David Hays, the acclaimed Broadway set and lighting designer and founding artistic director of the National Theater of the Deaf, has passed away.
Videos by Suggest
Hays died on Feb. 17 at his home in Essex, Connecticut, at the age of 95. His wife, Nancy Varga, confirmed his death to The New York Times.
With dozens of Broadway credits, Hays was one of the industry’s busiest designers for decades. His career spanned from the 1950s, when he established his reputation with 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.
Nominated for three Tony Awards, Hays also designed more than 30 ballet productions for George Balanchine. He worked with directors like José Quintero on Long Day’s Journey Into Night and The Innkeepers, Elia Kazan on Tartuffe, and Tyrone Guthrie on Dinner at Eight. Hays was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame in 2014.
David Hays Cofounds the National Theater of the Deaf After a Prolific Broadway Show
Meanwhile, one of his most significant Broadway projects was the 1959 premiere of The Miracle Worker, directed by Arthur Penn and starring Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke.
While working on the lighting design, Hays became interested in using sign language in theatre. He pursued this interest for nearly a decade. Along with Robert Panara, Bernard Bragg, and Dr. Edna Levine, Hays secured funding from the U.S. Department of Education and cofounded the National Theater of the Deaf.
Over nearly 50 years, the NTD has performed in all 50 U.S. states, including on Broadway, and in 33 countries, using a blend of American Sign Language and spoken English. In 1977, the organization was honored with a Special Tony Award.
After NTD’s executive director was found to have embezzled funds, Hays resigned as the company’s artistic director in 1996.
Hays Also Wrote Several Popular Books
Hays was born on June 2, 1930, in Far Rockaway, Queens. He attended Woodmere Academy on Long Island, where he discovered his passion for theater arts. After graduating from Harvard in 1952, he received a Fulbright fellowship to London, supported by a recommendation from playwright Thornton Wilder.
After returning to the United States, Hays attended the Yale School of Drama for graduate school. He also worked as a set designer at a resort in upstate New York, where he met dancer and actress Leonora Landau. They married in 1954 and were together until her death in 2000. Hays later married Elaine Coleman in 2001; they divorced three years later. In 2014, he married Nancy Varga.
In 1995, Hays and his son Daniel co-wrote the bestseller My Old Man and the Sea, an account of their sailing trip around Cape Horn. Hays had previously authored Light on the Subject: Stage Lighting for Directors and Actors and the Rest of Us (1988) and later published his memoir, Setting the Stage, in 2017.
He is survived by Varga, Daniel Hays, his daughter Julia, four grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren.