The Deaf West Theater production of The Adventures of Pinocchio, which opens Friday, will bring both deaf and hearing audiences together. Amber Zion plays Pinocchio, and while she acts out the part, Darrin Revitz will provide Pinocchio’s speaking voice.

“We work as a team,” Zion said, speaking through sign language interpreter Jennifer Snipstad. “We work with my sign language so that she’s able to follow and match my signing. Shadow actors will stay back a little bit and provide the voice for my behaviors and my acting. There are also times when we’re mirroring one another, you can see us both on stage doing the same work.”

Matthew Henerson is a hearing actor playing Gepetto. His counterpart, Colin O’Brien-Lux, will sign the dialogue Henerson speaks.

“Both hearing actors who can sign and for that matter hearing actors who can’t, like me, and deaf actors can pick up the cues from somebody else on stage,” Henerson said. “It’s very much like acting in a normal play.”

The evening of Wednesday, Feb. 9 the Deaf West Theater was an empty stage under construction. Zion and Henerson sat in the library preparing the evening’s rehearsal. Zion’s enthusiasm showed through her vigorous signs and ecstatic facial cues to her interpreter, while maintaining eye contact with me. Henerson complemented her with a mellow spoken word.

The next day, director Stephen Rothman elaborated on the double casting. Rothman has been experimenting with doubling the roles in previous Deaf West plays. When he had a one person show, that only required one double. For Pinocchio, Rothman had to double the entire ensemble of actors.

“The last show I did there, which was What Are You, Deaf?, a one person show, I tried something which I’m now taking further this time,” Rothman explained in a telephone interview on Feb. 10. “We opened the show with both the hearing actor and the deaf actor on stage acting together. Then at a point that was appropriate, the hearing actor stepped off, sat down on a stool and started doing the voicing just from off the corner of the stage. What really interested me was the first few minutes of the show where both of them were interacting together.”

This production is adapted from the book by Carlo Collodi, written 130 years ago, and a 2006 theatrical adaptaion by Lee Hall. The playwright left an opening in his script that Deaf West interpreted. Hall offered any director the freedom to adapt the play. So Rothman, through a series of improvisations with the Deaf West theater company, added an opening and closing sequence to the traditional story. In the Deaf West version, a troupe of actors in the 1880s sets up a production of the latest hot story, Pinocchio. The troupe then acts out the play, with their hearing and deaf actors intermingling on stage.

“We set up why suddenly his son (O’Brien-Lux) who’s dressed as an echo of Gepetto is actually on stage signing the Gepetto role but not off on the side,” Rothman said. “He’s in the action and we tried to integrate the entire show that way.”

The Deaf West original segments incorporate the history of deaf culture. In 1880, the Milan Conference ruled that deaf people would have to learn to speak and read lips, outlawing sign language. Before Pinocchio and Gepetto enter the play, Henerson and Zion play a father and daughter. He actually supports the Milan Conference policy, but through the family’s performance of Pinocchio, they come to a more understanding place.

“There’s sort of a contrast there between the framing device in which the father is rigid and a little probably self-centered for sure,” Henerson said. “He’s a bit of a bigot actually and then all of a sudden you have to watch him play this generous pater familias. And this young woman who you’ve seen and liked then becomes Pinocchio who really begins the story as a horrid brat, Pinocchio beginning life like all infants do, self-centered, a little unreasonable and what not.”

With the historical context, let alone the intensity of the original tale, Deaf West has recommended a minimum age of 10 for families bringing children to the show.

“Lee Hall really managed to capture the spirit of the book,” Rothman said. “The book is of its time and the book is, just like the Grimm Fairy Tales, it’s dark cautionary tales for young people. Don’t go off to playland with the nice man who turns out to be a predator. Don’t go running off to trust everybody that you meet in the forest and all of that. In fact I’ve added a little something at the end of the first act because I think if you don’t give the younger people a little hint that things are going to be okay, it could end with a traumatized intermission. I’m really not up for that.”

