafness and Deaf people. (16) This production resists having Ewell's deafness function merely as a type of "narrative prosthesis," an "opportunistic metaphorical device" that insists that characters' disabilities explain any departure from societal norms. (17) The view that Ewell's hearing status alone motivates his racism does not fit all the facts. Ewell's racist views are unexceptional. In fact, his bigotry facilitates his social interactions. We see, then, that to assume a direct correlation "between having a physical disability and the nature of a character's identity" overdetermines the ways that deafness can be meaningful and relevant. (18) Rather than "producting] characters who are indentured to their biological programming in the most essentializing manner," this production shows the pervasive racism of Maycomb with a particular vigilante--Ewell--who happens to be deaf. (19)

Given how rarely Deaf characters appear, there is a risk that a particular d/Deaf character--sacrificial or villainous--will be seen as typical of all Deaf people. This danger underscores the problems of representation for marginalized groups, as Stacy Wolf points out: "Valorizing 'positive,' 'accurate' images necessarily calls up the conundrum of visibility: What exactly is a positive representation? To whom? And who can decide?" (20) Seago reflects on this challenge: I have an activist Deaf friend who initially objected to the idea of me as a Deaf man playing a very negative character onstage, which might impact negatively on the audience. That all Deaf people are bad or stupid or illiterate, etc. Then she saw the play and the first thing she said was to the effect of "Whoa, I take it back. I was so impressed by how multi-dimensional the deafness was used." (21)

If Deaf actors are meant to perform the humanity and diversity of Deaf characters, some negative representations should appear alongside the self-sacrificial traditions.

It would be predictably routine for a Deaf actor to be cast as Arthur (Boo) Radley: Radley's isolation and communication choices fit common misperceptions of deafness, as does his presumed dependence. This limited casting option is one Seago anticipated: "I assumed that I would be cast as Boo because he doesn't talk much and is an outsider as well. I told my wife and she said that character was too easy for me and not challenging." (22) Based on this insight from Lori M. Seago, he proposed to the festival director, Bill Rauch, that he play Bob Ewell in the production: "When I told Bill about my wife's idea, he really perked up, stood straight up in his chair and was thunderstruck by the concept." (23) By presenting Bob Ewell as deaf, the production challenges a long-standing history of imagining Deaf characters (and Southern Deaf characters in particular) as saintly martyrs for the hearing community. (24)

The casting of Seago has additional effects, as his performance highlights the range of identities--visible and invisible--within Maycomb. (25) Although race-conscious casting of a Black actor as Robinson seems mandated, the novel reveals that racial definitions are insufficient in capturing characters' complexity. This complexity surfaces in this description of Ewell as provisionally White: "All the little man on the witness stand had that made him any better than his nearest neighbors was that, if scrubbed with lye soap in very hot water, his skin was white." (26) Lees description echoes the cultural narratives of the "tramp" in the late nineteenth century, a figure that "was strongly racialized in the cultural imaginary as native-born white and male." (27) The novel suggests that social class can visibly register, as seen in the stipulation that being "scrubbed with lye soap in very hot water" is necessary for Ewells whiteness to visibly register. Both his hygiene and access to hot water give us information about his class identity, important within the text, and hint at his slim claim to respectability.

The novel establishes the limited claims to respectability that might be available to poor characters. Distinctions between racial and class identity are shown to readers through details about the Ewell home's proximity to its African-American neighbors' "neat and snug" houses, as well as the Ewell homes poor conditions. In this terrain, the one exception to the Ewells' squalor is as follows: One corner of the yard, though, bewildered Maycomb. Against the fence, in a line, were six chipped-enamel slop jars holding brilliant red geraniums, cared for as tenderly as if they belonged to Miss Maudie Atkinson, had Miss Maudie deigned to permit a geranium on her premises. People said they were Mayella Ewell's. (28)

These details are not decorative; rather, they serve as evidence for Mayella's domesticity and nurturing capacity. Her taming of this small space into a space for growth and decoration indicates that she has possibly earned some claim to respectability. (29) Such claims are denied to the Ewell males. Burris Ewell goes to school only once a year, allowing him to meet his legal obligation and avoid truancy charges. This single visit allows Scout to witness the lice in Burris's hair. A stance of suspicion toward the Ewells is reinforced by his classmates, including Little Chuck Little who speaks to "protect" the teacher: Little Chuck Little got to his feet. "Let him go, ma'am," he said. "He's a mean one, a hard-down mean one. He's liable to start somethin' and there's some little folks here." He was among the most diminutive of men, but when Burris Ewell turned toward him, Little Chuck's right hand went to his pocket. "Watch your step, Burris," he said. "I'd soon's kill you as look at you. Now go home." (30)

Little Chuck Little articulates the underlying aggression some residents have toward the Ewell family; even the younger members can be threatened with death for pivoting in place. The Ewells are positioned as avaristic, unhygienic, and contemptible inhabitants of Old Sarum. In contrast, Walter Cunningham Jr.'s ongoing attendance and his father's consistent efforts to repay Atticus for an entailment issue establish the Cunninghams as a morally upstanding, respectable White family--if a poor one.

The text develops a connection between morality (as shaped by hygiene, education, and financial exchange) and legal credibility. Interestingly, both families demonstrate some literacy in their awareness of their legal obligations (to avoid truancy) and rights (toward property). Both remain legally naive, a term that describes "speakers" who have limited English proficiency and/or familiarity with the legal scripts "which must be used in legal settings to attain certain objectives." (31) Seago's Ewell has a motive for evading the courtroom: while some "difficulties apply to all legally naive speakers, they fall more harshly and on a far wider range of deaf litigants than the courts have been willing to admit." (32) This particular obstacle adds to the appeal of a lynch mob as an extralegal strategy for Bob Ewell.

