



The actor Russell Harvard sat in an armchair, draped in a blue robe and looking surly. It was late August in a rehearsal room at Playwrights Horizons on 42nd Street, and he was in the middle of an emotionally charged hospital scene.

In Craig Lucas’s “I Was Most Alive With You,” Mr. Harvard (“Tribes,” “Fargo”) plays a gay, deaf recovering alcoholic named Knox — and so does the actor Harold Foxx, who stood on a raised platform behind him. As Mr. Harvard delivered Knox’s lines in English downstage, Mr. Foxx performed them in American Sign Language upstage.

They are just two of the 14 actors in the enormously complex Off Broadway premiere of this ambitious bilingual play, a multigenerational drama that aims to be equally accessible to deaf and hearing audience members at every moment of every performance. There is one featured cast member and one shadow cast member for each of the seven characters. The shadow cast performs entirely in A.S.L.; the featured cast, in a mix of English and sign.

And the artists themselves? The director, Tyne Rafaeli, said the ratio is about 50-50, deaf and hearing — and that’s how the rehearsal felt, with its layers of conversations occurring in English and A.S.L.