Deaf actress’s achievement

Press, 22 September 1984, Page 20

Deaf actress’s achievement

Listen to Me: The Story of Elizabeth Quinn. By Elizabeth Quinn and Michael Owen. Michael Joseph, 1984 208 pp. $33.90

(Reviewed by

Margaret Quigley)

On August 25, 1981, the capacity audience at London’s Mermaid Theatre broke into tumultuous applause for an American actress who had played the lead in the. London premiere of the play “Children of a Lesser God.” Elizabeth Quinn, standing in front of the audience was unable to hear the acclaim; she had been deaf since the age of two. Her amazing success at the Mermaid earned her the Society of West End Theatre’s best actress award and gave her the professional status to

bridge the gap between the deaf and the hearing worlds. Born in 1948 in New York state, Elizabeth lost her hearing suddenly in early childhood after a series of illnesses. Her parents, Anita and Jack Quinn, struggled desperately to find some way to halt or reverse the loss of hearing. Eventually Anita, accepting the inevitable, enrolled her six-year-old daughter at the American School for the Deaf. Elizabeth’s troubled and rebellious years there, and later at college, were made more disturbed by her father’s fight against alcoholism, but more tolerable by the constant sympathy and companionship of her younger brother, Billy. Her various jobs in the different theatres for the deaf in the United States lead to her invitation to play Sarah Norman in the London production of “Children of a Lesser God.”

Michael Owen, arts editor and columnist on “The Standard” in London, has a good journalist’s ability to tell this story vividly and dramatically, but without descending into the banal or melodramatic. He met Elizabeth Quinn for an interview while she was rehearsing the play, which deals with the anguish of a deaf woman. Impressed by her presence and her performance, he became interested in discovering more about the life that had enabled her to give such a deeply-felt and moving performance. (The play ran for more than two years in London.) This biography is the result of his interest. Its brief epilogue, has been written by Elizabeth Quinn herself.