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SUZAN ZEDER: Sign language is the most poetically visual,
beautiful language you can imagine on stage.
And I was captivated by just the sheer power
of what that language looks like in performance.
"The Edge of Peace" is the third
and finally installment of the Ware trilogy,
which is a larger piece of three plays
each one of them set in a different era.
But all of them set in the same small town
which is a real town
in Ware, Illinois.
VOICE: This town is Ware.
W.A.R.E.
SUZAN: One of the young men from the town
has been declared missing in action in World War II.
What is the impact on everybody in the town?
When this event happens?
LINDA HARTZELL: Suddenly they think that a prisoner of war,
a german prisoner of war from a camp in Illinois,
which, there were prisoner of war camps in America.
I didn't know that until I started working on this show,
has escaped.
SUZAN: Family theatre ought to be like a banquet
where everybody comes and they take what they're hungry for.
So the young people in the audience
are going to identify with Buddy,
the little brother who refuses to believe that his brother's dead.
BUDDY: How many kills do you think Ricky got?
CLOVIS: Ricky? Buddy, Ricky was in the infantry.
BUDDY: Is. Ricky IS in the infantry.
LINDA: I care about the kids more than the adults.
Because they're the smartest people in the room.
There is nobody smarter in the room than a ten or eleven year old.
Especially if they've been taken to see theatre and read books.
They get it.
SUZAN: Anyone from say age eight and above
will come and will find a little bit of their own story in this story.
And each one of them will take away something different.
LINDA: So many of the things in this piece are ageless.
You're going to see and feel something when you're eleven
that you do when you're 45 or 80.
So it's for all ages.
And it's a real challenge
to work on a show that you're needing to always deal with a split focus.
Because you've got the hearing actor and the deaf actor.
And the task at hand is the make sure,
as far as I'm concerned,
that the hearing and deaf audience get as much of the story as possible.
SUZAN: It's wonderful of us to have a director of Linda's caliber
and national prominence here working with our students.
LINDA: The great thing that Suzan does, she doesn't write didactic theatre.
There's always a highly theatrical element to the story.
So this story's exciting.
BUDDY: And Gus is yelling "keep your head down."
"KEEP YOUR HEAD DOWN!"
LINDA: It's an adventure story.
It's a human interest story.
Filled with a lot of humor, a lot of warmth,
and a lot of tension.