Lessons in Laughter
ISBN: 9781563682179
Platform/Publisher: Project MUSE / Gallaudet University Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Chapters; Download: Chapters
Subjects: Authors American; Deaf; Actors;

Bragg, a deaf person born of deaf parents in Depression-era New York City, tells how he realized his dream of becoming an actor and pays tribute to his family, deaf friends and others to whom ``sign language was a perfectly normal and acceptable way of communicating.'' The richness and variety found in signing and in the deaf culture permeate his montage of stories. This member of a minority he describes as unique resisted exploitaiton by the hearing, and efforts of professionals to deflect his self-determination. In vignettes that reveal a bubbling personality, readers follow the flowering of his lively intelligence, his developing relationships and the psychic energy that enabled him to construct a textured life, star in a weekly show on public television in San Francisco, found the National Theatre of the Deaf. Bragg's story, told in sign to coauthor Bergman, a colleague, provides a bridge between the hearing society and the deaf. Photos not seen by PW. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Bernard Nathan Bragg was born deaf in Brooklyn, New York on September 27, 1928. He graduated from the New York School for the Deaf in 1947 and attended Gallaudet College, where he studied theater and acted in school plays. After graduating, he took a teaching job at the California School for the Deaf in Berkeley, occasionally performing skits and directing small shows at conventions and clubs for the deaf.

During the summer of 1956, he went to France and studied with the mime Marcel Marceau. After returning to the United States, Bragg began performing in nightclubs, schools, and universities in the San Francisco area. From 1958 to 1961, he had his own television show on KQED in San Francisco called The Quiet Man. He also continued to teach and in 1959 received a master's degree in special education from San Francisco State University. He moved back east in 1967 to help start the National Theater of the Deaf. He performed with the theater for 10 years.

He went on to become a visiting professor at Gallaudet University and a technical adviser for the 1979 television movie " ¿ And Your Name Is Jonah. His autobiography, Lessons in Laughter: An Autobiography of a Deaf Actor, was published in 1989. He died on October 29, 2018 at the age of 90.

(Bowker Author Biography)


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