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Workshop hones skills Photo by Bob Pennell Scenic Middle School students, from left, Heather Guider, Stacey Head and Holly Clement, work on their acting skills during a workshop sponsored by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival Wednesday. Deaf students learn acting By BILL VARBLE Like most actors, Missy Keast wants to know her character's motivation. Unlike most actors, Keast is deaf. The Los Angeles actor uses American Sign Language to communicate with a roomful of deaf teens Wednesday at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. "In real life we're all actors," she says in ASL as interpreted by Dottie Rundles, of Portland. "Onstage, you have to take your experiences and use them." It's a sort of Acting 101 workshop Keast is presenting for some 50 students Wednesday in the Festival's Great Hall in Ashland. The class is part of a three-day event the OSF and Keast are staging for deaf and hard-of-hearing students. Taking part are young people from Crater High School and Scenic Middle School, both of Central Point; Griffin Creek Elementary, in Jacksonville; and the California School for the Deaf, of Fremont, Calif. Interpreters signed the action a day earlier as kids took in the Festival's production of Shakespeare's "Othello," and they're doing so again in the workshop, as fast as you can talk. Mike Delgado, a teacher at the School for the Deaf, says his students studied "Othello" before coming to Ashland to see it. Los Angeles actor Missy Keast communicates with deaf teens Wednesday at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, as Fremont, Calif., student Daniel Peknik watches. "But they were amazed by the production," he says. Keast, an outgoing 33-year-old with a big mane of blond hair, tells the kids she's a graduate of the Arizona State School of the Deaf and Blind and of Arizona State University, where she majored in history. After college she worked as an actress with the National Theatre of the Deaf. She now works at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. If somebody is interested in, say, a Louis XIV exhibit, she might tell a story that shows what the king's life was like. Everybody likes stories. Keast is also working on a book project. It's called "One Day." She asked deaf people from around the world to send her photos of what they were doing on a single day, May 1, 1997. She got thousands of photos to choose from. She's trying to sell the book to publishers as a lavish coffee table book (the project's Web site is www.one-day.com ). One publisher looked at the pictures, then said, "But you can't tell they're deaf." Making a big DUH! face, Keast says, "Well, that's the point!" Keast asks the kids to introduce themselves and add a one-word description of themselves in ASL. A boy named Dan signs that he's a dreamer. Ginny says she is serious. Victor is just tired (laughs all around -- hey, it's early). Brad is a snowboarder, Cori is energetic, Holly is quiet, Stacy is flirtatious. Once they've all checked in with their mini-descriptions, Keast gives them their next assignment: become a door. One by one, kids make herky-jerky door-opening motions. "More detail," Keast says. "Show it. I want to see the specifics. What does your door look like?" The miming gets more focused. Here are kids with big doors, French doors, sticking doors, sliding doors, glass doors, trap doors, Dutch doors, revolving doors. Then, just as they are getting into it, things again get more complicated. "Remember the adjective you used to describe yourself?" Keast says. "Well, use your door again -- go through it, then enter into that space." But how do you enter a space of sleepiness, dreaming, passivity? Kids struggle with the concept. Keast squeezes through a tiny imaginary door, stands up in a small space and bumps her head. Yeow! Nobody needs a script to get her reaction. The next exercise ratchets the complexity meter another notch. Imagine a hallway. Now imagine that door again. OK, enter the hallway through the door. In the hallway is a window. Make a transition walking down the hallway -- like Othello changing during the play -- and look out the window. What's out there? The first volunteer is Ms. Flirtatious. She goes through a door and down a hall without much conviction. Keast isn't buying. "I want to see what you're thinking as you look out," she says. "I didn't understand." Ms. Flirt goes through her door again, this time more slowly. She makes her way down the hall, comes to a window, looks out and sees somebody. Whoever's out there, she must like him, because she is clearly flirting with him, big time, and you don't need to be a critic to get it. The play may be the thing. But Tom Daley, a teacher from Crater, says the students are getting something else out of all this, something even more basic. "They love being around other deaf kids," he says. "There's not that much opportunity for them to socialize with other deaf students." Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA