In 1955, with Boston theaters, the Yale drama program and even his stint at the Old Vic behind him, Hays moved to the center of the theater world.

He worked in New York for 15 years as a stage designer and produced set and lighting designs for more than 50 Broadway plays, 30 ballets for George Balanchine, productions at Lincoln Center, as well as seasons at the Shakespeare Festival at Stratford, Connecticut.

But even after he won awards for his off-Broadway designs and earned several Tony nominations, when the National Theatre of the Deaf came along in 1967, Hays turned away from stage design and found a new love in his theatrical life.

“My life as a designer is really of the past,” he told a Harvard Magazine interviewer in 1976. “The National Theatre of the Deaf is my passion. That is what I care about.”

He served as a producer and director for the company for 30 years, and though he retired in 1996 his daughter, Julia Klebanow ’77, remains actively involved in the theater.

Hays’ National Theatre, a professional acting troupe made up of both deaf and hearing actors, has been widely credited with bringing sign language out of the shadows and expanding the boundaries of theatrical expression.

The company combines speech, sign language, dance and pantomime in a way that Hays describes as “a major dimensional form of poetry.”

“When you think about it, it is possibly the only new theater form of the second half of the 20th century,” Hays says.

In 35 years, tours have brought the National Theatre of the Deaf to all 50 states, and the group was the first to play in Communist China in 1986 and the first to travel to South Africa after the end of apartheid in 1992.

During his time at the National Theatre’s helm, Hays also returned to Harvard—this time as a teacher, rather than a student. For two years in the late 1970s, he taught a modern drama course that brought professionals from the field of theater into the classroom in order to teach students about the different crafts and arts that go into the theater trade.

“This way when students would go into a play, they would understand all the complex things that go into making the play and end up enjoying it more and in a deeper, fuller way,” he says.

In his first year as an undergraduate, Hays had divided his time between theater and the College sailing team. But after that he found that apprenticing at the Brattle Theatre took up so much time that he couldn’t pursue both interests at once.

He sailed throughout his life but it wasn’t until his lifelong career in the dramatic arts was well established that Hays found more time to devote himself to the seas.

In 1980, he and his son, Daniel, earned a major award for sailing a nine-foot dinghy from Florida to the Bahamas. And six years later, they became the first Americans ever to sail around Cape Horn in a vessel less than 30 feet long.

Their trips to the southern tip of South America and elsewhere inspired them to write an account of their world-wide sailing adventures in 1995 titled My Old Man and the Sea.