Marlee Matlin became the first Deaf actor to win an Academy Award, at age 21, for her role in “Children of a Lesser God.” Thirty-five years later, another Deaf actor named Troy Kotsur, Matlin’s co-star in the 2021 Oscar-winning “CODA,” became the second – hence the subtitle in “Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore.” The documentary film, screening at the Tribeca Festival before opening in cinemas, chronicles the actress’s life and career in a way that is novel for a mainstream film (but shouldn’t be): Her friends, family and associates communicate to the camera in a combination of American Sign Language and English – and, unlike other films that feature Deaf people (including “CODA”), everything is subtitled, including the English.
In her film debut, director Shoshannah Stern, who is herself a Deaf actress, is clearly attempting to use Matlin’s singular story as a way to focus attention on Deaf performers as a whole, and, by extension, all Deaf people. But, thanks to a kind of cultural myopia, the film omits a significant part of that bigger picture.
The movie begins with a warning that it contains incidents of “domestic abuse, sexual abuse and language deprivation.” These refer to personal struggles that Matlin detailed in her 2009 memoir “I’ll Scream Later” – how she was molested by a baby sitter and then a high school teacher, which led to her drug use, and how her relationship with William Hurt, her co-star in “Children of A Lesser God” who became her lover when she was 19 and he was 35, was physically and emotionally abusive (claims that Hurt, who died in 2022, had rebutted.) We viscerally understand her “language deprivation” when we see her pay a recent visit to her brothers, who basically ignore her, a repeat of her experience growing up as the lone deaf person in a hearing family.
Even when she got national attention after her debut in “Children of a Lesser God,” much of it was cringeworthy, ignorant and patronizing comments by critics and interviewers about how she was “lost” in the “strange and frightening world” of the deaf, and that she would clearly be a one-shot wonder, given an Oscar as a feel-good gesture; “how many roles are there for a deaf-mute actress.” Matlin is not mute, and, although she did have to fight the skeptics, she has had many, many roles over the decades, as we see in clips from shows such as “Seinfeld,” “The West Wing,” and “The L Word” that are included in the documentary. We hear from Henry Winkler, who become her mentor, and even gave her a place to stay when he was a star and she was struggling., and from Aaron Sorkin, who cast he because he thought her brilliant;, “She has a lot of dexterity with language.”
There are a few details about her life that are not directly connected to her career – how she has tattooed “Perseverance” on one wrist and “Warrior” on the other; how she didn’t sign with her four hearing children when they were growing up, but is determined to sign with her new grandchild,
But the film is largely concerned with her work as an actress, and how her successful career made her a role model and activist for the Deaf community. “I became an advocate without knowing it at first,” Matlin signs to Stern, before we learn that her testimony before Congress helped lead to legislation requiring new televisions to include closed captioning.
Her success opened doors, Matlin’s long-time interpreter, Jack Jason, tells us (in ASL, captioned in English.) Before Matlin came along, he says, there were some Deaf performers such as Phyllis Frelich, but Frelich et al had “smaller roles.”
In fact, Phyllis Frelich had the exact same-sized role – indeed, the exact same role. Frelich originated the role of Sarah Norman in the original Broadway production of “Children of a Lesser God,” and won a Tony Award for it in 1980 – seven years before Matlin won the Academy Award for the role in the film adaptation.
This reflects an admittedly widespread infatuation with Hollywood at the expense of other forms of art and entertainment, but it’s a particular disappointment when discussing Deaf performers, since live theater is where they’ve had the most opportunities. Theater is how most of the Deaf performers interviewed in the documentary got their start: Lauren Ridloff, who has had roles in the TV series The Walking Dead and the film Eternals, was first a Tony nominee and Theatre World Award winner for the 2018 revival of Children of a Lesser God on Broadway. Before her Broadway debut, she was a teacher; director Kenny Leon initially had hired her to tutor him in American Sign Language. Troy Kotsur, who won that second Oscar for his role in “CODA,” has been acting on stage for almost forty years, making his Broadway debut in a 2003 revival of Big River. That was a production of Deaf West Theater, part of what is easily argued to be a culture of Deaf Theater, with its own companies, its own playwrights.
Both Marlee Matlin and director Shoshana Stern certainly know about the history of the Deaf on stage. Stern was the ASL master in the Deaf West Theater production of “Spring Awakening”on Broadway, which starred such Deaf performers as Russell Harvard, Sandra Mae Frank, and Daniel Durant, who later performed with Matlin in “CODA” – as well as Matlin herself, making her Broadway debut. She was not alone.
Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore will be shown at the festival three times at three different venues — Monday June 9 at 8 pm at SVA Theater; Wednesday, June 11, 3:15 p.m. at AMC 19th Street East 6; Thursday, June 12, 6:15 p.m., Village East by Angelika – followed by a release in New York cinemas starting June 20th.