In this production, it is unclear to what degree Kaya Van Dyke's Scout understands the physical danger of the mob scene, but she is very aware of its charged nature. The scene's transition from one of impending physical threat to a defused exchange is mandated within the dramatic plot. Scout's appeal to courtesy and a reference to Cunningham's past relationship (and indebtedness) to Atticus may be accidental, but they are markedly effective. This scene does not offer a calculating Scout serving up blackmail; however, her effort to connect with Mr. Cunningham by foregrounding her relationship with his child does cause him to reconsider the group's violence. Her concern that she has been inadvertently impolite serves to reinforce the codes of politeness and community even as she wonders out loud if she has erred in invoking them. One critic, Alexandra Rundle, describes this performed exchange as follows: In this scene, Kaya Van Dyke as the younger Scout absolutely shines as she talks down an angry mob of men just by appealing to them as human beings. Van Dyke strikes just the right balance of naive-but-not-too-naive about what's going on, scared but not willing to let it show, and above all, trusting that humans will do what's right if you just remind them of their humanity. (33)

It's not certain that "remind(ing) them of their humanity" is the only factor in defusing the scene. Cunningham must be aware, after his child is invoked, that attacking Atticus would result in witnesses and in orphaning the Finch children--if the children are permitted to survive. This scene seems to motivate Ewell's later attack on Scout. Being thwarted by a child, and a female one at that, may be particularly provocative to Bob Ewell's sense of himself as a White patriarch.

In this pre-trial scene, Seago stresses Bob Ewell's sense of racial superiority through deliberate choices about when to vocalize Ewell's lines. The word "nigger" appears in half of Ewell's spoken lines (threats and commands fill up much of the balance). Seago's decision to have Ewell voice the word "nigger"--loudly, and repeatedly--heightens the dramatic impact of that racial slur, emphasized by his character's relative vocal sparseness. Seago reveals that the director Marion McClinton's presence as possibly "the first Black director to direct Mockingbirdf" made him more comfortable in emphasizing Ewell's racism: When Tom comes in the first time, everyone is shouting. McClinton made that entrance a much more powerful, negative aspect than a White person [directing] might have gotten. Having a Black director "gave" me more permission, more of a comfort level to be so racist. Marion being so familiar with racism himself gave the play much more of an edge than a White director might have or usually do. And that is a stroke of genius on Bill Rauch's part. (34)

Seago's investment in making sure that Ewell's racism is understood counters the misperception of seeing Ewell's hatred as an individual character flaw rather than as a systematic part of Maycomb life. Ewell's expectation of violent justice is warranted; indeed, as the audience sees near the show's end, the police system unofficially carries out the expected murder of Robinson. (35) But at this point in the dramatic action, Ewell is outraged that the official legal system remains involved when extralegal violence is delayed.

Seago reveals that he performs Ewell as understanding language as the most secure means of advancing his racial claims and physical aggression: Bob Ewell's becoming deaf at nine influenced the character development. I used that too, when I want, in the jail scene. I talk for myself because I was part of the group and so I spoke very clearly. They didn't do what I wanted. (36)

Seago's analysis of Ewells motives became central to my understanding of the production: this Ewell understands language as a tool to assert his desires and dominance over others.

Code-Shifting in the Courtroom

Seago's linguistic abilities inform his characters legal maneuverings and power. Seago and director McClinton stage Bob Ewell's dual language usage as an asset rather than as a detriment. (37) The availability of spoken English and home sign give Seago as Ewell a few codes to work within and time to think about strategy as he determines whether he "understands" a question in a specific language. Director McClinton saw this performance decision as accomplishing a character goal: Seago would perform Bob Ewell as knowingly assimilating or feigning ignorance when it was advantageous to do so. Seago describes those choices as follows: In the courtroom scene I used my deafness, the "Deaf card," or I tried to, to have it protect me. Marion called my manipulation with the "Deaf card," when to speak and when to force my daughter to interpret as the equivalent to the Sammy Sosa defense when he had to testify in court about his use of steroids. He did have good English but chose not to be able to understand in court and speak through an interpreter so he could be perceived more sympathetically and even to say later on when he had a chance to think of better evasive answers that the interpreter misspoke for him. (38)

This linguistic exchange between Bob and Mayella Ewell provides insight into these characters' identities and their shifting relationship. Dramatically productive, these exchanges underscore the legal system's precariousness and how the Ewells escalate the courtroom's volatility.

Due to the location and class position of the Ewell family, the theatre practitioners decided that Mayella and Bob Ewell would communicate using home sign, a system of "homemade signs ... that helped to establish the illiteracy of the Ewells as well as the intensity of the relationship" between this father and daughter. (39) As noted by scholar Nancy Frishberg, "home sign is the generic term for the idiosyncratic sign languages or gestural behavior that is developed when deaf individuals are isolated from other deaf people and need to communicate with the hearing people around them." (40) Frishberg's criterion demonstrates that Bob Ewell's language usage is exceptional. Typically, home sign is used by a deaf child to communicate to a hearing parent (who, like the child, does not use ASL) and is not taught to subsequent generations. Such perpetuation of Bob Ewells home sign may be due to the likelihood that "the responsibility for the creation and maintenance of such a [language] system lies primarily with the principal user, the isolated deaf person." (41) Ewell is born too early, too poor, and too geographically isolated for ASL to be available to him. Bob Ewell's language usage, then, marginalizes him from Deaf people who see ASL as a major component of their cultural identity and political action. (42) Curiously, Bob Ewell's use of home sign reinforces his isolation from other Deaf people even as it fortifies his authority within his household and the courtroom.

