David Hays obit

David Hays Dies: Broadway Designer, National Theater Of The Deaf Co-Founder Was 95

 

He was not on the list.

David Hays, a prolific Broadway set and lighting designer and the founding artistic director of the National Theater of the Deaf, died Tuesday, February 17, at his home in Essex, Connecticut. He was 95.

His death was reported by wife Nancy Varga to The New York Times. With dozens of Broadway credits stretching from the 1950s, when he established his reputation with, among others, the original 1956 production of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night, to the short-lived 1981 staging of Kingdoms starring Armand Assante, Hays was among the industry’s busiest designers.

Nominated for three Tony Awards, Hays also designed more than 30 ballet productions for George Balanchine, with lighting designer Stephen Strawbridge telling The Times, “He was one of the last of the ‘double threats’ — those who design in more than one discipline.”

Among the directors Hays worked with were José Quintero (Long Days Journey Into Night, The Innkeepers, among others), Elia Kazan (Tartuffe) and Tyrone Guthrie (Dinner At Eight). Hays was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame in 2014.

One of his most far-reaching Broadway projects was the 1959 premiere production of the Penn-directed The Miracle Worker starring Anne Bancroft and, as Helen Keller, Patty Duke. While working on the George Jenkins-led lighting design, Hays became interested in the use of sign language as a theatrical art form, an interest he shared with Bancroft. Pursuing this interest over nearly 10 years, Hays, along with Robert Panara, Bernard Bragg and Dr. Edna Levine, secured U.S. Department of Education funding and cofounded the National Theater of the Deaf.

In its nearly 50 years of existence, the NTD, using a hybrid of American Sign Language and spoken English, has staged productions in all 50 U.S. states (including on Broadway) and 33 countries. The organization received a Special Tony Award in 1977.

“David was a torchbearer who used his position to uplift and develop a field that, until then, had few champions in the mainstream,” DJ Kurs, the artistic director of Deaf West Theater, told The New York Times. “His vision proved that American Sign Language possessed a profound, inherent theatricality that belonged in the canon of great art.”

Hays resigned as NTD’s artistic director in 1996 after its executive director was found to have embezzled funds.

Born David Arthur Hays on June 2, 1930, in Far Rockaway, Queens, Hays attended high school at Long Island’s Woodmere Academy, where he developed his interest in theater arts. He then attended Harvard, graduating in 1952 and receiving a letter of recommendation from the playwright Thornton Wilder to receive a Fulbright London fellowship.

Returning to the United States, Hays attended graduate school at the Yale School of Drama and worked as a set designer at a resort in upstate New York, where he met dancer and actress Leonora Landau. The two married in 1954, and remained together until her death in 2000. His second marriage, in 2001, to Elaine Coleman ended in divorce three years later, and he married Nancy Varga in 2014.

Hays and son Daniel cowrote My Old Man and the Sea, the 1995 best-selling account of their sailing trip around Cape Horn. Hays had previously written Light on the Subject: Stage Lighting for Directors and Actors and the Rest of Us (1988). In 2017, he published the memoir Setting the Stage.

Varga and Daniel Hays survive him, as does daughter Julia, four grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.