Goya: Deafness, Madness, and More

The sleep of reason produces monsters

There have been a few films and television shows made about Goya.   One such film is Goya--oder Der arge Weg der Erkenntnis (1971, Dir. Konrad Wolf).  Another is Goya in Bordeaux (1999, Dir. Carolos Saura).  Most recently made seems to have been  Goya's Ghosts (2006, Dir. Milos Forman and staring Natalie Portman, Javier Bardem, and Stellan Skarsgård). 

According to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, "Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (1746–1828) is regarded as the most important Spanish artist of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Over the course of his long career, Goya moved from jolly and lighthearted to deeply pessimistic and searching in his paintings, drawings, etchings, and frescoes."  Goya became extremely ill at one point in his adult life, and this illness caused him to become completely deaf (some say the illness and resulting deafness have to do with his licking his brushes, which were coated with lead-filled paint). 


Recently, I was on the Videophone with Iosif Schneiderman, who wants to produce the third of his plays (one which was done with Willy Conley) about the deaf painter Francisco Goya. It is the deafness (and madness) that I believe attracted Schneiderman and Conley to this painter's life.  I have begun to develop my own fascination--partly because of the play I saw, done by Scheiderman and Conley, a couple of years ago.

The play featured mime and gesture, very little (if any) sign language of any kind (and certainly no spoken language).  There were sounds--music, thunder, even vibrations generated under the audience seats, and there were lighted special effects as well.  Then there were the masks...all designed by Schneiderman.  I would LOVE to produce a play of this kind with him!

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Here's my experience of the 2nd play, GOYA en la Quinta del Sordo (in the House of the Deaf Man) previously done by Iosif Schneiderman and Willy Conley (with acting students of Gallaudet University).  Originally published in another (dead) blog as "In the House of Some Deaf (Mad) Men" by Deaf Directions (by me); reprinted here with permission.

Long ago, in the early days of silent film, when it didn't matter if an actor was deaf and/or mute, the Russian filmmaker Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein explored creating films that could "speak" to everyone, rising above language barriers because that film, theoretically, would have a "universal language". Eisenstein was not the first to dream about a universal language, nor was he the last.


Move back a couple centuries and consider, for example, the "dream" etchings by the Spanish artist, Francisco de Goya (1746-1828). Goya was a highly successful painter who, in his mid-40s, suffered the sudden loss of his hearing (as a direct result of lead poisoning from the paints he used). Goya spent the second half of his life creating drawings of various types that critiqued Spanish society "in images and characters existing in all their life-affirming contradictions, like the characters in a Shakespeare play, or in the novels of Balzac" (Paul Stuart). In one series of etchings, the Los Caprichos, this brilliant artist tried to create a "universal language" that "would encourage men and women to reflect on the world and their roles and actions within it."

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 Now come forward in time again to NOW, and to the inspirations of two Deaf playwrights, one Russian and the other American, and the resulting play that is perhaps not of universal language, but--as a performance of gestures (visual, audio, even tactile)--this is certainly a play of universal communication. Co-authors Willy Conley and Iosif Schneiderman, explored an adaptation, or even a translation, of Goya's works into the play, Goya en la Quinta del Sordo (in the house of the deafman).

I saw this play, TWICE, and I can't wait to tell you more about it. So the focus of the next several blogs (over the next few days or weeks or whenever-I-find-the-time-to-write) will be a "show and tell" of these two performances, AND of the roughly one hour video interview Conley and Schneiderman allowed me to tape (with the interpretation help of Sarah Blattberg). For now, I'll just end this blog entry with this: Goya: en la Quinta del Sordo (in the house of the deaf man) is currently under consideration for the national festival of the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival! 

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To see more information about this production, visit Gallaudet University's Theatre Arts page.