By SHARON EBERSON
It was no exaggeration when City Theatre announced that Another Kind of Silence, the world-premiere play that leads off its 2025-2026 season, “is one of the most ambitious shows the company has taken on.”
Bilingual and bicultural, the plot unfolds simultaneously in English and American Sign Language (ASL), along with some Greek Sign Language, as Evan and Chap, two already-partnered queer women, cross paths in modern-day Greece and find themselves falling in love.
Beyond the multilingual script, Another Kind of Silence further pushes boundaries as four characters and their “four souls” – each character has a singular Greek Chorus – “traverse one of the hardest chapters in committed relationships.”
The challenges and rewards of the play, by award-winning playwright L M Feldman, have taken shape over a decade, leading to the rolling world premiere that starts with City Theatre’s production.
“I think it’s everything that exemplifies our work,” said Clare Drobot, recently named as the singular artistic director at City. “It is bold, it’s boundary-pushing, but it’s also beautiful and deeply human, and filled with laughter and joy and desire. … It just feels like exactly what City does: To work with fantastic Pittsburgh-based artists, bridge them to the national community, and bring new plays to life.”
City and its producing partners, through the support of the National New Play Network’s Venturous Theater Pipeline, have commissioned Director of Artistic Sign Language and cast member MoMo Holt to create what is called a gloss, or full American Sign Language translation of the intricate script.
Holt’s entertaining bio, besides her extensive degrees and theater experience, includes that she is on “a full-time tenure-track gig at Gallaudet, shaping future theater-makers. She’s equal parts professor, performer, and proud nerd for timing, rhythm, and the beauty of a well-placed sign.”
Holt and director Kim Weild, Chair of the John Wells Directing Program at Carnegie Mellon University, have known each other for many years, and Weild first heard of Another Kind of Silence through the playwright, while Feldman was working on it almost a decade ago.
Weild’s older brother is profoundly deaf, “So my relationship to the world in a certain way was of course formed and informed by him,” the director said. “I’ve been creating bilingual work in SL and English now for 18 years, and, interestingly, one of the first plays I ever saw was with the National Theater of the Deaf when I was about 7 years old.”
Although her background puts the work in Weild’s wheelhouse, its intricacies have required extraordinary measures of process and production for all involved.
Feldman has made ASL integral to specific characters in a way that is rarely seen onstage. More often, for instance, a Deaf Broadway or Deaf West production of an existing show (the Tony-nominated Spring Awakening revival, for example), has a performer communicating through ASL “twinned with” or “shadowed by” an English-speaking performer.
Telling a new, multilingual story with integral Sign Language, along with the conceit of “Inside/Outside” character choruses, has been both daunting and exhilarating.
Evan is played by Pittsburgh-based actress Catherine Gowl, and Chap, by Kaia Fitzgerald, a hard-of-hearing actor from St. Paul, Minnesota. Jules Dameron and Anil Margsahayam play their partners, Ana and Peter, while the chorus actors are Hope Anthony, Thomas DellaMonica, Amelia Hensley and Holt.
During a Zoom conversation, Holt explained, “It’s very different than working on, say, Shakespeare, and I’ve translated Shakespeare for many years.”
The play, originally called Fill Our Mouths, is mostly about navigating committed relationships, and how love evolves as individuals evolve.
“How do we know [for instance], is this the right person for me?,” Holt said through an ASL interpreter. “What is the chemistry? How do you make the decision that it is real love?”
“At its heart, this play is a love story, right?,” Drobot said. “It’s two humans who meet, feel a connection, and they’re both in committed relationships. I think that’s something that’s so universal.Yes, there are both deaf and hearing characters in the play, but ultimately, it’s a play about language, it’s a play about love and desire, and connection.”
Among the challenges of telling the story, Holt noted, is that not only will a hearing person use phrases differently than a deaf person would use, but also, that Sign Language is not universal. In striving for authenticity, she contacted an ASL user in Athens to help with Greek Sign Language translation.
“There can be a lot of misunderstanding and overlaps, so that’s part of the transcribing process,” Holt said.
The online version of the City Theatre script, or gloss, is uniquely color-coded and includes both illustrative images and links to videos of Holt demonstrating, for example, apropos VGC (visual gestural communication) or the nuances of GSL (Greek Sign Language).
In this context, a gloss refers to written and illustrative demonstrations of each signed word, creating a reference point for the actors, because ASL has its own complex structure, which cannot be fully captured in written form.
For times when signing may be used exclusively, the scenic design will include some captioning (as City previously did with Tribes, in 2014), and the character blocking has to be just so – making sure, for example, that actors’ and audience sightlines are unobstructed.
The company whose mission is new play development is on the ground floor of creation with Another Kind of Silence, which is a different kind of play.
“We have now moved into the 21st century, and technology has shifted. I think that there’s actually a lot of potential for the development of new forms of design that create accessibility in the theater,” Weild noted. “It makes me think a lot about Tennessee Williams‘ forward to The Glass Menagerie, about plasticity of design. … There’s this beautiful play … and L has written this phenomenal container for experimentation. And that’s what we are doing.”
Williams theory of “plastic theater” was a ground-breaking, non-realistic approach to drama and design, that saw the 2013 Broadway revival of Glass Menagerie take place amid a pool of black water.
For Another Kind of Silence, the extended rehearsal process also has allowed time for the creative team to work on the design, lighting, sound and multimedia content, so that the “accessibility aesthetic is built in,” Drobot said. “That will ensure that every performance is accessible to every audience member in the community. Certainly, that’s the hope.”
Community partners for the production include The Pittsburgh Deaf Connection, ASL Coffee Chat, Persad Center, Western Pennsylvania School for the Deaf, and the Centre for Hearing & Deaf Services, Inc.
Holt’s hope is that all who attend will see something of themselves in the characters, whether it is a person who is fluent in ASL, but may be confused by Greek Sign Language, or an English speaker trying to make a connection with someone who is hard of hearing.
Underlying it all are a person’s internal thoughts and emotions, “so there’s a lot of communication misunderstandings,” Holt said. “That’s very fascinating, navigating a hard-of-hearing experience, and I’m sure a lot of people in the audience will make that connection.”
Holt made the connection by comparing the interactions to an English meeting a Spanish speaker, when each is not fluent in the other’s language.
“How does that affect a relationship?,” Holt asked, then asked the question that might just be the crux of Another Kind of Silence:
“Can love conquer all?”
TICKETS AND DETAILS
City Theatre’s production of Another Kind of Silence runs September 20 – October 12, 2025, on the Mainstage at 1300 Bingham Street, South Side. Tickets: visit https://citytheatrecompany.org/production/100833/another-kind-of-silence or call 412-431-2489. The rolling premiere will continue with separate productions at Curious Theatre Company in Denver, Colorado, and Vortex Repertory Company in Austin, Texas. Note: City’s next production in November, of Lauren Gunderson’s work based on Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, is part of another rolling premiere, as a co-commission with Northlight Theatre, Chicago; People’s Light, Malvern, PA; and TheatreWorks, Palo Alto, CA.
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