Seago, Flood, and McClinton are savvy in their linguistic choices for the Ewells, as the problematic nature of interpreting for Deaf people and/or other bi- or multilingual people remains a contemporary issue that would have been even more challenging at the time that this play was set. (43) With this awareness, they craft a Bob Ewell that exploits every opportunity for control available to him--even one allowed by the lack of a credentialed, appropriate translator. Flood's Mayella serves as her father's interpreter throughout the courtroom scene, including during Atticus's questioning of her father and herself. This linguistically difficult task is theatrically productive, but legally suspect as "the interpreter's neutrality, both in fact and as perceived by the clientele, is crucial to the success of an interpreting assignment." (44) As we will see, to assess Mayella's interpreting as successful--by either the court's standards or Bob Ewell's--is to wildly miss the mark.

Seago and Flood created a backstory for Bob Ewell's linguistic identity that permits such self-interested calculation: [We] decided that Bob was born hearing and lost hearing when he was nine. So he had language from the beginning so able to speak somewhat and have some kind of language. If Bob had been born Deaf, it would be only gestures and mime. He would not be able to function on the level that I portrayed for Bob in the courtroom. (45)

This character choice alters how the courtroom scenes proceed. As Candace L. Brown writes in her review, "A dramaturg's research showed that courthouse proceedings in the 1930s weren't likely to include interpretive accommodations for the deaf, (46) Rauch said, so Mayella does all the interpreting for her father in this riveting part of the story." (47) However, there are two cautions in seeing Ewell's ability to shift language codes as only contributing to his power. Like most participants, he must mediate the courtroom activity primarily through legal English with which he is unfamiliar. However, unlike the other participants, this mediation depends on his daughter's translating the spoken dialogue. His control of Mayella is key to any advantage he might have in court.

The production's use of Bob Ewell's languages correctly presents him as a disenfranchised character with an appetite for power. The late onset of Ewell's medical deafness gave him ample time to encounter the racial slurs he vocalizes and to internalize the racial privilege that motivates his character. (48) Seago chooses to verbalize Bob Ewell's confirmation that he can read, allowing his character to address his era's public debates about literacy. (49) Having met the minimum legal requirements for his participation in the courtroom, Ewell views the court as an avenue to exert what he believes to be his privilege as a White man: exacting his will over Robinson by condemning this character to death. As his interpreter, Mayella seems compelled to code shift as her father sees fit. She faithfully reproduces his racial slurs and false narratives. One reviewer characterizes the Ewells' gestures as a "'white trash' sign language," noting that this class-based identity "lends a credible psychological layer to Ewell's mind: Marginalized, discriminated, angry and broken by communication barriers." (50) The reviewer rightly notes the possible effects of such a language choice and suggestively offers the descriptive, slighting term "white trash": a reminder to a contemporary audience member of the stigma against those in a lower social class, a prejudice that may affect the onstage characters. Ewell's linguistic form and content (which includes references to receiving government support) lend to his being seen as a type: what Frankenberg describes as "the white Other," imagined as destitute and damaged. (51) The term also reminds us that disdain of a character's language and class status may lead to disdain of the characters--and distrust of their testimony.

That his daughter has been taught home sign sufficient to serve (problematically) as his interpreter and interlocutor underscores Bob Ewell's command within the home and his reliance on his daughter within the courtroom. Sheriff Heck Tate's testimony offers another opportunity for manipulation by the Ewells. Tate's lines begin with evidence of his familiarity with the Ewells, referring to "Bob, I mean, Mr. Ewell." (52) As Tate recounts Mayella's injuries and mentions a "black eye," Flood covers her right eye as she translates. However, the script insists on Tates initial uncertainty about which eye is injured: he first states that her left eye is injured. In this production, this phrase makes Flood, as Mayella, turn around in her chair to look at Tate. As performed, the actors do not confirm that Mayella is feeding information to Tate. However, Tate's revision (which quickly follows Mayella's gestural confirmation of which eye was injured) shows the audience that such witness prompting is an avenue available to the Ewells, if they wish and if the witness is willing.

Such manipulation of witnesses is possible as long as Mayella complies with her father's agenda. Rundle reinforces the domination secured through this performance choice: Mayella is the only one who can understand the majority of his signs and sign back to him, so she becomes, as default, his voice. Instead of this giving her power, she has to translate her fathers insults against herself and against her mother in front of the whole courtroom, her shrill voice cracking and her eyes always riveted to her father s. It's a brilliant depiction of the control he has over her, and perhaps the most interesting part of the whole play. (53)

Flood's deployment of home sign includes her using a number of iconic, rather than arbitrary, signs. (54) As a result, Flood/Mayella's real-time interpretation also has a significant performance effect: audience members have additional means of understanding the alleged crime.

Flood's use of home sign allows audience members to decipher Mayella's testimony in two modes: aural and visual. For instance, to confirm the rape allegation Mayella gestures at Tom Robinson, puts her right index finger into her left circled fingers, then points at herself. Because the signs that represent rape are clearly recognizable as such, other onstage characters begin gesturing as they recount key parts of the case: the judge uses a fist pumping gesture when saying "sexual intercourse" and Atticus uses gestures that mimic beating and choking when he discusses those accusations. The courtroom participants thereby reinforce the ease with which one might understand gestural signs.

This deciphering allows audience members to actively construct meaning. We "see," not just hear, the accusation of Tom Robinson's rape and the incest questioning that Atticus begins. The participatory nature of such meaning-making through home sign offers the possibility for audience members to serve in the position of a jury member or a translator. The audience members are given, through home sign, an additional way to mediate and make sense out of Mayella's fragmentary, painful testimony. However, the Maycomb social codes of femininity and respectability restrain the onstage audience's possible empathy for Mayella.

"A nineteen-year-old girl must have friends": Respectability and Rape

Atticus: Miss Mayella, a nineteen-year-old girl must have friends. Who are your friends?

Mayella (puzzled): Friends?

Atticus: Don't you know anyone near your own age? Boys--girls--just ordinary friends?

Mayella (angry): You makin' fun o' me again, Mr. Finch?

Atticus: Do you love your father, Miss Mayella?

