A Third Theater Offers Captioned Performances
Seattle Repertory Theatre will make much of its 2009-10 season accessible to people with hearing loss by offering captioned performances of its four at the Bagley Wright Theatre, Rep's main stage.
The productions and caption dates are:
39 Steps -- Thursday, Oct. 1
Equivocation -- Thursday, Dec. 3
Glengrarry Glen Ross -- Thursday, Feb. 11
Fences -- Thursday, April 1
Tickets will go on sale Aug. 21. Seattle Rep marketing director Katie Jackman plans to send us an email link that we can post on this website to enable them to keep track of how many ticket purchases come from our readers and members.
The caption-area tickets will cost $35 each, significantly less than Rep's normal pricing of $41 to $48 for seats in that area.
Seattle Rep joins Seattle's Paramount and 5th Avenue theaters in offering one captioned performance of each of its dramatic productions. The captions, prepared in advance, are displayed in synch with the performance on a portable reader board. All three theaters have engaged c2net out of Boston to do that captioning.
Rep's initiation of captioning comes in response to requests from the Washington State Communication Access Project, and is one more small step towards our objective of making Washington's public places accessible to people with hearing loss. Wash-CAP was also responsible for instigating the captioned performances at Paramount and 5th Avenue.
Seattle Rep's captioning program is being funded in part by a grant from the Theatre Development Fund from New York City, which has also provided start-up funding for Paramount and 5th Avenue. Three of TDF's eight access grants this year have gone to Seattle theaters, a focus that TDF Accessibility Programs Director Lisa Carling says is the result of Wash-CAP's advocacy within the Puget Sound theater community.
