Student Charges ART With Discrimination

A doctoral student at the Graduate School of Education has filed a complaint charging the American Repertory Theater (ART) with discrimination against the disabled.

In a complaint registered last week with the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), Robert S. Menchel, who is hearing-impaired, said the ART discriminates because it does not regularly present interpreted performances for members of the deaf community.

"Since I am a student at Harvard University, I feel I have the same right to attend a play as anyone else," Menchel said, with the help of a telephone service for the deaf.

According to Menchel, who is a member of the President's Committee on Employment of People with Disabilities, the ART is legally obligated to provide the hearing disabled with access to performances since it receives NEA funding.

Henry Lussier, director of marketing at the ART, defended the theater yesterday, saying that the costs of interpreted performances are prohibitive.

Lussier wrote a letter to Menchel citing some interpreted ART performances in the past. And in an interview, he said that a regular program of signed performances will eventually be instituted.

"Right now we are trying to define the funding that would go into it," Lussier said.

An interpreted performance of "King Lear" presented by the ART last semester was "a wonderful event," Lussier said in the letter.

But, he said later in the letter, "The turnout was too small to come close to covering our costs."

The theater has instituted an infrared system which allows the mildly deaf to attend performances. But "the system is of no assistance to a profoundly deaf person like myself," Menchel said.

Julia A. Richardson, acting director of the civil rights division of the NEA, said yesterday that NEA protocol precluded her discussing specific complaints with the press.

But Richardson said that a "program or activity must be accessible to the disabled" if its sponsor receives funding from her organization.

"There are a million artistic questions that have to be resolved," Lussier said.

While Menchel said he feels slighted by the ART, he said his criticism does not extend to Harvard, which owns the space on Brattle St. used by the ART.

"The office of student affairs at the School of Education has been great," Menchel said. "They have provided me with interpreters and note takers at every class."