‘Creative Captioning’ Takes the Stage at UMD

MFA student leads effort to expand accessibility for audience in ‘Hip Hop Anansi.’

By Jessica Weiss '05 | Maryland Today

Past University of Maryland theater productions have offered deaf and hard-of-hearing audiences tools like American Sign Language interpretation and captioning apps to follow along. A School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies (TDPS) production opening Friday at The Clarice is taking accessibility to a new level.

In “Hip Hop Anansi,” a lively, rhythm-packed performance for young audiences, captions are projected in real time as part of the set design, transforming dialogue into a vibrant visual element. Each character is assigned a custom font and color palette that matches the show’s aesthetic and is choreographed with the onstage action. The captions move, too—wiggling when a character laughs or swelling in size when someone shouts.

“The aim is that the caption happens as close to the performer as possible—not just for the thematic relationship, but so that an audience member isn’t having to look in two different places,” said Timothy Kelly, a third-year MFA student in theatre design leading the project as part of his thesis. “The captions have their own identity and style.”

While Deaf theater has long pioneered innovative approaches to accessibility, “Hip Hop Anansi” represents the first use of “creative captioning” at UMD—and one of the first examples in the D.C. metro area aimed at general audiences. It’s also a milestone for TDPS: its first production created specifically for young audiences, or “TYA”—a genre geared toward children and youth from kindergarten through 12th grade.

Before coming to UMD, Kelly worked as a lighting and video designer in the United Kingdom, where he developed a passion for accessibility. Last year, he debuted a captioning system for TDPS’ April 2024 performance of “Are We at War Yet?” that allowed audience members to follow every line on their cell phones. For his thesis, he wanted to go further—creating something fully integrated into the show’s world, rather than layered on top.

With “Hip Hop Anansi,” Kelly has been collaborating with Director Paige Hernandez ’02, along with the cast and technical crew, since day one. A modern adaptation of the beloved Ghanaian folktale “Anansi and His Sons,” the show centers on the clever trickster Anansi, who longs to win the coveted “fly pie”—but needs the help of his graffiti-tagging, breakdancing, rhyming children to do it.

When the show premiered in 2006 at Bethesda’s Imagination Stage, the creative team included several deaf artists, and performers incorporated sign language into their lines.

“Accessibility was written into this show from the very beginning, so it’s amazing to see that continue and expand,” said Hernandez, who performed in the original production. She is currently associate artistic director of Everyman Theatre in Baltimore.

Kelly’s design process began with a deep dive into the tradition and visual language of hip-hop, inspiring typographic choices that enhance readability and express character—like costumes made of words. Six strategically placed projectors bring the captions to life across the stage.

To keep everything in sync, Kelly isn’t typing live during performances. Instead, he and undergraduate assistant Lee Talbot ’25 spent hours entering hundreds of lines and cues into a detailed spreadsheet, which is then run through a custom-built program that tells the system when and where to project. During each performance, a live operator clicks through the cues, with the ability to make real-time tweaks if an actor misses a line.

Throughout the process, Kelly has worked closely with TDPS Director Jill Bradbury, who is deaf, to ensure the captions are not just functional, but expressive and engaging. She called the result “an amazing experience.”

But beyond this single show, Bradbury said Kelly’s work has sparked wider interest in integrated creative captioning among faculty and students.

“Many deaf people I know have given up on going to theater because the access experience is so unsatisfactory,” she said. “I want TDPS, The Clarice and UMD to be an example of how to do access well.”

Kelly’s written thesis will also include feedback from six deaf audience members who have agreed to participate in post-show discussions. Bradbury tapped into her local network to gather a group of former colleagues, friends and Gallaudet students—all frequent theatergoers with plenty of insight to offer.

“There are lessons we've learned here that I hope will make my thesis a useful resource,” Kelly said. “And I hope there’s institutional knowledge now—among people who have seen this and worked on it—that will carry forward into future productions.”

Photos by Taneen Momeni.