There are only a few deaf theatrical groups operating in the United States, so when we heard about a new one that was thinking outside the box, of course we wanted to talk with them. Dr. Brian Cheslik, Artistic Director, and Sandra Mae Frank, Production Manager, for Deaf Austin Theatre in Austin, TX share the challenges of running a deaf theatre company while ensuring accessibility and making stage magic for all their patrons. 

Transcript: 

[Liz: White female with blond hair and earrings, wearing gray “Ambassador” shirt and black sweater jacket in front of orange background 
Brian: White male with short black hair and beard wearing black “DAT” shirt and gray jacket in front of white background 
Sandra Mae: White female with chin-length brown hair and black “DAT” shirt in front of white background]
 
Liz Tannebaum: Hi! Hello! 
Brian Cheslik: Hello! 
Sandra Mae Frank: Hello! 
Liz: I’m Liz Tannebaum. (Shows name sign). I’m a Sorenson Ambassador. I’m here with the honor of interviewing these two beautiful people. Let me introduce Brian Cheslik (shows name sign), right? 
Brian: Right. 
Liz: Brian is the Artistic Director. And this beautiful woman is Sandra Mae Frank (shows name sign), Production Manager. Before we start, can you please expand on your roles at — important — Deaf Austin Theatre (DAT) for those out there please. 
Brian: Sure. I’m the Artistic Director. That means I basically lead the organization. I make all the creative decisions. I read and select scripts. For the most part, it’s my responsibility to direct the show too. Or if I’m booked already or busy, I find another director to take my place.
I also collaborate with other companies on co-productions.
I handle a lot of the business things, such as applying for rights, paying for rights, producing work, and so forth. 
Liz: Beautiful. Sandra Mae? 
Sandra Mae: My role in DAT is having Brian’s back in support as we go along. I also work internally with the people — actors, our board members, checking on them to make sure everything is going well, making sure the different projects are going well. Pretty much anything Brian asks me to do. I take all the tasks he sends me and organize them together and do them. 

People working with DAT 

Liz: How many people are involved in DAT? How does the membership in the audience look? How does that work? It’s important for everyone out there to see that so we can grow deaf theater in the future. 
Brian: Right now, we’re a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. We’re still “new”. We officially started in 2017.  
Liz: 2017 — that’s new. 
Brian: We have an Artistic Board of Directors, which has 8 people, including Sandra Mae and myself. All of our work is completely voluntary. The people who get paid tend to be the directors, designers, production team, and actors — all the people involved in a specific show. We fundraise to pay them for their work. Hopefully in the future DAT will grow to where we have an Executive Board, and we can be paid for our work. 

Types of shows DAT does 

Liz: Now, I want to ask you two what shows you have shown at DAT such as comedy, drama, monologues, musicals? 
Brian: We do everything. We’ve done comedy, drama, musical theater, new works, short play festivals, long new original plays written by deaf people. We’ve done variety shows, cabaret-type shows, lots of different things. 
Sandra Mae: We jump on what is cool, what people want, what people need, and the type of stories we can give. We look at the upcoming years and see what we can do this year and what people need and what stories will make an impact. And we also look for new work. We recently did a new work by a deaf playwright who also acted in the show.
If you are interested, reach out to us. We are in a place where we have a lot of freedom to say, “Want to do it? Let’s do it.” Then depending on how much it costs, we’ll figure it out as we go.  
The important thing about DAT is it’s taught me a lot about handling the ups and downs. Will I be perfect? No. I’m constantly learning on the job. I’m an actor myself, but as production manager it challenges me every day. Some days I think, “Ugh, I can’t do this.” Then the next day I say, “No, I can.” I keep at it again and the team supports and pushes each other. One of the morals I want to share with the deaf community is — if there’s something you want to do, just do it and you will create something beautiful! That’s what we’ve been doing. 

Acting with DAT: Deaf or hearing? 

Liz: Do you perform with deaf actors, or do you work with hearing actors also? 
Sandra Mae: Yes. We do include both. I think the key is, within the show we do, is the character role hearing or deaf, and why are they hearing or deaf? What is their purpose in the story?
We frame different ways of how we want to use hearing and deaf actors. Sometimes we do a show with just all deaf with subtitles. We’ve done a show with both hearing and deaf in it.
Some shows we use voices but we reframe what the voices mean in this particular situation and why are the voices there. Rather than simply bringing it in to provide access to hearing people in the audience, we change it to why is the voice there. And when we’ve established that, we have a story.
We don’t specifically do it one way or the other but focus on the why. What is it there for? Then we go from there. 

What is it about for DAT? 