Mayella: Love him, whatcha mean? (55)

Mayella may appear to be easily angered, but Atticus's questions directly impact whether the jury sees her as a sympathetic witness or as a deservingly ostracized person. (56) If she does not say that she loves her father, her moral standing as a "good daughter" to the White patriarch is comprised; if she does say she loves her father, she reinforces her connection with a marginalized member of Old Sarum. By framing Mayella as friendless within the court, Atticus emphasizes her distance from the Maycomb community. It is unclear whether Bob Ewell's "poor whiteness or bad whiteness (filthy, debilitated, dangerous, debris)" will be permitted to "set off" Mayella as representing "the nice body of good whiteness," or whether she will be seen as contaminated by him. (57) Atticus's lines warn Mayella of what is to come: "Miss Mayella, I won't try to scare you for a while, not yet. Let's get acquainted. How old are you?" (58)

As we learn, Mayella is not the icon of White womanhood necessary for her father's narrative to be easily upheld. Some scholars note the ways in which Atticus's interactions with Mayella reinforce the association between Mayella and the southern belle archetype--a supposedly flattering term that often masks hostility. (59) Others note that Atticus problematically relies on classist and sexist assumptions as a legal defense, a biased way to offset the racism of the courtroom. Malcolm Gladwell, for instance, contends "Finch does what lawyers for black men did in those days. He encourages [the jury] to swap one of their prejudices for another." (60) If the jury is convinced that Mayella, as an Ewell or as an individual, is degenerate, that judgment may override the evidence of the case.

Whether Mayella is allowed to control her self-presentation or to be presented as "an Ewell" is important, as these identities are a crucial component of her case's perceived merit. In the courtroom, we see a range of legally naive speakers "flounder [ing] in the legal system because they are unfamiliar with the scripts which must be used in legal settings to attain certain objectives." (61) The rape narrative Bob Ewell suggests--that of a White woman raped by a Black man--is expected and eminently persuasive. Tom Robinsons voiced empathy for Mayella Ewell may be the most audacious challenge for the jury members, who might read his disclosure as his "being in a position to pity"--a substantial transgression of Maycomb's codes of gender, race, and class. (62) Robinsons disclosure reveals the antithetical options available to Mayella: an icon of White womanhood or an object of Black pity. This production offers her other positions: an abused daughter, a victim of incest, and, at the end, someone who rejects her fathers manipulation.

Susannah Flood's performance makes Mayella's fear and discomfort abundantly evident. Rundle writes that "Flood steals the show as Mayella: she manages to be both reprehensible for the deadly accusation she's made and achingly pitiful as her testimony sheds more and more light on her terrible life against her will. She flinches at every loud noise like an abused animal." (63) This performance reinforces the distance between Mayella and the inert icon of White womanhood, a perception gap that Atticus depends upon (and exploits) throughout the courtroom scene. Atticus repeatedly guides the jury's perceptions of the legal participants' bodies and places within the community.

Atticus's strategy of regulating people's bodies and testimonies surfaces in his efforts to establish empathy for his client. Atticus requests that the jury (which includes a seated Dee Maaske) see Robinson's specific body as meaningful as part of an individual history--not just as representative of his group identity. The audience is told that Robinson's left arm is disabled because it was "caught in a cotton gin when he was a boy. Tore all the muscles loose." (64) Perhaps Atticus means the jury's and audience's gaze to be a corrective, pedagogical one: by seeing Robinson's particular body harmed by segregated labor, perhaps the jury will see him as an individual with a specific testimony rather than as an archetypal Black man who must therefore be feared. Mayella's trauma is not similarly visible. By highlighting Mayella's isolation, Atticus emphasizes her difference from "ordinary" White women used to having friends rather than being abnormally separate. Unlike Tom Robinson, Mayella questions whether she must accept how Atticus frames her (as "friendless" and as a "Ma'am"), suggesting her relative agency in challenging the norms of White womanhood.

Mayella's initial exchange with Atticus underscores her limited expectations for respect within the courtroom, as well as his assumptions that she will be compliant. Murphey, as Finch, turns away casually when he says he may ask things that she's already answered before asking rhetorically, "but you'll give me an answer, won't you?" (65) Flood's delivery of an emphatic unscripted "no" steps on the last two words of Murphey's line. Her next line makes it clear that she assumes Atticus's purpose is to ridicule her, stating "I won't answer a word as long as you keep on mockin' me ... Long as you call me 'ma'am' and say 'Miss Mayella.' (To JUDGE TAYLOR.) I don't have to take his sass." (66) Flood speaks and signs Mayella's refusal, making her resistance legible to her father. Her lack of familiarity with what Judge Taylor terms "courtesy" reinforces her distance from the class position and passivity that Atticus prescribes for her. Tom Robinson's subsequent testimony underscores her lack of fitness for such courtesy, presenting Mayella as willing to secure her desires through manipulation and financial exchange. According to Robinson, she has "saved nickels" for the children to secure privacy with him, a man established as inappropriate due to his racial identity and marital status. (67) Flood's Mayella is in tears throughout much of Robinson's testimony, either because of its accuracy or because of the humiliation that these alleged norm violations establish. If Mayella Ewell is established as unsympathetic--as hostile, trashy, sexually experienced, or as an incest survivor--the jury may see her as inciting or deserving of this alleged attack. (68)

