A Revolution They Helped Inspire

As Phyllis Frelich grew up in the small town of Devils Lake, N.D., going to Gallaudet College in Washington was one of life’s greatest aspirations-just as it was for many other young, deaf Americans.

“The dream was to get out of wherever you were and to meet and mingle with the cream of the deaf world, all together in one place,” Frelich recalled-and that place was Gallaudet, the most important school for deaf students in America, known as “the castle on the hill.”

Frelich achieved her goal, graduating from Gallaudet in 1967. She went on to become one of the college’s most famous alumni, thanks to her role in Mark Medoff’s “Children of a Lesser God,” for which she won the Tony Award for best Broadway actress in 1980.

The subject of Frelich and Medoff’s latest collaboration is closely related to Gallaudet itself. In “Road to a Revolution,” currently playing at Deaf West Theatre in North Hollywood, a transformative event in the history of Gallaudet makes waves many miles from Washington, D.C., as well.

When Frelich was a student at Gallaudet, little notice was taken of the fact that the president of the college was not deaf. That’s the way it had always been. But several years later, people started to notice. When Gallaudet began looking for a new president in the late ‘80s, pressure mounted to name someone who was deaf.

Nonetheless, in March 1988, the school’s board, presented with two finalists for the job who were deaf and one who was hearing, picked the one who could hear.

In one of the most audible protests ever by deaf Americans, the Gallaudet students and faculty rose up and blocked the gates to the school, shutting it down and preventing the newly appointed president from setting foot on the campus. After several tense days, the president resigned and the board reversed course, selecting I. King Jordan as the first deaf president in the school’s 124-year history. The non-deaf chairwoman of the board also resigned and was replaced by a deaf man.

“We joke that this revolution was the deaf civil rights movement compressed into one week,” said Robert Steinberg, Frelich’s non-deaf husband, interpreter and noted set designer.

The 1988 uprising at Gallaudet looked like possible movie material to Medoff, whose “Children of a Lesser God” had already been made into a Hollywood film. Accompanied by Frelich and Steinberg, Medoff made the rounds of the studios, not long after the Gallaudet events took place. Their initial idea pitted a fictional deaf Gallaudet board member against her deaf daughter, a student protester. It didn’t sell. Medoff recalled that one young movie executive responded, “But there already was a deaf movie’-referring, of course, to “Children of a Lesser God.” A few years later, a studio offered Medoff the chance to rewrite and direct an existing script about the Gallaudet protest as a TV movie. By then, however, he had decided he didn’t want to write about the events at Gallaudet. Medoff, who isn’t deaf, thought people might object to a hearing writer telling this story. “I didn’t feel it was my place,” he said. In addition, Medoff said he doesn’t enjoy writing about real, living people. “I’ve dealt with real people, and it’s difficult to write the negative side of anyone you become involved with,” he said.

So Medoff and Steinberg proposed an alternative: a “road” scenario involving a group of deaf and hard-of-hearing Americans and their relatives who, fired up by the rebellion at Gallaudet, board a van and travel across America to join the protest. The mother-daughter conflict from the initial idea remained, in the form of a deaf woman whom Frelich would play and her adult daughter. But this time the characters were from New Mexico. Medoff, who was a theater professor at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces from 1978 to 1992, set the characters at a deaf school in Santa Fe, primarily because he hoped that the proposed movie could be shot close to home. Again, however, the movie didn’t happen. The release of Spike Lee’s similarly structured “Get on the Bus” in 1996 may have had so mething to do with it, Medoff said. But there were more substantive issues: The studio wanted a family-oriented TV movie, and Medoff’s attempt to include extensive closed-captioning resulted in protests that some kids who would watch the movie couldn’t read. Also, the studio wanted the leading character to be a kid-the teenage, non-deaf granddaughter of Frelich’s character. “If possible,” Medoff said, “they wanted to make a movie about deafness with no deaf people.” Medoff wanted to write about three generations of women, and he especially wanted to write a leading role for Frelich, whom he calls his “favorite actor.”

She has held that title almost from the moment they met in 1977, when Medoff participated in a writers’ program at the University of Rhode Island, where Steinberg was running the design program. Frelich was an actress with the National Theatre of the Deaf, the Connecticut-based company that is usually credited with breaking the ground for all deaf theater that has followed.

Medoff, a hot off-Broadway playwright at the time (‘When You Comin Back, Red Ryder?” and “The Wager”), had never known deaf people and knew very little about deafness. But within 20 minutes of their meeting at the couple’s farmhouse, “I was so taken by Phyllis’ energy and the way she welcomed me in and bid me to communicate with her, I wanted to write a play for her.

“I was infused with a quasi-spiritual awakening, seeing the possibilities of making that leap from culture to culture, from language to language,” Medoff said.

A year later, after Medoff moved to New Mexico, he sent Frelich and Steinberg some pages of the play he was writing for her. The couple hated it. Frelich and Steinberg felt the character was too furious about her deafness, as opposed to being an individual simply dealing with life. Over Chinese food in a New York restaurant, Medoff said, “I tore up the pages in front of them-and this was before computers.” He began again.

The result was “Children of a Lesser God’-not only a pivotal play for Medoff, Frelich and Steinberg, but also for the Mark Taper Forum, which premiered it. Medoff credits Taper artistic director Gordon Davidson with helping him focus on Frelich’s character. On Broadway, “Children” won Tonys for best play and actor (John Rubinstein) as well as for Frelich.

Medoff continued writing for Frelich intermittently. “The Hands of Its Enemy” played the Taper and the Huntington Hartford (now the Doolittle) in L.A. in 1984 and then was produced off-Broadway. “Gila” played the Odyssey Theatre in 1998. Medoff’s also directing a movie, “Children on Their Birthdays,” based on a Truman Capote story, in which Frelich has a role. When Deaf West artistic director Ed Waterstreet asked Medoff for a new play idea, Medoff suggested a stage adaptation of the Gallaudet screenplay. His ties with the people at Deaf West are strong. Waterstreet’s wife, Linda Bove, was Frelich’s “Children of a Lesser God” understudy and tour replacement, and was one of Medoff’s sign-language teachers. Frelich and Steinberg, who moved to the L.A. area for “Hands of Its Enemy” and now live in Temple City, have worked at Deaf West since its first production 10 years ago.

Medoff is directing “Revolution,” and Steinberg designed what he calls the play’s “Paul McCartney set’-because it represents “the long and winding road” from New Mexico to Washington. Because only about 30% of Deaf West’s audience is deaf, the cast of characters includes one hearing woman who speaks many of the other characters’ signed lines, as well as five actors who will help interpret and will play small roles.

According to Frelich, deaf theater-the National Theatre of the Deaf and “Children of a Lesser God,” in particular-helped influence opinion to the point that the Gallaudet protest of 1988 became possible. “With all of this exposure, deaf people began to see this was something they could do.”

The same wave of activism also included the Americans With Disabilities Act, which helped to open enough opportunities at other colleges that Gallaudet (now Gallaudet University) must compete harder to recruit the top deaf students, Frelich said. But Gallaudet now offers a theater degree-an option not available to Frelich, who majored in library science.

This spring, Gallaudet’s theater department is presenting the ancient Greek classic “Lysistrata,” a play about an earlier spontaneous revolution. Who knows-if “Road to a Revolution” works in North Hollywood, maybe someday it can be produced at Gallaudet itself.

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‘ROAD TO A REVOLUTION,” Deaf West Theatre, 5112 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood. Dates: Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2 p.m.; Sundays, 3 p.m. Ends May 27. Price: $20. Phone: (818) 762-2773; (818) 762-2782 (TTY).