One Enchanted Evening, One New Lawsuit
Captioned theater made its Washington State debut Sunday evening, Aug. 10, when Seattle's Paramount Theatre presented a captioned version of A Chorus Line.
The captions, provided and operated by the Caption Coalition (c2net) of Boston, were displayed on a portable message board set up in front of the stage in synch with the performance. David Chu, founder and CEO of c2net, was on hand to personally oversee the preparation and display of the captions. Paramount Theatre set aside a generous block of 80 tickets in the right-orchestra section of the theater, from where the captions were clearly visible.
Despite less than a month's notice, summer vacations and little public advertising (other than what we were able to do on this website and through Washington's hearing-loss organizations), we had over 50 people request seats in the caption area. Paramount Theatre manager Mason Sherry said afterwards that he thought the performance went well, and seemed optimistic about future captioned performances.
The news from Seattle's other major theater, though, has not been good. 5th Avenue Theatre, which bills itself as Seattle's largest theatrical employer, has declined to provide captioned performances, claiming that doing so would constitute an "undue burden." 5th Avenue said that captioning one performance of each of the seven productions it presents in any one season would cost $14,000, and it claims that it can't make room in an annual budget of some $19 million to provide for captioning.
If captioning were declared to be an "undue burden," 5th Avenue would not be required to provide it. However, in order to claim that providing an accommodation like captioning constitutes an undue burden, the facility must show that it can't reduce expenses, can't expect a revenue increase from the expected new audience, can't raise enough revenue by increasing admission charges to everyone, and can't find a sponsor.
Because 5th Avenue did not provide any information to substantiate its claim that captioning would constitute an undue burden, the Washington State Communication Access Project (Wash-CAP) filed suit last week in state court in Seattle. Our complaint did not ask for money damages, but asked that 5th Avenue provide captioned performances like the performance provided by Paramount. Trial is not scheduled to occur until January of 2010, but we hope to work out a settlement with 5th Avenue well before that date.