These codes shape not only Mayella's experience but also those of Scout. Mayella and Scout, because of their gender and race, have similarly constrained choices as they consider the ramification of their fathers' actions. Scout differs from Mayella here only in degree: after Bob Ewell's death she (like Mayella) is asked to be complicit in her fathers obstruction of justice. As with Mayella, an actual or future homicide is involved (it is understood that Robinson is facing a death sentence). Like Mayella, too, Scout has been threatened and injured by Bob Ewell. Because of Kaya Van Dykes very grounded younger Scout, and the wonderfully measured performance of Dee Maaske, audience members are given the opportunity to think of the future adult Scout in empathetic, productive ways. What the production makes shockingly clear is that any comparable development Mayella may have will be accomplished with fewer resources and additional obstacles. This disparity is evident even before Mayella inherits responsibility, after her father's death, for the household with an undetermined number of children ("some people said six, others said nine; there were always several dirty-faced ones at the windows when anyone passed by"). (69) There may be pity available for Mayella in the courtroom, but no legal advocacy available to her within that space, and no community structure available to her outside of it. (70) Contempt for Mayella--for the incest she suffers at the hands of her father, for the desire that Robinson reports--is the most probable outcome. After the sentencing, there are no public resources for her to navigate and little sympathy available to her as an Ewell (and possibly still less as Robinsons accuser). She, an accessory to her father's revenge and the focus of his abuse, seems doomed to return to their shared home.

Flood's linguistic choices give us several cues about the Ewell home. It initially seems that Flood's Mayella is in a responsive role when it comes to Seago/Ewell's testimony, using home sign and her voice so that he understands the action--and can manipulate the proceedings. When her father's lawyer prompts her to offer her testimony "in your own words," his command breaks the simultaneous speech and home sign usage that she had been using up until this point. Once Flood's Mayella feels that she is being mocked by Finch, she begins to code switch when doing so is useful to her in navigating the court proceedings--or in trying to secure her own survival. Within this production, Bob Ewell may be playing the "deaf card"--but Mayella also begins to play the few cards available to her.

Flood makes deliberate language choices that suggest her character's increasing agency. She chooses not to translate any of Finch's early questions about her lack of friends, whether she loves her father, whether he is "good to you, is he easy to get along with?" or about her father's drinking. (71) When Atticus asks "When he's riled--has he even beaten you?" Flood/Mayella looks nervously at her father. (72) Her gaze remains fixed, even after the Judge prompts her to "Answer the question, Miss Mayella." (73) Only after Bob Ewell gestures to ask her what is going on does she respond by signing and speaking "My paw's [Bob Ewell] never touched a hair o' my head." (74) Her answer seems prompted by her father's signed question rather than the vocalized ones. This delivery reminds the audience that Bob Ewell has more power over Mayella than the appointed judge.

Flood/Mayella uses home sign and her voice when stating that she is the oldest in the family, but verbalizes (without signing) moments when her testimony may contradict her father's narrative: she states "I don't recollect if he [Robinson] hit me. I mean, yes, I do, he hit me.... Yes, he hit--I just don't remember--it all happened so quick!" (75) Tellingly, after a period of not translating, she deliberately uses home sign to relay Atticus Finch's question about how long her mother has been dead. Seago, as Bob Ewell, does not seem to move a muscle at this question. After an eleven second pause, Mayella vocalizes and signs "Don't know. Long time." (76) This exchange alerts us--and Mayella--that Bob Ewell will not necessarily volunteer information when his daughter signals her need for his assistance. At a minimum, the silence may frame Mayella as a daughter not sufficiently respectful of her dead mother's memory. More significantly, this pause allows uncertainty to develop about whether Mayella is not just a mother figure to the young Ewells, but is also their mother.

Flood does not translate any dialogue about her familiarity with Tom Robinson, although she does sign that there were "several niggers around" (repeating her father's home sign for the slur as she does so). (77) She first states, "I don't recollect if he [Robinson] hit me," only to begin signing, after the beat, "Yes I do, he hit me ... I'll answer any questions you got." (78) She doesn't sign as she testifies that Robinson raped and beat her. At this point, Finch gestures the words "beat" and "choke," which conveys to Bob Ewell the line of questioning about Robinson's alleged attack. Then Finch asks Mayella, "Why don't you tell the truth, child--didn't Bob Ewell beat you up?" (79) There is an eight second pause. She then announces "I got somethin' to say an then I ain't gonna say no more"--a phrase that also indicates Mayella's refusal, from this point in the production on, to sign and translate. (80) She points at Tom Robinson, but makes no other gesture, as she says: That nigger yonder took advantage of me an if you fine fancy gentlemen don't wanta do nothin' about it then you're all yellow stinkin' cowards, stinkin' cowards, the lot of you. Your fancy airs don't come to nothin'--your ma'amin and your Miss Mayellarin' don't come to nothin', Mr. Finch. (81)

As she returns to her seat, she turns away from Bob Ewell, who gestures toward her. Despite his insisting poking of her shoulder to prompt her to sign, it seems that she meant her earlier statement: she's not going to say any more. She doesn't sign Finch's introduction of Tom Robinson, initially using her left hand to partially shield her face and then covering it entirely as Robinson describes Bob Ewell's yelling at Mayella "You goddamn whore, I'll kill ya." (82) When Tom Robinson is re-cuffed, Bob Ewell puts his hand on Mayella's back. She draws away.

Given Ewell's extensive exploitation of Mayella, it is immensely satisfying to see her dramatic non-verbal confrontation with her father. His continued non-verbal aggression reaches its highest point in his auditory challenge to Atticus Finch after closing arguments. Seago decided to have his character clap slowly after Atticus's climatic speech, confirming his contempt for his antagonist. The first of the three claps happens after Atticus has begun taking off his coat as he returns to his seat. Mark Murphey, as Finch, stands in place for a beat in a gesture that echoes his pause during the attempted mob scene when he learns of Heck Tate's absence. Seago improvised this clapping moment in rehearsal, after which the director insisted that it be kept: The clapping established the frustration didn't get what I wanted to, didn't have the ability to confront him from my point of view. He [Ewell] tried to destroy the eloquence of Atticus's speech. By clapping sarcastically, I shattered that in my raw, limited, physical way. People still remembered the jarring effect. (83)

Finch's eloquence is visually reinforced by the physical movement mandated within the playscript and novel: even when Atticus has failed to exonerate Robinson, the African-Americans in their segregated section stand to show their solidarity and, presumably, their indebtedness to Atticus. Scout is coached to do the same. (Both actors playing Scout comply.) Bob Ewell's clapping unsettles these visual cues of reverence.

