The show was awesome. The captions detailed. The caption screen? Not so awesome, large, or even centered – it sat off to the right of the stage. But annoyances aside, the power of RENT was an experience all its own.
Fast paced, with bright colors and an overall theme of love, RENT was featured at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts in Fort Lauderdale on Friday, Sept. 15 through Sunday, Sept. 17.
The matinee of the hit bohemian musical, held at 2 p.m. on Saturday, was open captioned (OC) – the entire play was typed verbatim and appeared on a 4 x 2 _ foot LCD screen for the deaf and hard of hearing (HOH). “Open captioned” means the screen requires no extra equipment to view the text (like a television does with closed captioning). The caption screen was positioned just to the right of the stage on an adjustable tripod – which would not have been a problem if one had a few more eyes. As it was, watching the show while reading the captions on the screen was like a high-speed tennis match.
The size of the LCD screen depends on how big the theater is. In larger theaters, screens are positioned on either side of the stage. The position is always to the left or right of the stage, but never suspended above. Those that set up OC are careful of infringing sight lines or somehow causing a distraction to the actors or the audience.
Lew Balaban, a licensed court reporter, a CART (Communication Access Realtime Translation, a translating system for the deaf and HOH) reporter in South Florida and the man in charge of providing the captions at the BC shows says, “I started at the Broward Center last year. I’ve been theater captioning since 1998 and did most of my captioning either on Broadway, The Kennedy Center [in Washington D.C.], Philly and Sarasota.”
Caption Coalition Inc., or C2, is the company that makes live performance captioning possible. Even if a captionist is licensed in CART or court reporting, he or she must still go through at least two years of further training in “performance driven captioning.” This means that he or she needs to be able to caption a show simultaneously to correspond with the movement on stage.
“Many, many, many hours are spent preparing to caption a performance,” Balaban says.
The captioning starts as soon as the play starts. In a musical such as RENT the deaf audience will even see the lyrics to songs.
The Broward Center is not the only theater in South Florida to provide captioning of its productions. When Miami’s Carnival Center for the Performing Arts opens on Oct. 1, it will provide captioning during its Sunday matinees. The Kravis Center in West Palm Beach, however, is another matter.
Representatives of the Kravis Center said that the theater should have captioning as well, but up to now nothing has been done about it. As of press time they are the only theater in Florida that does not caption performances, according to Balaban.In April, the Broward Center held a workshop devoted to theater captioning. Every theater in Florida, as well as one from Texas, attended. All attendees stayed to view an OC performance of Little Women, which was a big hit amongst the crowd.
Plays at the Broward Center are open captioned during Saturday matinees. For more information or to contact the Broward
Center box office call (877) 311-7489 (SHOW), or for the deaf (954) 468-3283.