Scholar Signs: Visible Language, reviewed. PLUS: The Keller-Bell letters, parsed!

October 30, 2014Chris Klimek

My review of Visible Language, an ambitious original musical in English and American Sign Language being performed at Gallaudet University, is in today's Washington City Paper. One of the play's concerns is Alexander Graham Bell's relationship with Helen Keller, whom he met as his student, but who became a close friend of Bell and his wife, Mabel.

I'll say. While researching this review I found several pieces of correspondence spanning a 25-year period between Bell and Keller in the Library of Congress. I haven't made anything approaching a serious attempt at scholarship here, but I read the letters I found and I was moved and amused by the story they tell, or at least suggest.