Bob Ewell's clapping not only catalyzes his hatred of Atticus but also sparks a significant transition in his relationship with Mayella. After this moment, Flood/Mayella makes it clear to her father (and any onlookers) that she refuses to sign for him. When the sentence is read, Seago/Ewell puts his hand on her left shoulder. She turns upstage, away from him. When he places his hand on her right elbow, she slaps his hand away. As she exits, Seago/Ewell grabs his hat and hurries after her. Rather than gloat in Robinsons conviction, she has slapped her abuser in a public place, making her anger with him visible. Her resistance--her decision that she not be purely instrumental for her father--inverts their earlier power dynamic. Seago relates that his character's decision to clap was the last straw for her. After her testimony, she doesn't interpret for him anymore, after the false testimony to cover for her fathers abuse. When Tom felt sorry for her, all of that. She doesn't want to do anything about what happens to her father. Being raped by her own father doesn't count (for the court). She knew that everyone knew about it, no one spoke up about how bad (her father's) character was. They defended the Black man more than they helped her. (84)

It is possible that racism motivates Mayella, but other factors surely play a part. That there is a mob available for the supposed rape by Tom Robinson and not the established rape by Bob Ewell is significant. There is no community available to Mayella, as there is for Robinson's family. Her child-care responsibilities (whether for her siblings or children, it is now unclear) will presumably continue, even if her translation duties to her father have ceased. Any distance she establishes from her father must be done with her meager resources and of her own free will.

It's clear that each character's decision--to clap, to stand, to refuse to sign--reveals their response to the dramatic action and the power dynamic within the courtroom. Mayella's resistance to being "forced to interpret lies by her father" confuses and frustrates her father. (85) However, she sustains her refusal as his character agitatedly follows her off-stage, using home sign repeatedly to try and engage her. I agree with Seago that this choice "really demonstrated the dysfunctionalism" of their family, even as it changes their relationship to the courtroom and to each other. (86) Linguistically distinct from the courtroom, then, and newly alienated from the proceedings, Bob Ewell becomes marginalized in the space that he had imagined supporting his White male privilege. His Deafness is reasserted--now presented as a present and future deficit. His White privilege has been compromised. His exploitative familial relationships have publicly been challenged. Because Bob Ewell's sense of superiority proves deadly, for Tom Robinson and for himself, it is nearly unthinkable to imagine respite or refuge for Mayella.

But the position of hero is available to her. This production is compelling in its suggestion that resistance and bravery are possibilities available to Mayella. She has braved Bob Ewell's abuse and repeatedly survived it, without a deus ex machina in the form of Arthur Radley to rescue her. Her bravery is staged in her initial interpretation duties, as well as her later rejection of them. Although the novel offers some evidence of Mayella's possible virtue via her carefully tended flower patch, this production offers more vital evidence for her courage. Mayella's rejection of her father, and in a public place no less, is the single bravest act of this production. It doesn't erase or mediate her father's harm. Nor does it excuse her own participation in his vendetta. But it is a choice made without coercion, unlike Atticus's reluctant decision to defend Robinson. Her refusal to translate--an autonomous, alienating choice--is Mayella's alone. And it is beautiful and brave.

These performance choices offer productive ways for understanding the tensions within Lee's text and how identities affect characters' relationships with the community and the courtroom. Seago and Flood's characters try to perform according to the scripts of the courtroom, and then reconcile that performance with their own loyalties, codes, and beliefs. Bob Ewell's palpable sense of entitlement is one of the few avenues that he has to forge a community. This limitation becomes lethal. In contrast, Mayella's last non-verbal decision (to no longer translate) reveals her refusal to be complicit in her father's maneuverings--a decision made at a great personal cost and destined to further isolate her. These characters' constricted, tenacious agency complicates how all Maycomb citizens understand and enact their understandings of community and justice.

MAUREEN MCDONNELL

Eastern Connecticut State University

NOTES

(1) Howie Seago, a winner of the Helen Hayes Award, has worked for over two decades in theatre and film, including as a producer and an Emmy-winning creator. My interview with Mr. Seago was immensely helpful for this essay. Seago electronically reviewed the included quoted sections to confirm their accuracy. Howie Seago, personal interview with the author, June 9, 2011.

(2) Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. "Interval, 3a," accessed June 30, 2015.

(3) Ibid.

(4) Throughout this essay, I will refer to Mr. Seago as Deaf. The capitalization of Deaf emphasizes Deaf peoples cultural and linguistic identity, whereas deaf designates the condition of not hearing. I refer to the character Bob Ewell as lowercase-d deaf as a way to reinforce Ewell's isolation from Deaf customs and his distance from standardized American Sign Language, a key feature of Deaf culture.

(5) Marion McClinton has won several awards as a director, including two Audelcos, an Obie, the Kesselring Prize, and nominations for Tony, Drama Desk, and Evening Standard awards.

(6) Robert Hoffmeister, "Border Crossing by Hearing Children of Deaf Parents: The Lost History of Codas" in Open Your Eyes: Deaf Studies Talking, ed. H-Dirksen L. Bauman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 207.

(7) Susannah Flood, interview by Philip Fisher. Theatre VOICE, January 5, 2013, http://www.theatrevoice.com/audio/nyc-interview-actress-susannah-flood-on-nina-raines-tribes. Flood played a CODA character in Nina Rainers Tribes at Barrow Street Theatre. The performances I saw included their first with ASL interpreters in March 2012. A post-production conversation in English and ASL followed that event.

(8) Holly Blackford similarly compartmentalizes Scout. See Mockingbird Passing: Closeted Traditions and Sexual Curiosities in Harper Lee's Novel (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2011), 133-34.

