The Floating Hat: Pacific Grove playwright's work premieres in Warsaw.

A Pacific Grove playwright's story of the friendship between Charlie Chaplin and deaf painter Granville Redmond will premiere in Warsaw this month, with a deaf actor in the role of Redmond.

The Floating Hat, written by Steve Hauk with songs by Piotr Flatau, has its world premiere Nov. 27 at Teatr Druga Strefa as Pływający Melonik. The production is performed in Polish and Polish Sign Language (PJM), and is designed to be fully accessible to both deaf and hearing audiences.

It is the first staging of a play Hauk began writing more than 25 years ago, and one that came close to production in the United States several times before stalling.

Redmond, a landscape painter best known for his scenes of coastal California, lost his hearing to scarlet fever at about age 2 and a half. His talent was first recognized at the California School for the Deaf in Berkeley.

He met Chaplin in Los Angeles through a fellow painter. Chaplin soon asked for his help: he wanted to become more expressive on screen. Elements of American Sign Language, and Redmond's own idiosyncrasies, are believed to sit at the core of some of Chaplin's techniques, a valuable vocabulary in the silent era. Redmond went on to appear in Chaplin's films, and Chaplin learned to sign from him.

“Almost everybody into early California art knows the story of Granville Redmond and the general story of his relationship with Chaplin,” said Hauk, who is also an art dealer. “I thought it was intriguing. Great silent filmmaker and a great silent artist. How did they communicate? What did they talk about?”

The spark was an account Hauk came across of a writer visiting Redmond's studio, which sat above Chaplin's film lot, around 1930. Redmond was painting. Behind him, on a stool, sat Chaplin, watching.

“It intrigued me,” Hauk said. “I just started writing from then.”

Hauk wrote the play around 1999 and 2000. “I researched a little, but a lot of it was imagination,” he said.

The hardest question was how the two men would talk. Little is recorded about how well Redmond spoke, and he lost his hearing before he could have said much. Hauk's solution: the characters sign to each other, and at moments the actor playing Redmond speaks aloud, so the audience hears what he is thinking. 

Hauk originally pictured a hearing actor playing Redmond. He always knew the play would need signing, so that deaf audience members could follow it. “Otherwise it would be really hypocritical,” he said.

His thinking shifted about two years ago, during readings. A talented actor with two deaf brothers liked the play but was irritated that the team would consider casting a hearing actor as Redmond. “That kind of alerted me to the fact that maybe I wasn't being as sensitive or as open to this as I should be,” Hauk said.

The play's revival came from Flatau, a Polish physicist turned musician who divides his time between Warsaw and San Diego. He had been visiting Hauk's gallery on and off for years. Flatau told Hauk he had been reading The Floating Hat online and was writing songs for it. A reading with local actors followed at the gallery. Flatau then translated the play into Polish and brought it to director Sylwester Biraga.

Teatr Druga Strefa is one of Warsaw's first private repertory theaters. It has performed continuously since 1989 and was formally founded in 1997.

Deaf actor Adam Stoyanov plays Redmond opposite Jakub Snochowski as Chaplin. The story also features painter Gottardo Piazzoni, Redmond's friend. On stage, Polish and PJM, and deaf and hearing cultures, meet. The Polish Association of the Deaf, which represents some 50,000 deaf people in Poland, is a partner.

The theater bills the play as the story of a friendship that didn't need a shared language because it created one, between two artists for whom image and gesture said more than words.

Hauk says the association's support matters most to him. “It's a really important issue, and it could spread around the world,” he said, “as something to point out the difficulties of overcoming communication issues.”

For details about the performances in Poland, visit teatr2strefa.pl.