
Charles St. Clair was on a fast road to nowhere when theatre changed his life. Actually, the road was to Columbus, Ohio, but he was going very fast. It was 1970 and he was 16, behind the wheel of his buddy’s car enroute to Ohio State, when somebody passed him going 70 miles per hour. Not to be outdone, he sped up and passed the guy at 80 mph. And so it went until the police clocked him at 120 mph and took him into custody.
The following Monday morning, he appeared before a judge who looked him over, told him he needed some direction, and ordered him to accept a scholarship to an acting school in Cleveland the very next day. St. Clair later learned that he owed this moment of grace to Susan Deter, an inner city stage director who had pulled him into a recent production of Martin Duberman’s In White America. St. Clair had only joined the cast because he and his buddy were dating a couple girls in the production. Deter had dared them to participate and St. Clair had quickly proven to be extraordinarily talented. He’d played Malcolm X and the role had landed him a scholarship at a theatre school. But it was in the suburbs, and St. Clair was an inner city boy. So he’d said, “No thank you,” and turned his sights to Ohio State where he’d hoped to register once he had the funds and to study something that would land him a real job. When he’d been driven away in the back of a police car, though, his buddy had called Deter and her social worker husband and they had interceded on his behalf.
Now, it was acting school or jail. St. Clair chose acting school: Fairmount Center for the Creative and Performing Arts. “I was the only Black in the entire school,” he recalls with a smile. “And I had this big afro.” At first, he resisted being trained in speech. He didn’t want to lose his inner city identity. It was complicated. His biological mother was part Irish, part Black. She’d entrusted him and his two half-brothers to the care of a Black woman who raised them in the inner city, where he was continually pushed to the margins for being too white. There were physical fights, almost every day. Then they’d moved to the suburbs, where all of a sudden, he was persecuted for being Black. He’d dropped out of the suburban high school at 16 and taken his GED instead. There was a lot of hate and anger in him. Now he was back at a suburban post secondary institution where they were trying to equip him to take on acting roles that included Shakespeare.
“I thought I was giving up the little bit of who I knew I was,” he recalls. “All of a sudden, someone wants to change the way you talk and they want to change the way you move.” He didn’t want to conform until he realized, “If you don't have control, if you don't have training, you can't do the things you really want to do.” When it occurred to him that he was gaining capacity and the ability to choose his future, instead of losing his identity, he threw himself into his studies. “I went crazy…I wanted to be the best.” And he found a little bit of himself in every role he played.
He also gained more family. The suburb was too far from his inner city home, so a Jewish family took him in, Ron and Janice Kumin. She was the head of the dance department and he was the Executive Director of the school. St. Clair realized this was permanent when Ron started introducing him as his son. “I’d had lots of mothers, but I’d never had a dad before,” he recalls.
From mentors Anne Heil, the theatre’s Director, and Phil Sowinski, he learned that theatre should be entertaining, but it also needs a deeper purpose. Under their tutelage, he wound up in musicals like Viet Rock, which was a first in the USA both as a rock musical and a protest play about the Vietnam War. He played the defense attorney in The Trial of the Catonsville Nine, also about Vietnam. By the time he finished his degree, he was on a mission to make a difference in the world and he had the natural talent and the cultivated skills to be able to do it.
He’d always been fascinated by the idea of theatre as communication, “I guess mostly because in some ways, I didn’t have a voice growing up.” Now, at 20, he was a successful actor, director and teacher at the Fairmount Center for the Creative and Performing Arts, but he still felt something was missing.
“One day I was on public transportation and I happened to watch a deaf couple on a bus and I was just fascinated by this form of communication I was watching.” He was mesmerized by the beauty of their visual language. “Every actor wants to know ‘What do I do with my hands?’” He’d had a deaf friend growing up who’d taught him finger spelling, but now, he knew he needed to learn American Sign Language and enrolled in a course.
When the classes weren’t progressing as quickly as he wanted to learn, he went to the Cleveland Hearing & Speech Center and hired deaf actor and psychologist Brian Kilpatrick as his tutor. The two quickly became friends, and once again, St. Clair found himself immersed in, but on the outskirts of, a community that was just finding its voice. As a hearing person, he could never fully belong there, but he was seized with a purpose that made even being on the outskirts worth it.
At the time, it was against the law of Ohio for ASL to be taught to deaf children in public schools.
The prevailing wisdom was that the deaf needed to be taught to read lips and speak: they needed to be “normal.” This was largely due to the influence of Alexander Graham Bell, whose mother and wife were both deaf. Bell feared that sign language would enable deaf people to isolate from the hearing population, especially if they were allowed to marry each other. So he campaigned indefatigably for “oralism” in schools. An international conference of “Deaf Educators” (who were not, themselves, deaf) decided he was right. Sign language was then banned from classrooms, and children who tried to use it were punished, sometimes forced to kneel on broomsticks, or have their hands tied to their desks. Also as a result of Bell’s efforts, various states passed laws forcing the sterilization of congenitally deaf adults.
By 1974, ASL was making a comeback in some states. There was plenty of evidence that pairing sign language with spoken language, or total communication, offered better quality of life to the deaf, but it was banned from Ohio public schools, where the law still mandated oralism in the classrooms.
