If art celebrates the soul, then actor Dean Patrick Cannavino is having a ball.
Fresh from collecting Chicago`s coveted Jeff Award for his 1987 Commons Theatre performance in the title role of the play ”The Signal Season of Dummy Hoy,” Cannavino is clearly in his element as he obliges a reporter`s call to strut his stuff in a one-man show for an audience of three or four stand-arounds.
At first, his slender frame seems overwhelmed by the black emptiness of the barren stage at the Paramount Arts Centre in Aurora. Then someone turns on a spotlight.
Instantly, the 5-foot-8-inch Cannavino transforms himself into another life form-one that`s capable of shedding, like a second skin, the earthly reality that confines it. He uses body parts like musical instruments to play the space that surrounds him.
His monologue is a corporeal concert: perpetual-motion hands alternately pluck at, tease, caress, ripple, strike, slice and clobber the air;
unfaltering legs balance a torso that moves with a seeming ignorance of gravity or momentum; and facial features conspire to reveal layer upon layer of hidden countenance, one alien to another.
In a matter of minutes, Cannavino rivets onlookers with a display of raw emotion; first love, then fear, then rapture and finally sorrow.
A photographer yells, ”Encore! That`s great! E-n-c-o-r-e!”
Cannavino ignores him and steps out of the circle of light.
The photographer forgets, for a moment, what everyone else also has forgotten.
Cannavino is deaf.
In the fourth month of her pregnancy, his mother, Kathy, contracted rubella, commonly known as the German measles. She recalls that she had no idea the virus that caused her to break out in a minor rash and feel only slightly sick for a couple of days was anything that might harm her unborn child.
In fact, German measles can wreak silent, but devastating, damage on a developing fetus, especially in the first three months of gestation. The disease can cause a variety of birth defects. Blindness and deafness are among the most common.
Years later, after Cannavino garnered national attention for his work as an actor and after he received the Joseph Jefferson Award Committee citation for excellence (the so-called Jeff Award, which honors achievements of professional theater companies that do not operate under Actors` Equity Union contracts) and, finally, after he walked away last June with a five-week scholarship for summer school at the internationally recognized National Theatre of the Deaf in Connecticut, Kathy allowed herself this comfort:
”When Dean was younger, people would reject him because he was deaf. They didn`t understand why he would do things they way he did. There was a lot of pain, but now there`s applause. That helps to erase it.”
To Cannavino, 23, thunderous applause sounds like a muffled hum, one that feels a lot like love. Love that he says he hasn`t yet found among hearing girls.
”I dated a few hearing girls, but it wasn`t anything serious. They didn`t get to know me very well,” Cannavino explains seated comfortably on the floor of his parents` modest ranch home in West Chicago. Even though his speaking skills are accomplished, a professional interpreter, Rita Taccona of Schaumburg, assists Cannavino throughout the interview.
”There was one girl,” he recalls, ”I think if she had sign language skills, we could have sustained the relationship longer because sometimes you can use sign language to show how you feel on the inside, when there are no words to express those feelings.
”Maybe that`s why I`ve fallen in love with the theater.”
The feeling is mutual, say playwrights, directors and producers, who have worked with Cannavino. He`s a real audience-pleaser, say his fans, a group that includes Oscar-winning actress Marlee Matlin.
Matlin, who is deaf, first met Cannavino at an actors` workshop. About a year ago, she visited him backstage after watching him portray deaf baseball legend William ”Dummy” Hoy in ”The Signal Season of Dummy Hoy.” Matlin told Cannavino then, ”I didn`t realize that you are as good as you are.”
”Cannavino was brilliant in the play,” she said in an interview.
”Seeing his work made me proud of him.”
Allen Meyer and Michael Nowak, who co-authored the fiction-based-on-fact play ”The Signal Season of Dummy Hoy,” credit Cannavino`s poignant portrayal of Hoy for helping them to understand better the play`s main character. However, when the play went to New York several months ago for an off-Broadway run, they say that the New York-based director picked a New York deaf actor to play Hoy. Meyer and Nowak say that although the eastern actor did a good job, if and when the play is adapted for TV or the movie screen, Cannavino is their first choice to reclaim the lead.
