The Signs of Progress

Although she loved the stage, Phyllis Frelich grew up with little hope of becoming an actress.

“I always enjoyed theater,” she explains in an interview, speaking through her interpreter and husband, set designer Robert Steinberg. “But when I was young, it was hard to have those thoughts [of being an actress].

“There were no careers [in the theater] for deaf people,” she continues. “And there was no way for a deaf person to study theater.”

That was back in the 1950s. Flash-forward a few decades to 1980, however, and you find Frelich accepting one of the stage world’s highest honors, a best actress Tony for her performance in Mark Medoff’s “Children of a Lesser God,” a role that she originated at the Mark Taper Forum.

The actress went on to perform at other major theaters, including the Manhattan Theatre Club and South Coast Repertory. It hasn’t all been so high-profile, of course, but throughout her career, Frelich has worked regularly at both large and smaller venues--particularly those in the deaf theater world that gave her her start in the late 1960s. Currently, for example, she’s playing the role of the psychiatrist in Peter Shaffer’s “Equus,” directed by Andrew Shea at Deaf West Theatre in Hollywood.

Although there have been substantial gains since 1980, deaf thespians still face daunting odds.

“When you look at the big picture, you do see changes: the National Theatre of the Deaf, the Broadway recognition, deaf characters showing up on television and film,” says the energetic actress, dressed casually in a denim shirt and jeans, as she sat near the Deaf West stage one afternoon a few weeks ago.

“There’s been a little bit more opportunity,” she continues. “It’s a slow growth, but it is a growth. But there’s still not a lot to talk about in terms of things being created for deaf actors.”

This remains true despite Frelich’s Tony and Marlee Matlin’s Oscar for her performance of the same role in the film version of “Children of a Lesser God.” “There’s not one particular reason,” Frelich says. “There’s a certain amount of ignorance, of discrimination and, yes, of fear.

“Fear of what?” she continues. “That they’re going to lose money, that they won’t be able to communicate with their actors, that they’re going to have to spend too much on interpreters. It’s an accumulation of all those things.”

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With Frelich’s hands flying as she signs, Steinberg translates at a pace few interpreters could match. Fortunately, the two of them have had decades of practice.

The actress and designer, who live in L.A. and have two grown sons, met in the late 1960s when both were working with the National Theatre of the Deaf. At that time, the North Dakota-born actress (who declines to give her age but is in her early 50s, according to previous reports) had just completed her studies at Gallaudet University in Washington.

College had, however, been a somewhat frustrating experience. “When I was a student at Gallaudet University, it was the only deaf liberal arts college in the world and they didn’t offer a degree in theater,” Frelich says. “Now, all colleges are open and accessible to deaf people with interpreters, but in my time that wasn’t so. And at Gallaudet, there were few choices.”

With acting out of the question, Frelich chose a more practical course of study. “I majored in library science,” she says, not without rue. “I didn’t know what else to do. That was one of the things that they felt deaf women could do, be a librarian.

“Library science was this great choice because you could then marry some deaf guy and you’d go off and he’d get hired to work and you could work in that town’s library,” she says. “So I graduated with a degree in library science, but I didn’t have a husband.”

Instead, Frelich became one of the original members of the National Theatre of the Deaf, which she’d learned about when its founder, David Hays, came looking for actors at Gallaudet. “I was very fortunate,” she says. “All of a sudden, you could make a living in the theater.”

Launched in 1967 in Connecticut, the groundbreaking troupe provided Frelich with an on-the-job education that was unavailable anywhere else. “We traveled all over the world,” she says. “We taught people a lot. We did as much educating as we did theater.”

Moreover, some of the people that Frelich worked with there--including Deaf West artistic director Ed Waterstreet, actress Linda Bove and others--went on to create other theaters for the deaf. In fact, Waterstreet says Frelich was instrumental in helping establish Deaf West.

In the early 1970s, when her sons were young, Frelich wasn’t able to pursue acting full time. But it wasn’t long before her career took another important turn.

In the late 1970s, she met playwright Medoff through her husband. “In our very first conversation he asked me, ‘Well, you’re an actor, what kind of roles are there?’ ” Frelich says. “I said that nobody writes roles for deaf actors and he said, ‘I’ll write one for you.’ ”

“People kept telling me what a remarkable person she was,” says Medoff, speaking by phone from New Mexico. “I thought, initially, that here was this handicapped woman, and so they’re overcompensating with praise.

