The Curran Theatre here in San Francisco had been shut down for renovations for quite some time, and we learned that Allison Bechtel’s Fun Home musical was going to be the first performance to grace their stage upon reopening. Amy really wanted me to get tickets, so I checked with their Front Office about getting seats for the audio described showing. All I got back from them was “What’s that?”
Since going blind, pretty much the only way I can enjoy movies, TV shows, Netflix series, and live theatre performances is by using Audio Description. On TV, shows that have it available allow you to access it through Secondary Audio Programming, or SAP, generally through a button on the remote or through the DVR/Cable Box/TV menu settings. Netflix series have it available from within the Language options of their shows, and once you set it, it persists through any and all shows that have that option until you turn it off, making it quite convenient when watching shows by myself. Practically all Blu-Ray discs released from 2009 onwards have Descriptive Video Services or audio descriptive tracks in their audio options. Sadly, some of these crush all the beautiful 5/1 Surround Sound down into a horrible 2.0 Stereo mix, but that’s a rant for a later date.
When seeing movies in a theater, I’ll generally get a Fidelio audio description device, basically a radio that taps into the audio description feed that comes with the hard drive for the main feature. Popping in an earbud, you get to listen to the AD track without disturbing any other patrons around you. This system is what gets used for Live theatre performances, except at musical and plays, there is someone sitting in a booth with a script talking into a microphone, broadcasting the description out to everyone in the auditorium using the devices so they can get the same movie-style experience and enjoy the show with everyone else.
The Orpheum Theatre, Golden Gate Theatre, and the Palace of Fine Arts Theatre all have audio described performances for the shows that come through, usually one or two days out of the entire run set aside for the description, almost always a Sunday matinee. Before the renovation, the Curran was listed on the American Council of the BLind’s Performing Arts Centers with Audio Description page where these very services were offered. Hence my surprise in August of 2016 when all I got was a “What’s that?” from a ticketing manager while I was trying to get audio descriptive performance tickets for Fun Home.
I explained what it was, how they were listed on the ACB website and how they’ve previously had audio description, yet it was becoming very obvious that in the renovation, someone somewhere forgot about that entire service. I left my number for a manager to give me a return call about the AD showing. A week went by and I heard nothing. I called again, asked for a manager, finally got one on the phone and received the same response. They had no idea what audio description was. I explained it and they said they’d get back to me.
It’s now September, and Amy and I have flown out to Toronto for the month to attend the World Cup of Hockey. Literally within 15 minutes of getting to our AirBnB, I receive a phone call from a Curran Manager, once again just to ask me about audio description. I was quite annoyed and sleep-deprived by this point, but I curtly explained what it was, how it worked at the SHN Theatres in San Francisco, how the Curran used to have it, and what company to contact to get it all up and running again. The manager took down all the information and promised they’d get back to me once they had an answer.
A whole month goes by. We enjoy our trip to Toronto, eat up all the hockey, Tim Horton’s, and poutine we could manage, and make our way back home. I still hadn’t heard from them by the end of October, so we started getting a carpet-bombing plan in action. Carpet-bombing is the act of going to LinkedIn and searching for a company, gathering all the names of the upper management personnel, figuring out how their email addresses are configured, and blasting out an email with the aggrieved issue to everyone you can find to make sure something gets done from the top-down.
Amy found the names of a few managers, and I found a press release that happened to have the email address of the Curran’s PR person linked on it. Deducing the naming convention of the Curran Management email addresses, I drafted a letter explaining how we wanted to see Fun Home with audio description and how the whole situation had been treated by the ticketing managers and sent that off to the Curran Director of Ticketing and Customer Service, plus we added in the san Francisco Mayor’s Office of Disability to add some punch to the request. That got a response quite quickly, both from the Director and the Office of Disability. Finally we were getting somewhere.
The show opened in January, and we were in the middle of November discussing what was going to be expected with the Director of Ticketing. I sent her all the information I had about Audio Vision, a company from San Jose that provides live audio description to the SHN Theatres and was the Curran’s previous vendor for the same service. We sat back and waited for them to return to us with a date. December goes by, the show opens in January, and then February comes along. No response at all. The show was coming to a close when I urgently emailed and checked in on the progress.
They finally managed to get audio description sorted out by the 2nd to the last showing of Fun Home before it left San Francisco. Since they had dropped the ball on my request, and left it all to the last minute, they had to get a lot of resources together quickly for it to work. Fun Home had just come off a run in Las Vegas, playing at the Smith Center where they happen to have two in-house audio describers. Since the Curran hadn’t contacted Audio Vision until my urgent email, Audio Vision didn’t have enough time to send up a describer to sit in on a few shows, write a script, and prepare for a live description. The Curran contacted the Smith Center, and then arranged to have Chanelle Carson flown up from Vegas for a night since she had a script and was ready to go for live description. The Curran then gave a block of tickets to the Lighthouse for the Blind in San Francisco so that more blind and visually impaired patrons could attend, plus gave Amy and I a touch tour of the set before the show started which was very welcomed.
Finally, it’s time for the show. After months and months of arguing, emailing, waiting, stressing, we finally managed to get the Curran to understand that they completely forgot about audio description and accessibility in their remodel and managed to get a fully described performance of Fun Home up and running for the Bay Area. All shows at the Curran now have a performance set aside for audio description, plus they still offer blocks of tickets to the Lighthouse for interested patrons.
Chanelle did an absolutely amazing job. Her colleague had written the script and done the description back in Vegas, so it was her first time describing the performance herself and it was a massive success. Her voice was warm, witty, well-timed, and she knew how to balance the tone and timber of her description based on the emotional peaks of the show. The Curran had set her up in a small closet just next to the bar where she watched a live feed of the performance on her laptop while speaking into a mic that fed our radio devices. Almost a disaster before the show started however when Chanelle accidentally got locked in the closet. She pounded on the door to no avail, quipped that of course she would get locked in a closet at a show about the main character coming Out of the closet, and managed to send a Facebook message to a friend from her computer who managed to phone the Curran and explain that the audio describer they flew in was slowly asphyxiating in the cupboard. Chanelle was saved and all was well for the show!
So note to all theatres out there. Don’t forget about Audio Description, especially if you’ve had it up and running previously. We did thank the Curran for finally seeing reason and adding AD back into their repertoire, but they definitely learned what happens when you piss us off and don’t respond appropriately or with any expedience to a request for accessibility accommodations.