Ellen Gray: When the sound is 'Switched' off: An episode in sign language

* SWITCHED AT BIRTH. 8 p.m. Monday, ABC Family.

WARNING: The commercials may seem louder during ABC Family's "Switched at Birth" this week.

That's because most of the episode will be in American Sign Language. (There will be subtitles.)

Now in its second season, the show about two teens - one deaf, Daphne (Katie Leclerc), and one hearing, Bay (Vanessa Marano) - who were accidentally raised by one another's biological families has intensified its focus on the deaf community. Bay's joined Daphne at Carlton, where classes are conducted in ASL - and Oscar-winner Marlee Matlin plays a counselor - as part of a pilot program for hearing students.

In Monday's episode, "Uprising," students upset by a plan to close Carlton and scatter them to mainstream schools decide to occupy the campus, inspired by the Gallaudet University protest 25 years ago that led to the hiring of that school's first deaf president.

The episode's not just a showcase for several of the show's deaf actors, including Matlin, Sean Berdy (who plays her son Emmett) and Ryan Lane, who plays another student, Travis, but shows how far Marano has come in her ability to communicate.

"I'm not fluent by any means. But I've gotten better," said Marano, during a press visit to the show's Santa Clarita, Calif., set in January.

"One-third of my scenes were signing in the first season. Now it's like two-thirds are," said the actress, who said that the actors learned ASL in different ways.

"Lea [Thompson] and D.W. [Moffett] get videos," she said. "Constance [Marie] would just rehearse and rehearse and rehearse and rehearse until her hand almost literally fell off. And then I meet with the ASL master [an on-set tutor], and then go over the script, go over it a few times, and that's it," she said.

Leclerc, who plays the other "Switched" daughter, arrived on the show already fluent, having chosen to study sign language years ago when she ran into problems with Spanish. "And then at 20," she said, "I found out that I have Meniere's disease," a disorder associated with vertigo and varying degrees of hearing loss.

But it's Marie who was singled out again and again by her fellow actors, deaf and hearing, for how well she'd learned to sign in order to play the mother of a deaf child.

And it's Marie who's paid a price, one that will leave the "George Lopez Show" co-star a bit sidelined in Monday's episode.

"I wanted to make this legit, [not], 'Oh, there's an actress who's faking sign language,' " said Marie of playing Regina, Daphne's nonbiological mother. "I wanted to learn it, and if my brain could handle it, I figured my arms could handle it. . . . No one knew that you couldn't take a hearing actress who was over 40 and give her a kamikaze course and she wouldn't hurt herself.

"It's called cumulative-motion injury, which breaks down to double tendinitis and arthritis and cubital nerve compression, meaning that the funny-bone nerve was being compressed all the time and popping out."

Though she tried everything from massage to braces, she wasn't getting better "because I was signing for four hours a day," she said.

Told by her doctors that she needed to stop, "I felt absolutely horrible, and I called [executive producers] Lizzy [Weiss] and Paul [Stupin], and we sat and we talked and then they said, 'Well, we'll just write your injury into the storyline.' And the monkey-wonderful miracle of that is, beautiful scenes came out of that injury, and scenes between Daphne and myself," she said.

A lot of this season has focused "on how guilty Regina feels that she cannot communicate with Daphne, and she promised her she would never leave her alone in a hearing world," Marie said. "That's one of the things I love about Regina, because the sad statistic is that something like 80 percent of parents who have deaf children don't learn sign language."

While she was learning, the dancer-turned-actress worked intensively with an ASL coach.

But for those learning ASL without one-on-one help, she has this tip:

"I watched music videos. You go to YouTube and there are your favorite songs, done with sign language. I watched this woman - she's so amazing - she does 'Rolling in the Deep,' by Adele. And it's beautiful how she does it. It's full-bodied and it's the lyrics. And you know those words. So one part of your body that knows the song goes together with the visual part and it kind of imprints better."

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