William Hoy was a turn-of-the-century deaf baseball player who was responsible for creating the hand signals used today in baseball umpiring. At that time, deaf people were called Dummy. The play chronicles the early part of Hoy`s career. It explores Hoy`s relationships with his teammates and the struggle for acceptance that he shares with a fictional social maverick, woman sports reporter Aliza Clover.
During the audition for the role of Hoy, Meyer says of Cannavino, ”I was freaked out by him. He looked like a white version of Prince. He had shoulder- length blond hair and he moved like he was choreographed.”
But director India Cooper saw the energy and commitment to work that she was looking for and cast Cannavino for the part. Nowak says, ”We wanted a deaf actor, and we had no idea what we were going to get. What we liked about Cannavino from the beginning was his charisma.”
It takes more than charisma to win over a hearing audience, says Cannavino. For a deaf actor, it takes tremendous discipline. ”The biggest difficulty for a deaf actor in a hearing production,” he explains, ”is that the deaf actor can`t be truly 100 percent involved because he can`t hear. In a hearing production, I have to learn all the other actors parts as well as my own, because I can`t hear them say their lines, and I have to know their cues so I won`t miss my own. It`s a real challenge.”
Dean Cannavino learned to live with challenge a long time ago. He`s been challenged since birth.
He was from all appearances a healthy, beautiful baby boy. As he grew, he seemed to be a born communicator, says Kathy: ”He showed his emotions easily, so I always understood whatever it was he wanted.” Perhaps that`s why she reasons, ”Dean was 3 years old before I found out he was deaf.”
After the initial shock, ”I felt like anybody else who learns their child is handicapped,” Kathy says. ”First you feel bad. Then you cry. Then you cry some more. Then you get mad. And then you do something about it.”
Something, she says, like ferreting out social workers with a solid knowledge of state-funded programs so your child can take advantage of every special education opportunity offered.
”And something like making Dean learn to speak to me because I refused to learn sign language,” Kathy says. ”I wanted him to talk, and I guess that was my way of helping him. He did learn to talk.” She adds wistfully, ”But I wouldn`t tell everybody to do it the way I did. Sign language helped Dean so much. It gave a name to the things around him. Now I feel that sign language is just as legitimate a language as English.”
Society has come a long way since a deaf man (like silversmith John Singer, played by Alan Arkin, in the film classic ”The Heart is a Lonely Hunter”) had to carry a business card that read, ”I am a deaf-mute. I read lips and understand what is said to me. Please do not shout.” Yet, even an enlightened society can seem unbearably cruel when money, which can mean the difference between living a full life and just living, is denied to those who can least afford the loss.
A situation like that, Kathy says, can make a parent do things out of desperation. ”You end up doing things you don`t want to have to do,” she says. Things like taking on the entire West Chicago School Board ”so your kid, who wants to be like all the other kids, can join a couple of extra-curricular school clubs, just like all the other kids.
”All we wanted was late bus transportation for Dean from Hinsdale South High School (in Darien) to our home in West Chicago so he could participate in after-school activities like the Drama Club.”
Back in 1981, when Dean was a freshman, Hinsdale South was, and still is, the high school for many hearing-impaired students from a multi-district region. They are sent to Hinsdale South to be mainstreamed, or integrated, into some of the same classrooms attended by hearing students.
”Out of all the school districts that sent deaf kids to Hinsdale South, 23 of the 24 districts cooperated with each other and sent a late bus for those kids,” Kathy says in a tone that reflects a still-smoldering rage.
”Only West Chicago wouldn`t voluntarily pay for some of the mileage so Dean could catch a ride on one of the buses.”
That meant Kathy or Don Kochniarczyk, Dean`s stepfather, had to arrange to leave work and shuttle Dean back and forth to Hinsdale South, a 40-minute trip each way, so he could join the Drama Club. When they couldn`t manage to get the time off, Don and Kathy paid others to give him a ride. Their effort saw fruition earlier than they expected, when in his sophomore year, Dean won a starring role in the school`s hearing-student production of ”The Fantasticks,” Kathy recalls proudly.
Three years and a special, quasi-judicial hearing later, Dean was riding the late bus home, serving as president of the Drama Club for deaf students, and earning enough points to eventually be awarded the title Thespian in the schoolwide hearing-students Drama Club.