On the whimsical side of Pinocchio, Zion gets to play both a wooden puppet and a little boy.

“I did some research,” she said. “I worked at summer camp with kids in the 5-10 year age range so I had the opportunity to observe their behavior and I was filing away a lot of that behavior as an actor. And then definitely the concept of being wooden affected my body movement. How would I move with those constraints?”

The Deaf West play, and the play within its play, follows the European tradition of casting women as Pinocchio, just as women traditionally play Peter Pan. We also know that at different points in the story, Pinocchio and friends get turned into donkeys, and a whale swallows Pinocchio and Gepetto.

“We can’t depend on special effects,” Zion said. “We have to make our own magic in the language of the theater. We have to play with ideas and provide illusions that people I think will really enjoy.”

Rothman revealed some of the show’s big set pieces.

“The donkeys are mostly physical,” Rothman said. “Even without adding ears, right now when Amber and Tommy [Korn] physically start to turn into donkeys, you really get the impression that they have become donkeys. We will sort of supplement that with a little bit of costume tricks on the ears and such. In terms of the whale, Evan our set designer has created a lot of interesting stuff that can sort of fly in to create that interior of the whale. With these interesting materials, it’ll be hanging down. It’ll give you the sense that you’re inside this crevice, this space that gives you the impression that you’re inside a whale.”

Deaf West delayed the opening of Pinocchio by one week. The actors appreciate having additional rehearsal time.

“I’m definitely excited about having the opportunity to delve deeper into the character,” Zion said.

The reason for the delay is actually an ambitious production design. Scenic designer Evan Bartoletti proposed to take out the second level of the space and make it one big open stage.

“What we probably didn’t realize was now suddenly that’s going to create some real issues of getting the sets in there and done on time,” Rothman said. “When [Deaf West artistic director] Ed [Waterstreet] said, ‘Let’s give the set more time,’ it was like ‘I’ll take it.’”

Rothman has directed theater since 1974, and this is his fourth with Deaf West. He also served as artistic director of the Pasadena Playhouse from 1979 – 1986 and directs internationally. He directed Harold Pinter’s Betrayal in Florence in 2008.

The Adventures of Pinocchio is Zion’s second production with Deaf West. She appeared in My Sister In This House last spring and has been with the company since 2002. She is a working actor in television and commercials, and also works full time in graphic design for Avanquest. A North Hollywood resident, Zion has a short commute to the theater. “I live a couple of blocks away,” she said.

Henerson is a Valley boy from Sherman Oaks and now lives in Van Nuys. He’s worked with major companies in Los Angeles from the Ahmanson, La Jolla Playhouse and Independent Shakespeare to NoHo’s own Antaeus Company. Pinocchio is his first Deaf West show and he is a full time theater actor.

Zion and Henerson met during auditions for Pinocchio. She was cast first and read with many of the Gepetto hopefuls.

“It would be impossible for me to forget the moment that you and I first met,” Zion said to Henerson. “I met everybody who was up for the role of Gepetto. You said, ‘May I touch you?’ during our audition working together. I think if I had been a boy you might not have asked that.”

She was right, Henerson added.

“You know what, I wouldn’t have and I’ll tell you why,” he said. “Here I am and I’m supposed to be hugging her and all this. I’m looking at Amber and I’m thinking this girl’s 15 years younger than me. I didn’t know how old she was. I don’t want to be throwing my arms around her. How do people do this s---? So I asked, 'Is it okay?' And she said it was fine.”

While the Deaf West theater is a great opportunity for differently abled actors, Zion considers herself an actor who should be up for any role. She could play most parts with little adaptation.

“I think people really tend to underestimate my capabilities as a person,” she said. “So I’m constantly in the position of convincing people that I’m just as capable as anybody else. It could open somebody’s eyes and change their mind if I showed up at an audition for a different role. Whatever barriers might exist for a deaf person are old news for me to be honest.”

The Adventures of Pinocchio opens Friday, Feb. 25 and runs through March 27 at Deaf West Theater.