“There’s a line in A Midsummer Night’s Dream that I’ve never paid much attention to, delivered by that most enthusiastic of overactor characters, Nick Bottom: “I could play Ercles rarely, or a part to tear a cat in, to make all split.” Coming as it does in the midst of Bottom’s densely Elizabethan diatribe about his thespian abilities, this bit about the cat usually gets lost between other, funnier lines. But when actor Ryan Schlecht delivers it in an ad hoc rehearsal room at Seattle’s Hearing, Speech & Deaf Center—his face deeply earnest, shoulders crunched together then spread wide as he wrenches his hands apart in a full-body ripping motion—I laugh like crazy.
I’m not the only one; the entire room breaks up at Schlecht’s riff, just one idea for an American Sign Language translation of Shakespeare’s beloved, magical rom-com.”…