(9) The production team included puppeteer and designer Lynn K. Jeffries (who executed David Gallows designs for the shadow projections) and lighting designer Dawn Chang. This set was operative until June 19, 2011, when a structural beam crack was found in the Angus Bowmer Theatre (where I had seen the production). A "re-imagined, re-staged" version found a temporary home at the Ashland Armory while the engineering issue was resolved. See Paul Fishman, "'To Kill A Mockingbird' Seen as Never Before and Probably Never Again" Read My Opinion (blog), June 19, 2011, http://readmyopinionblogspot.com/2011/06/kill-mockingbird-seen-as-never-before. html (site discontinued).

(10) Candace L. Brown, "Ashland's 'Mockingbird' Sings A Sold-Out Tune," A NewsCafe. com: Northern California's Premier Online News Magazine, March 15, 2011, http://anewscafe. com/2011/03/15/review-ashland's-'mockingbird'-sings-a-sold-out-tune/.

(11) Using British Sign Language (BSL) is not analogous to an actor studying a dialect, but requires a complete translation effort. Although British and American English are similar, ASL has more linguistic overlap with French Sign Language than BSL.

(12) A number of United States productions choose to have Deaf actors use ASL when performing British characters. Barrow Street Theatre followed this practice in Tribes. Russell Harvard performed his role as Billy, a Deaf British man, with a British accent when his character spoke. When his character learns Sign Language and chooses to communicate exclusively through that language, Harvard then used his first language, ASL.

(13) Trent Batson and Eugene Berman, Angels and Outcasts: An Anthology of Deaf Characters in Literature (Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 1986); Edna Edith Sayers, Outcasts and Angels: The New Anthology of Deaf Characters in Literature (Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 2012).

(14) Melissa V. Harris-Perry, Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 96.

(15) Tom Humphries is the first to offer this definition of audism in print. Humphries, "Communicating Across Cultures (Deaf-Hearing) and Language Learning" (PhD diss., Union Institute and University, 1977), 12, ProQuest DP10817.

(16) Howie Seago addressed this difficulty when talking about his early acting opportunities. For instance, a role offered to him on Star Trek: The Next Generation initially asked that his character wear a hearing aid and, within the episode's time frame, learn speech to resolve the dramatic plot. That a futuristic science-fiction show still relied on audist production ideas reveals how firmly entrenched these norms are. Seago reveals that "Well, my heart sank when I saw that [plot]. I told them I didn't want that story. I grew up deaf in an oral school, struggling to learn how to speak--getting smacked in the head when I didn't say it right. I could not go along with this story. I told my agent to turn it down, and that cause quite a stir because the offer had been made. But I insisted. I treasure sign--love it. My heart would not let me accept such a role." After Seago's objection, the production team revised the role in a culturally appropriate way in the Season Two episode "Loud as a Whisper." See Howie Seago, interview by Phyllis Freilich, "Hollywood through Deaf Eyes: A Panel Discussion," in 7he Deaf Way: Perspectives from the International Conference on Deaf Culture, ed. Carol J. Erting, Robert C. Johnson, Dorothy L. Smith, and Bruce D. Snider (Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 1989), 741.

(17) David T. Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 47.

(18) Ibid, 50.

(19) Ibid.

(20) Stacy Wolf, "Disability's Invisibility in Joan Schenkars Signs of Life and Heather McDonald's An Almost Holy Picture," in Bodies in Commotion: Disability and Performance, ed. Philip Auslander and Carrie Sandahl (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 317nl4.

(21) Seago, personal interview.

(22) Ibid.

(23) Ibid.

(24) One of the key prototypes of this pattern is John Singer in Carson McCullers's The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1940). In 2011, Robert Schleifer became the first Deaf actor cast as Singer. Up until this Chicago production, film and theatrical adaptations followed a singular pattern: a Deaf character created by a hearing author and adapted by a hearing screenwriter/ playwright was performed by a hearing actor directed by a hearing director.

(25) For instance, Mayella becomes a CODA in this production because of her father's deafness.

(26) Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1960), 182; emphasis mine.

(27) Susan Schweik, The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 185.

(28) Lee, Mockingbird, 182.

(29) The production seems to reference this image by placing red flowers near Mayella in the opening sequence. The production begins with Maaske narrating as a tableau establishes the main characters, including downstage Tom Robinson and Mayella Ewell who exchange an ambiguous, prolonged look.

(30) Lee, Mockingbird, 34.

(31) Carla M. Mathers, Deaf Interpreters in Court: An Accommodation That Is More Than Reasonable (Boston: National Consortium of Interpreter Education Centers, 2009), 19, http://www. interpretereducation.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/Deaf-Interpreter-in-Court_NCIEC2009.pdf.

(32) Mathers's footnote 43 provides additional context: "[Contemporary] courts erroneously believe that Deaf people are fluent in English and, for example, that is one reason they were permitted to serve on juries prior to the passage of the ADA. In State v. Guzman, 555 M.E.2d 259, 260 n. 2 (N.Y. 1990), the deaf juror was permitted to serve only because the court assumed he used English. The court remarked 'that this appeal does not require us to determine whether a juror dependent on a nonliteral sign language, such as American Sign Language, would be qualified under our statutory requirement that a juror be English-speaking.'"

(33) Alexandra Rundle, "Singing Mockingbird's Praises--with Reservations," Passport 2: Ashland and the Rogue Valley (blog), May 8, 2011, http://blog.passport2ashland.com/?p=2245 (site discontinued).

(34) Seago, personal interview.

