Accessible holidays at Seattle theaters
Thanks to the good efforts of a number of Seattle's live theaters, those of us with hearing loss won't need to have a holiday season full of nothing but silent nights, as we'll have a menu of captioned performances available to us.
Tomorrow, Dec. 4, Seattle Repertory Theatre is offering a captioned performance of "Equivocation," a play in which Shakespeare is the principal character, not the author. King James has commissioned Shakespeare to write a play about a plot to assissinate the king, but when Shakespeare finds out that the "official" version of events isn't accurate, he has to choose between his artistic integrity or possibly his head. To ensure seats from where the captions will be visible, email the box office, boxoffice@seattlerep.org.
On Sunday, December 27, Seattle's Fifth Avenue Theatre will present a captioned performance of the holiday standby White Christmas, the Irving Berlin favorite. Fifth Avenue is offering tickets to the captioned performances for the special price of $37.50. Again, the best way to ensure that you'll be seated in the right spot is to email the Fifth Avenue box office, ticketing@5thavenue.org.
Finally, the New Year really will get kicked off on Jan. 3, 2010, when Seattle's Paramount Theatre presents the Rockettes and the Radio City Christmas Spectacular at 5 p.m. It appears that Paramount has changed its website design, and in the process, we've lost the on-line order button for captioned performances. For now, other than calling or visiting the box office, the best bet for those of us who don't use telephones easily might simply be to contact Mason Sherry, the theater manager directly by email, masons@stgpresents.org. Mason has been a terrific supporter of Paramount's captioning efforts, and he will find a way to let us order online tickets.
The captioning at all three theaters is being done by c2net from Boston, which converts the script into text form in advance, then displays the captions on a portable reader board visible from a bloc of seats set aside for those who request them. The captioning effort has been partially funded by the Theatre Development Fund from New York City.
The captioning efforts were undertaken after requests from the Washington State Communication Access Project (Wash-CAP), a non-profit membership corporation whose purpose is to improve access to Washington's public places for people with hearing loss.
