(Or, Why I Wrote a Play About Her)
Raymond Luczak
Words: 803
[Essay]

Ever since I first began learning American Sign Language (ASL) in the summer of 1984 at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., I also noticed how some DeafBlind people communicated through listening to tactile signing. I did make a few DeafBlind friends, but I still felt somewhat uncomfortable with the idea of having my hand lightly touched while I signed. I was a bit incredulous that most DeafBlind people could follow me through my signs alone when my facial expressions seemed such an essential element to my signing, but they all assured me that I was clear. Nine months later I fell in love with my first partner, who happened to be DeafBlind. It was through him that I began to learn and appreciate many aspects of DeafBlind culture as well as to understand the spectrum of vision loss in the same way that I’d seen the range and impact of hearing loss in others.



In August 2001 I met John Lee Clark, a DeafBlind editor, writer, and publisher here in Minneapolis. We immediately bonded as friends and colleagues; his company The Tactile Mind Press eventually published three of my books and produced two of my full-length documentaries for DVD.
Among the countless conversations John and I had online and in person, one person’s name came up now and then: Helen Keller.



I knew who she was. Even though Laura Bridgman was the first DeafBlind educational success story and became very famous during the age of P.T. Barnum, Helen Keller’s fame eclipsed Laura’s by a vast margin. Although I had not read any of Helen Keller’s work, my impressions of her were largely formed by William Gibson’s myth-making play The Miracle Worker. I felt deeply troubled by the implication that Helen Keller was a barbarian who needed saving and an animal who needed to be told what to do. First off, Helen Keller ran amuck all over the stage, which is not what most DeafBlind children do, particularly if they have no vision. They quickly learn the pain of getting bruised by tripping over things; no one has to teach them that lesson. Helen Keller kept bumping into things onstage, which completely undermined the supposed assessment of her intelligence.
And of course, Patty Duke’s over-the-top performance as Helen Keller in an otherwise exquisite film directed by Arthur Penn was cringe-inducing. It was not until I saw the Torch Theater’s production of The Miracle Worker here in Minneapolis that I saw possibly the most realistic portrayal of Helen Keller onstage. She did not bump into things; she actively examined new objects through touch and smell; and she had created homemade signs that indicated mother or father. She simply had not yet grasped the concept of language as in vocabulary and grammar.



As it turns out, many of my Deaf signing friends hate--I repeat, hate--Helen Keller because of the way hearing people had placed her high up on a pedestal and pointed to her as a shining example for all of us to emulate, as if she was the patron saint of anyone with hearing loss.
Worse, Helen wanted more than anything to speak, and therefore she did not learn sign language. She did fingerspell, which is not the same thing as signing. She herself also kept her distance from the DeafBlind community.
The notion that ASL is completely equal in every way to English or any other foreign spoken language first came to the forefront by way of a hearing linguist named William Stokoe in the early 1960s, whose findings were widely disseminated in the field of linguistics a decade later. By then Helen Keller had died.



I thought that it was high time to examine the iconography of Helen Keller from the DeafBlind community’s perspective. With John Lee Clark’s invaluable feedback, I was able to craft a new play in which I imagined a Deaf artist working on a statue made in honor of Helen Keller and finding herself flummoxed when her statue decides to stop sitting still. I Never Slept with Helen Keller is a distillation of my observations and experiences with the DeafBlind community over the past 25 years, as well as a catalogue of my reactions to John Lee Clark’s insightful comments about the DeafBlind experience. The play also considers the chasm between reality and myth as well as personality and icon: Should Helen Keller still matter, even now when many DeafBlind people are able to lead such independent lives?



I look forward to the day that the myth of Helen Keller is no longer a cross of expectations that all disabled people are expected to bear, and that DeafBlind people are treated just like anyone else, not as saints blessed with an early entrance into Heaven, but as ordinary people with flaws as deep and inherent as our own.



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I Never Slept with Helen Keller, produced by Deaf Blender Theatre, will premiere at the historic Deaf club and community center, Charles Thompson Memorial Hall in St. Paul, Minnesota. Tickets are available at https://www.deafblender.org