(35) I find it difficult to interpret the shooting of Tom Robinson as anything other than a homicide. The "escape attempt" reads like a fictional cover for this delayed execution. This stance is shared by some people involved in the OSF production. According to Seago, "in one of McClinton's ruminations (during rehearsal), it occurred to me that I shouldn't have sympathy for the guards. 17 bullets in Tom. That many and even to have to kill him when he didn't even deserve to be jailed in the first place. Marion made me and others see the play in deeper and different perspectives. He said that he would not make the play an apology for the murder of a Black man. He wanted to add or emphasize the injustice more than it being just a sweet memory by a young innocent child." Ibid.

(36) Ibid., my italics.

(37) In the novel, Calpurnia is the only character described as having two languages when Scout observes her language usage in the Black church: "The idea that [Calpurnia] had a separate existence outside our household was a novel one, to say nothing of her having command of two languages" (Lee, Mockingbird, 136). Claudia Durst Johnson discusses Calpurnia's code switching briefly, and Calpurnia's literacy at greater length (including her familiarity with legal writing), within her book. See especially Durst Johnson, "The Danger and Delight of Difference," in To Kill a Mockingbird: Threatening Boundaries (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan and Twayne Publishers, 1994), 71-93.

(38) Seago, personal interview.

(39) Ibid.

(40) Nancy Frishberg, "Home Sign," in Gallaudet Encyclopedia of Deaf People and Deafness, ed. John V. Van Cleve (New York: McGraw Hill, 1987), 3:128.

(41) Ibid.

(42) Although Ewell predates the Deaf Pride movement, it is interesting to see the artistic team's logic affirm his language.

(43) The case of Oswaldo Martinez is a contemporary example. His status as a deaf Mexican who relied on home sign has meant that language education is a necessary pre-cursor to his facing trial for a murder and rape charge. Martinez has a compelling incentive not to demonstrate linguistic competency even if the language education is appropriate and effective. See Mather, Deaf Interpreters, 15-16, 26.

(44) Nancy Frishberg, "Interpreting," in Gallaudet Encyclopedia of Deaf People and Deafness, 2:90.

(45) Seago, personal interview.

(46) Dramaturg Martine Green generously shared some of her research with me. Martine Green, personal interview with author, July 5, 2011. She alerted me of the usefulness of this source in her preparation: Kathryn Lee Seidel, "Growing Up Southern: Resisting the Code for Southerners in To Kill a Mockingbird',' in On Harper Lee: Essays and Reflections, ed. Alice Hall Petry (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2007), 79-92.

(47) Brown, "Ashland's 'Mockingbird' Sings."

(48) Because of the later onset of Bob Ewell's hearing loss, he would have been familiar with English's basic grammatical functions. See Frishberg, "Home Sign," 130.

(49) Literacy--and "the ability to interpret the constitution"--was required of Alabama voters at this time. Harper Lee was aware of this requirement, which she dramatized in her published undergraduate writing. See Durst Johnson, To Kill a Mockingbird: Threatening Boundaries, xi-xii.

(50) Melissa Echo Greenlee, "Howie Seago Infuses Deafhood, ASL into Oregon Shakespeare Festival Roles," deafREVIEW, last modified April 16, 2012, accessed August 23, 2012, http://deafreview. com/deafreview-news/howie-seago-infuses-deafhood-asl-into-oregon-shakespeare-festival-roles/.

(51) Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Constructions of Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 192.

(52) This is the line as delivered in the Oregon Shakespeare Festival archival tape of the production, which I accessed July 15-18, 2014. Sergei's written play has Heck demonstrating his familiarity with Bob Ewell in these ways: "I was fetched by Bob--by Mr. Bob Ewell" and "I was leaving my office to go home when B--Mr. Ewell came in." Christopher Sergei and Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird: From the Novel by Harper Lee (New York: Dramatic Publishing, 1960, 1970), 53.

(53) Rundle, "Singing Mockingbird's Praises."

(54) Because iconic signs visually represent what they refer to, it may be easier for someone to "decode" such gestures. This production's gestural home sign is similar to pantomime, making it possible for viewers to understand what actions Mayella Ewell is relaying. This quality is painfully evident during the cross-examination of Mayella Ewell by Atticus Finch.

(55) Sergei and Lee, Mockingbird, 64.

(56) Scout also has no female friends and few within her age group.

(57) Schweik, Ugly Laws, 185. Here, Schweik refers to the work of Ruth Frankenberg and that of J. Brooks Bouson, "You Nothing but Trash," Southern Literary Journal 34:1 (2001): 101-23.

(58) Sergei and Lee, Mockingbird, 63.

(59) Seidel, "Growing Up Southern," 81.

(60) Malcom Gladwell, "The Courthouse Ring: Atticus and Southern Liberalism," New Yorker, August 10, 2009, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/08/10/the-courthouse-ring.

(61) Mathers, Deaf Interpreters in Court, 19.

(62) Schweik discusses this positions relationship to property claims. The Ugly Laws, 63.

(63) Rundle, "Singing Mockingbirds Praises."

(64) Sergei and Lee, Mockingbird, 67.

(65) Ibid., 64.

(66) Ibid.

(67) Ibid., 71.

(68) See "rape complex" of the South, a term coined by Wilbur). Cash, The Mind of the South (New York: Vintage, 1991), 115.

(69) Lee, Mockingbird, 182.

(70) There is not a scene where adults consider how to break the news about Bob Ewell's death to his family or voice concern about the Ewell childrens financial or emotional well-being. The novel and playtext both include reflection on these issues for Tom Robinson's survivors.

(71) Sergei and Lee, Mockingbird, 65.

(72) The stage directions following this line are as written: "MAYELLA looks around, startled"', ibid., 65.

(73) Ibid.

(74) Ibid.

(75) Ibid., 66.

(76) Ibid., 64.

(77) Ibid., 65.

(78) Ibid., 66.

(79) Ibid., 68.

(80) Ibid.

(81) Ibid.

(82) Ibid., 73.

(83) Seago, personal interview.

(84) Ibid.

(85) Ibid.

(86) Ibid.