Cannavino`s much acclaimed personal charm isn`t lost on audiences. Kathy offers a fistful of newspaper clippings that attest to Cannavino`s popularity in a Cleveland stage production of Peter Shaffer`s controversial play
”Equus.” Cannavino wowed his director and the hearing audience when he played the lead character, 17-year-old Alan Strang, an emotionally disturbed teenager who blinds six horses he virtually worships by stabbing them with a spike.
The demanding role of Alan is usually performed by a speaking actor, but Cannavino persuaded the director to cast him as Alan and have an actor, who was positioned off stage, say his lines. The dramatic device made it seem as though one of the on-stage horses was speaking Alan`s thoughts.
Simultaneously, Cannavino used sign language and body movement to communicate Alan`s tortured emotions.
It worked. At the conclusion of the play, the horses are dead, and a stripped naked Alan confronts his unspeakable deed. Cannavino brought the audience to tears when he suddenly spoke Alan`s final lines in his own voice: ”Find me. Find me. Kill me. Kill me. Kill me.”
The role of Alan was particularly hard for Cannavino, not only because of his deafness, but because he had to appear briefly on stage in the nude: ”At first I felt that being naked on stage was against my morals. But I realized that, in the theater, I have to be ready for anything. I said to myself, `It`s not Dean on that stage. It`s Alan, and you have to make Alan come alive. It`s Alan who`s being naked to the world.`
”Alan was my most difficult role. It took a lot of psychological energy. Sometimes I`d use memories from my past experiences. After a performance, I`d still be shaking for a long while.”
Last summer, Cannavino was a guest artist in the Northwestern University production of ”Mother Hicks.” He was cast in the role of Tuc, a deaf storyteller. His performance won him an invitation to be a guest lecturer at the college.
Staggered by the prospect of standing on the teaching side of the classroom in front of a bunch of supersmart college students without an interpreter, Cannavino asked what was expected of him. He was simply told,
”Bring yourself.”
”So I showed up for class and signed and voiced,” he says. ”It was scary at first, but when I made a joke they laughed, and pretty soon they began asking me questions. I talked about how hearing actors and deaf actors perform differently on stage. I explained that hearing actors use voice and body movements to communicate, whereas deaf actors use their hands and body movements.”
Despite the odds against a deaf actor`s making a living in the theater, Cannavino remains undaunted. Yes, he says, eventually he will take the theatrical cosmetology courses that he planned to start a few years ago, so he`ll always have a way to make a living. But he vows that he will never give up acting. It seems, he says, the only thing that he cannot do is not act.
His latest gig has taken him temporarily to Cleveland, where he is an actor-manager for a small theater group called Fairmount Theatre of the Deaf. The touring troupe, which is funded by various grants, puts on theatrical productions, and visits schools throughout the country, performing skits, poetry and mime. The purpose of their work is to permit students of all ages, from pre-school to college, to see first hand what talented non-hearing actors can do.
Fairmount producer Miles Barnes says that Cannavino is so painstaking in his efforts to communicate with his audience that up to eight times a week the actor is asked, ”Are you really deaf?”
Cannavino considers the producer`s comment and says, ”I`m proud to be deaf; I always have been. I have no negative feelings about it. Maybe that`s because my family never rejected me.”
Kathy separated from, and later divorced, Dean`s father when Dean was about 5 years old. In 1971, she married Don Kochniarczyk. Today they share five children: Sarah, 7; Suzanne, 11; and the three Cannavino brothers, Dean; James, 23; and Richard, 25. Kathy credits Kochniarczyk with being a strong influence on Dean when he was young.
Kochniarczyk remembers telling Dean that he could do anything in life, but because he was hearing-impaired, it would just be a little harder.
”Don encouraged him to try to do everything,” Kathy says. During his childhood, Dean played on many of the youth baseball and football teams that Kochniarczyk coached.
In the movie ”Children of a Lesser God,” teacher John Leeds desperately seeks to reconcile his love relationship with the deaf and volatile Sarah Norman. He asks her, ”Do you think that we could find a place where we can meet, not in silence and not in sound?”
For Cannavino, that place is the theater. His goal, he says, is to breathe new life into the now defunct Chicago Theatre of the Deaf.
So, the reporter asks, who would come to see your theater company when it would likely be modestly financed, and when, in a major city like Chicago, there are so many excellent professional touring shows to see?
”You,” he answers.
Yes.
