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The play was specially written for the deaf actress Phyllis Frelich, based to some extent on her relationship with her husband Robert Steinberg. [1] It was originally developed from workshops and showcased at New Mexico State University, with Frelich and Steinberg in the lead roles.
- Mark Howard Medoff
- 1981
Mark Medoff (March 18, 1940 – April 23, 2019) was an American playwright, screenwriter, film and theatre director, actor, and professor. His play Children of a Lesser God received both the Tony Award and the Olivier Award. He was nominated for an Academy Award and a Writers Guild of America Best Adapted Screenplay Award for the film script of ...
Apr 25, 2019 · Mark Medoff, a provocative playwright whose “Children of a Lesser God” won Tony and Olivier awards and whose screen adaptation of his play earned an Oscar nomination, has died in Las Cruces ...
- Author Biography
- Plot Summary
- Characters
- Themes
- Style
- Historical Context
- Critical Overview
- Criticism
- Sources
- Further Reading
Mark Howard Medoff was born in Mount Carmel, Illinois, on March 18, 1940. His father, Lawrence, was a physician, and his mother, Thelma, a psychologist. He earned a B.A. in 1962 from the University of Miami, and an M.A. in English fromStanford in 1966. Medoff has held a number of academic appointments at New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, inc...
Act I
The primary action of Children of a Lesser Godtakes place inside the mind of James Leeds. Time is not linear during the play, and characters “step from his memory for anything from a full scene to several lines,” and place changes rapidly on a bare stage that holds “only a few benches and a blackboard.” James is a speech teacher at a State School for the Deaf. He meets Sarah Norman, a cleaning woman who has been deaf from birth and has resided at the school since the age of five. Two other st...
Act II
The second act begins with a bridge party at the newlyweds’ home attended by Franklin, James’s supervising teacher, and Mrs. Norman. Sarah delivers a splendid performance, suggesting that she has become integrated into the middle-class hearing world, but later tells James “I feel split down the middle, caught between two worlds.” James also experiences this struggle to feel comfortable in both worlds because he becomes exhausted serving asSarah’s translator and finds it impossible to enjoy mu...
Orin Dennis
Orin is two years younger than Sarah and has been a student with her at the State School for the Deaf since he was a young child. Orin, however, has some residual hearing and practices both his lip-reading and his speech. He is described as “the guardian of all. . . deaf children because he [is] an apprentice teacher and speaks.” He is also described as someone who “wants to lead a revolution against the hearing world and thinks [the deaf] can hardly wait to follow him.” Orin is angry that Sa...
Mr. Franklin
Mr. Franklin is the Supervising Teacher at the State School for the Deaf. He is one of the “Great White Fathers” of deaf education. He takes a condescending attitude toward everyone. He views all the deaf, even the adults like Orin and Sarah, as needy children who need his protection and guidance. However, his compassionate, benevolent pretense is weakened when he says to James: “Mr. Leeds . . . we don’t fornicate with the students. We just screw them over. If you ever get the two confused. ....
Edna Klein
Ms. Klein is a lawyer who helps Orin with his claim of discrimination against the State School for the Deaf. She does not know how to sign or how to communicate with Orin or Sarah. She plans to read a speech that she has written before the commission but is accused by Sarah of writing “the same old shit”—that deaf people are helpless and need hearing people to get along in the world. Ms. Klein is well-intentioned, but recognizes neither Sarah or Orin as human beings who can speak for themselves.
Language and Meaning
Children of a Lesser Godforces its audience to struggle with the problem of language, specifically resulting from the differences between spoken English and American Sign Language (ASL) and those who employ these languages. James becomes exhausted
TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY
1. Research the following and discuss the contribution of each to the world of theater: The National Theater of the Deaf, Louie Fant, Bernard Bragg, and Phyllis Frelich. 2. Alexander Graham Bellwas a teacher of the deaf long before he invented the telephone. He is well known for devising “Bell’s Visible Speech.” Find out more information on this topic and pay particular attention to the chart, if available. 3. Through the years there has been an ongoing argument between the oralists (those wh...
Search for Self
Sarah’s mother demanded that her other daughter’s boyfriends’ friends act as companions to Sarah when the girls were younger. She enthusiastically recalls: “These boys really liked Sarah, treated her the same way they treated Ruth, with respect, and . . . and if you didn’t know there was a problem, you’d have thought she was perfectly normal.” Mrs. Norman did not realize that none of these boys were interested in Sarah herself, but only in how she could meet their needs; their sole reason for...
