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Russell Harvard, Reaching Beyond ?King Lear?


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The New York Times
SOURCE: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/02/style/russell-harvard-reaching-beyond-king-lear.html
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Summary

with...An actor rightly wonders: Why is there a TV show about meerkats but not one about deaf people?Branching out: Mr. Harvard in Hudson River Park.CreditCreditNathan Bajar for The New York TimesSupported byBy Maureen DowdEven though he gouges out eyeballs eight times a week, Russell Harvard seems like a really nice guy.When I tell the actor that I have a cold, as we sit in a corner of the Lambs Club in the theater district, he insists on pouring me a glass of the jasmine, elderflower and violet kombucha he is drinking.“That’s my favorite,” said Mr. Harvard, who is deaf. He can speak with what he has called “a deaf accent” and, with a hearing aid, the sound in his right ear can get “pretty crisp.” But for this interview, he mostly relied on an American Sign Language interpreter, his friend Steven Nugent.The tall, brawny Mr. Harvard, 38, is playing the Duke of Cornwall, the sadistic husband of Lear’s rotten daughter, Regan, in the buzzy (if mostly Tony-snubbed) Broadway production of “King Lear,” with Glenda Jackson as Lear. Cornwall stabs Gloucester’s eyes with the imprecation, “Out, vile jelly!”But now, thanks to Mr. Harvard, who translates Shakespearean language into sign language for his role, I also think about the play in terms of metaphors about deafness.Like Donald Trump and so many other leaders and moguls bombarded with the white noise of flattery, Lear cannot hear the truth. Mr. Harvard, Mr. Gold and Alexandria Wailes, the show’s director of artistic sign language, worked together to interpret Shakespeare.“Russell is a very beautiful and poetic signer,” Mr. Gold said. The couple that smells together, stays together.”Pedro Pascal, who was the sexy Oberyn, Prince of Dorne in “Game of Thrones” and now plays the sexy villainous Edmund, the bastard son of the Earl of Gloucester, in “King Lear,” said that Mr. Harvard’s kindness as a person and generosity as an actor shine through his bad guys in “Fargo” and “Lear” and “ends up creating a much more original villain, more human and accessible and ultimately more terrifying because you can see yourself in it.”Ms. Jackson told me that “Russell can be ferocious on the stage, but invariably charming and utterly delightful off.”When I asked what Ms. Jackson was like, Mr. Harvard grinned and said, “She’s a diva. Then he studied theater at Gallaudet University in D.C. before starting his career with a bang, playing the adult adopted deaf son of Daniel Day-Lewis’s character, the oilman Daniel Plainview, in the 2007 Paul Thomas Anderson epic, “There Will Be Blood.”For that movie, Mr. Harvard employed a vintage form of sign language used at the turn of the 20th century: signing “small,” as he put it.“Now we sign bigger," he said. Because I was chatting with whoever the hell would listen.”His next film was an indie, “The Hammer,” about a deaf college wrestler named Matt Hamill; he inherited the part after another actor stepped aside to accommodate the deaf community’s wish to see a deaf actor in the role.Mr. Harvard said that he knows that it’s “a fine line,” noting: “I was talking to a friend of mine who was debating whether her straight friend, who was playing a lesbian role, should not have that. We have our mores.” (He said that what he was doing a bit with me, signing and speaking at the same time — known as SimCom, for simultaneous communication — is “strongly discouraged” in the community “because you’re not able to do both languages perfectly at the same time.”)Mr. Harvard continued, “I was thinking that it would be really cool to have a deaf character play Man-Bat’s part. “But at the end of the day, it’s really about what the camera tells you when you’re looking at their face.” He said that Mr. Harvard has “an empathetic quality” that tugs at your heart, even when he’s doing bad things.I asked him why more people in charge of shows don’t create deaf characters.

As said here by By MAUREEN DOWD