Liz: What kind of audiences do you pull in and attract — you mentioned full access, but what do you like the audience to see? 
Brian: To me, it’s really about the story. When I pick a script, it has to have a beautiful story.
Recently I read a play — really, I read the book first — called Tiny Beautiful Things. It’s a true story about a woman writer that was asked to step in and write an anonymous advice column. When she finished that job, she collected all the letters submitted and her responses and published them in a book. A famous actress from the movie, “My Big Fat Greek Wedding”, Nia Vardalos (who also wrote it), took that book and wrote a play based on it. I read the book, and it was beautiful and touching with real human stories. Then I read the play, and she (Nia) captured the spirit, the human spirit, the struggles, everything, and I knew immediately I wanted to do that play. 
So, I always try to find stories that will capture the audience, that they can relate to, that they can learn from, and will challenge their minds.
Same recently, in 2023, we did The Laramie Project, which is about a 1998 gay college student who was murdered in Wyoming and how his murder impacted the small town of Laramie. I’ve loved that play for a long time, loved the story. I used to teach the play when I taught Theater at Texas School for the Deaf. But I noticed the students did not really understand because the movie was captioned. English captions are not always accessible to most — many deaf people. So, I wanted to have it as a stage production in full ASL. That was a big dream of mine.
As I started to produce it, and get it ready, as I chatted with the deaf community, many people had never heard of Matthew Shepard. That was literally the hate crime that started all the hate crime laws, especially for queer people. So, I knew I had to produce that play to educate the deaf community and hopefully start to open their minds. That was also the same time a lot of Drag bans were happening, especially here in Texas. So my hope was that story would challenge the deaf community to be more openminded and openhearted to people who were different.  

Streaming challenges 

Liz: Ok, now, your website and social media mentions that you stream some shows. For both of you, what are the challenges that streaming brings? How do you make that happen? What were your challenges? 
Sandra Mae: Number one — rights! 
Brian: The first thing is the rights.  
Sandra Mae: We must get permission. Some shows we can, some shows we can’t. We experienced the impact for our first streaming because not everyone can fly in to watch. So, if we can stream, that’s great because then those at home can watch. It’s not the same as in person but it’s something we can provide. The shows we can do, great, but the shows we can’t do — like a big number of musicals —  
Liz: Because of copyrights, you have to ask. 
Brian: That. 
Sandra Mae: And it’s expensive.  
Brian: You have to apply, then you have to pay. Many people don’t realize that just to do a play, you have to pay the copyright fees. A percentage of that money goes to the playwright. And it’s not cheap. You typically have to pay a specific amount for every night you’re producing the show, depending on how many seats you have in the theater.
So, a play — for example, we performed The Laramie Project on two weekends and that cost roughly $3,000 just to get the approval to do the play. That doesn’t include the costs for the actors, director, travel, housing, costumes, etc. 
Liz: All part of the budget. 
Brian: That. That’s really the number one struggle — getting the approval, too. I’ve been lucky to have a good rapport with my agent at one copyright house. There’s several. I explained how there’s really only seven deaf theaters in the U.S. Seven.  
Liz: Seven. Wow. 
Brian: And if you’re not lucky enough to live in a city where they have deaf theater, close enough to travel, or you don’t have the financial privilege to be able to afford to fly, pay for hotels, everything, then you can’t experience deaf theater. So I explained that and explained that this is a nice way to get the playwright’s story and message out to a population that has been left out. 

Future plans for DAT 

Liz: What are your future plans and anything you want to add to tell the audience about DAT that I may have forgotten to ask? 
Sandra Mae: If you want to know what we’ll be talking about, we have an upcoming activity — our Bat Ball on Friday, October 18. That’s our fundraiser gala. We’re hoping to make it an annual or semiannual event. Again, the gala is a fundraiser.  
Liz: Will it be streamed? 
Sandra Mae: No, not for this one.  
Liz: Darn. 
Sandra Mae: At the fundraiser gala, we hope people will come and enjoy socializing with drinks and appetizers. We will have DJ Nico DiMarco come to DJ for us. That will happen the same weekend as TSD Homecoming. Great timing to attend both events. At that event we will talk about what is coming next season and encourage people to donate. That’s our next upcoming event.
We will have a short play festival in November. Then in December we’ll have a cute reindeer story — not cute, it’s for adults — reindeer story by us, the Artistic Board. You can see who’s on the DAT team. We’ll do that in December. That’s all I can mention. We’ll have a huge, exciting announcement soon. 
Brian: Amazing things are happening next year, 2025, including a fantastic collaboration with another deaf theater company. But that’s all we’re saying for now.  
Liz: I can’t wait! 
Brian: If you want to find out, you have to come to Austin to the fundraiser gala. Now, as for other plans we have for the future. We have the next few years of plans for shows ready. Our long term goal is to hopefully establish an Executive Board with people to make business decisions so that we can handle the artistic part. And then everyone can be paid for their work and hopefully…find a true home, a theater space in Austin to call our own, with DAT on the building. That’s the dream. 
Sandra Mae: And important for people watching this now: if you’re interested — actors, please audition, yes — if you’re interested in directing, have a play you want to pitch, or have some ideas, reach out to us. Set up a video meeting with us. Give us your ideas of what you want or if you want to be involved, go ahead! It’s not just us, but you as well. If you’re interested, reach out to us. We have open minds and doors. If you’re interested, bring it on. 
Brian: Not only that, but if you’re interested in financially sponsoring us, being a corporate sponsor, donating to DAT, becoming a monthly or annual donor, contact us. 
Sandra Mae: It’s a tax write off! 
Liz: Okay! Thank you, thank you, thank you for your time, both of you, to share this story. I really enjoyed it and I’m sure the audience will too. So again, thank you and I wish you all the best best of luck at DAT and many many more.  
Brian: Thank you. 
Sandra Mae: Thank you. 
Brian: Thank you so much.  
 
 
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Interested in the arts? Watch our interview with Melissa Malzkuhn from Motion Light Lab and SignLight International Film Festival founder CJ Jones.