“But I was so enamored of her spirit and some indefinable quality that shines in her,” says the writer, who has since written three plays for Frelich and has others in the planning stages.

“I have come to believe that she is among the most generous and creative actors I’ve ever worked with. There’s nobody I’d rather work with. The great lament I have for her is that more people have not been able to see her work.”

‘Children of a Lesser God” premiered at the Taper in late 1979 and went to Broadway the next year. “In a personal way, of course it was a tremendous turning point,” Frelich says. “But it didn’t mean that there was a lot of work to be had after that. The odds were still against me.”

Yet the play did bring mainstream attention to the situation of the deaf community. And after she won the 1980 Tony, Frelich began to notice some attitudinal changes in the general population.

“After that, everywhere I’d go, there would be people who wanted to study sign language, if only just for the beauty of the language itself,” she says. “Before that, there was nobody like that. People said, ‘That’s the language of the deaf. We don’t need that.’

“If they were going to communicate with me, they wanted me to learn to speak,” she continues. “But with sign language onstage, it became more accessible, and those attitudes changed. So I’d love to think that theater has played a large role in that change.”

That success also enabled Frelich to break into television. She won an Emmy nomination for her performance in the 1985 “Hallmark Hall of Fame” TV movie “Love Is Never Silent” and went on to appear on such series as “Barney Miller,” “Hunter,” “Spenser: For Hire” and “L.A. Law.” Largely because of the scarcity of film and TV roles, though, theater has remained Frelich’s primary outlet.

In 1985, she returned to the Taper to star opposite Richard Dreyfuss in Medoff’s “The Hands of Its Enemy” at the Taper and the Manhattan Theatre Club. And in 1993, her one-woman show about a deaf stunt pilot, “Lolly Foster’s Daredevil Airshow,” was seen at the Kennedy Center.

“From the moment Frelich strides onstage . . . it’s clear that something rare is happening,” wrote Pamela Sommers in the Washington Post. “There’s an exhilaration and energy to the whole evening.”

Here in Los Angeles, Frelich has been seen in a variety of Deaf West productions--which are presented in American Sign Language, with simultaneous translation for hearing audience members--from the theater’s inaugural 1991 production of D.L. Coburn’s “The Gin Game” to last year’s staging of “A Christmas Carol.”

In that outing, Frelich played Scrooge, as the character is written, as a man. But in “Equus”--which presents the interaction of a psychiatrist with a young patient who has blinded six horses--Frelich plays the usually male Dr. Dysart as a woman.

The actress does not, however, think the change fundamentally alters the play. “In a way, it doesn’t make any difference whether it’s a man or a woman,” she says. “I didn’t find anything that didn’t make sense for a woman. When you translate it to a woman, the same emotions work just fine.”

In Frelich’s opinion, the central dynamic between the young patient and the older doctor remains intact. “It’s about the passion that the boy has experienced that the middle-aged psychiatrist hasn’t experienced,” she says.

“There are different problems here, and they’re solved in different ways,” Frelich continues. “But I don’t think it hurts the play at all.”

Frelich and her fellow artists at Deaf West are, after all, used to adapting works that were originally written to be performed by hearing actors. What they’d like to see next, of course, are more plays written specifically for deaf actors. For despite the success of “Children of a Lesser God,” such works remain extremely rare.

“Here we are all these years later, and the only [widely seen] plays being written for deaf actors are still the plays that Mark Medoff has written,” Frelich says.

Even Medoff isn’t sure why his work stands virtually alone in this regard: “I can’t answer for other people. But I’ve run into a lot of resistance, especially when I’ve pitched ideas to movie and television people.

“The powers that be are not interested in developing scripts with a middle-aged deaf woman at the center,” Medoff continues. “Even when you look around at other minorities, there’s a very limited acceptable talent pool of minority actors, and [deaf and hearing-impaired actors] are at the bottom of that pool.”

But a little patience may still be warranted. “Theater for hearing people is thousands of years old,” the actress says. “The tradition of deaf theater is only 25 years old. But a great deal has happened in those 25 years.”

* “Equus,” Deaf West Theatre, 660 N. Heliotrope Drive. Thursdays to Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 2 p.m. Through March 24. $15. (213) 660-4673 or TDD (213) 660-8826.