Setting
Children of a Lesser Godis a drama set “in the mind of James Leeds.” Characters in the play step from his memory for a few lines or an entire scene. There are two “places” where the action occurs: the State School for the Deaf and James Leeds’s house across the road. In Act I, time is “fluid.” Scenes from past and present blend together often without the audience realizing what has happened. In Act II, the sense of time is more linear, although not completely so; there is more of a sense that...
Flashback
Because the action of the play takes place “in the mind of James Leeds,” time does not always move forward. Scenes from the past, like the visit to Mrs. Norman’s house in Act I, weave themselves into the fabric of the action. The entire play can be seen as a flashback: the actions and words of the beginning of the play come back again near the end.
Imagery
“Deafness isn’t the opposite of hearing. . . . It is a silence full of sounds.” This is the central image of the play. Sarah tries to show James that the relationship between the deaf and hearing worlds is not an “either-or” situation, but rather one with its own distinct and unique possibilities and components. Much of the imagery of this play is not contained in the words of the characters but rather in the sign language they employ. Sign language in this play provides both visual and verba...
Deafness is a unique condition; its effects are not immediately visible. Individuals whose bodies bear an outward sign of impairment or disability are recognizable in the world at large. And the community recognizes, more or less, what should be done to assist these people to fuller participation in the larger society. How does society as a whole i...
Robert Brustein, writing in The New Republic; called Children of a Lesser God a “supreme example of a new Broadway genre—the Disability Play,” in which, regardless of our defects, the audience learns that we all share a common humanity. He further noted that speech in this drama “operates not to inform and reveal but rather to manipulate emotions a...
William P. Wiles
Wiles is a teacher with over twenty years of experience in secondary education. In the following essay, he explores the characters’ individual attitudes toward hearing, speech, and deafness inChildren of a Lesser God. “In the beginning, there was only silence,” James Leeds says at the very beginning of Children of a Lesser God, “and out of that silence there could come only one thing: Speech. That’s right. Human speech. So, speak!” he could not have been more wrong. In this opening speech, Ja...
WHAT DO I READ NEXT?
1. The Miracle Worker, a play by William Gibson, explores the early education of Helen Keller and her teacher, Anne Sullivan. The play confronts the issues of the link between language and communication, and the struggles of both student and teacher to make that link. 2. Brian Clark’s play Whose Life Is It Anyway?examines the idea of allowing individuals who are impaired to make decisions for themselves through the story of Ken Harrison, a sculptor. After he is involved in a car accident and...
Tom O’Brien
O’Brien reviews the film adaptation of Children of a Lesser God, which Medoff cowrote. While he praises the performances, the critic was less pleased with the translation from stage to screen, feeling that certain elements of Medoff’s original text were misused for the screenplay. Children of a Lesser God both moves and disappoints. Directed by Randa Haines, whose television experience includes Hill Street Blues and the film about incest, Something about Amelia, Childrenprovides a bare-bones...
Adams, Elizabeth. “Mark Medoff’ in Contemporary American Dramatists, edited by Jim Kamp, St. James Press, 1994, pp. 443-45. Brustein, Robert. Review of Children of a Lesser God in the New Republic, Vol. 187, no. 23, June 7, 1980, pp. 23-24. Sagona, Paul. “Mark Medoff” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 7: Twentieth Century American Dramati...
Gallaudet University Home Page, http://www.gallaudet.edu. DeafNation Links Page, http://www.deafnation.com/Deaflinks.html. Deaf World Web & ASL Dictionary Online, http://dww.deafworldweb.org/asl/.
First produced in 1979, Children of a Lesser God was written specifically for deaf actress Phyllis Frelich, and based in part on her real-life relationship with her husband. In the story, an idealistic teacher at a State School for the Deaf falls in love with a woman who has been deaf since birth.
Apr 25, 2019 · Medoff wrote 30 plays and is best known for the groundbreaking Children of a Lesser God, the story of a young deaf woman and her love affair with her speech teacher.
Apr 27, 2019 · Taking its title from a poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson, Children of a Lesser God opened on Broadway in 1980, ran for 887 performances and won the Tony for best play, as well as acting honours...