St. Clair and Kilpatrick were determined to change that. They collaborated with Kilpatrick’s girlfriend Jackie, a deaf dancer, and musician/composer Gar Smith to create a play that was equally immersive for both hearing and non-hearing audiences. Titled My Eyes Are My Ears it featured deaf, deaf & blind and hearing actors and included music and dance. The deaf actors signed their parts while hearing actors gave voice to the language. In one scene, a husband and wife talked with sign language over breakfast while voices from the stove and the refrigerator communicated what they were saying. With that show, St. Clair and Kilpatrick launched the Fairmount Theatre of the Deaf in 1975.
One of the actresses was married to an editor for the local NBC station. He told his producer about the magic of this show, and the producer was so impressed that NBC did a half-hour special with scenes from the production, that aired regionally, then nationally, and finally won an Emmy.
In 1976, they followed up with a “mute-ical,” Alice in Deafinity, conceived and directed by St. Clair. Loosely based on Alice In Wonderland, the lavishly-costumed fantasy transported Alice to a world of silence where she could not understand what was going on until given the “Gift of Sign" by the White Queen. Then she ran afoul of the Red Queen at the little red, oralist schoolhouse, where children were tyrannized and prevented from effectively communicating with each other. Alice accidentally did the Red Queen in, liberating the schoolchildren, then attended the Mad Hatter’s tea party with the White Rabbit, Tweedle Dumb and Tweedle Deaf, and the rest of Lewis Carrol’s characters, Finally, she wound up back home in the hearing world singing “WITH THESE HANDS”. The production toured throughout the Cleveland area and California. It was so popular it was invited to the Lincoln Center’s prestigious ” Festival In the Park” in New York City.
Staging a “mute-ical” with both deaf and hearing actors and singers, posed special challenges. How were deaf members of the cast going to recognize their musical cues? They had to get creative with strategies like mounting speakers beneath the floor so actors and audiences could feel the bass with their feet, and having them hold balloons so they could feel the vibrations of the music.
Next, St. Clair and his team researched the history of social attitudes toward the deaf and wrote and produced Law of Silence, taking audiences back to the Middle Ages, when deaf babies were routinely put to death as children of Satan. Since finger spelling was originally developed by a Spanish monk under a vow of silence, the show proposed that the monk was caring for a deaf child who’d been hidden in the monastery by his mother, for his protection. It was a devastating expose of historic prejudice and oppression that showed the little boy being discovered and put to death.
Another “mute-ical” was a version of Beauty and the Beast where beauty was in the eye of the beholder and the beast didn’t physically transform, but became a prince to his beloved when she saw past his intimidating exterior. This won three Emmys.
By this time, Fairmount Theatre of the Deaf had incorporated as a not-for-profit. It was a professional theatre with numerous actors on the payroll, secured funding, and a strong enough reputation that it survives today under the name Cleveland SignStage. Ohio law had changed to allow total communication in the schools. For St. Clair, it was time to move on.
That was the beginning of a varied career that has taken St. Clair to Hollywood, National Tours, and to the faculties of three universities, BYU, Duke, and ASU. He has specialized in so many aspects of theatre, from acting to lighting design to stage management to directing, that employers sometimes have struggled to figure out where he belongs. They labeled him a “generalist” before he came to ASU to serve on the faculty of Interdisciplinary Arts and Performance program. “Interdisciplinary Theatrical Artist” sits better with St. Clair than “generalist.”
The question of belonging has been a recurring theme throughout his life. Because of his mixed racial heritage, he’s been able to play white characters and Black. Now that his hair is white, he’s categorized as “ethnically ambiguous,” and was recently cast in a commercial as the father of a Spanish family.
In his personal life, he’s on a quest to connect with his identity by researching his ancestors. He’s traced his biological mother’s family back to Ghana, and has taken students there on three Fullbright Scholarships to learn about the culture and create curriculum that honors it in US schools. He knows nothing about his biological father, but ancestry DNA promises a breakthrough there.
Belonging even crops up with regard to religion. St. Clair was raised Baptist, became religiously unaffiliated, got adopted into a Jewish family, then married a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He converted when he read the Book of Mormon while his wife, Faith, was finishing her degree in theatre at BYU. His church is socially conservative. His work is not. “I give voice to the voiceless,” he says, and many of those voices are out of sync with the teachings of his church. So, whenever he’s involved in a production, his wife and members of his congregation ask him whether or not they should attend. Often, he winds up telling them this is probably not a production they will enjoy. For himself, the distinction between his own beliefs and the voices he brings to the stage is not troubling. But others sometimes have trouble understanding it.
Being between differing worlds has pretty much been constant in St. Clair’s life. Maybe, that’s part of why he’s been able to accomplish what he has. Maybe he had to deeply know what it’s like to be on the outside in order to develop his genius at building belonging. Maybe, that’s part of what’s given him the drive to reach across divides and create community where it didn’t exist before.
Was it worth the price? I didn’t ask. I didn’t feel like I needed to. St. Clair’s smile was open and ready, his eyes were bright and his voice impassioned as he related the work he’s done and how his mantra is love and respect. I felt like I was in the presence of greatness. It was inspiring.
What do you think of Alexander Graham Bell's campaign to do away with sign language, extinguish deaf culture, and train deaf people to be full participants in mainstream, hearing culture? Weigh in with your honest, anonymous opinion here: https://forms.gle/ukAfeM4BaND5T9yKA
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