Children of a Lesser God

In 1980, the playwright Mark Medoff’s play “Children of a Lesser God” debuted on Broadway to wide critical acclaim, and went on to win the Tony Award for Best Play that year. Medoff was inspired by the deaf American actress Phyllis Frelich to create a work that represented the deaf and hearing-impaired community in a real, non-stereotyped way. The play he wrote highlights the tensions between the hearing and deaf worlds through the stormy love story of a hearing man and a deaf woman.

Always cast with deaf or hearing-impaired actors, “Children of a Lesser God” practices the representation that it preaches. For long stretches of scenes, characters communicate exclusively in either Signed English (a word-by-word rendering of English into sign language) or in ASL (American Sign Language, which is a separate and distinct language of its own). This means that hearing actors must spend the rehearsal period learning to sign fluently and that an ASL and Signed English interpreter be present for the duration of rehearsal to let the deaf and hearing actors communicate with one another. Not only that, but the two types of signs are used as a plot point: the hearing characters tend to use the slower, more cumbersome Signed English; but the deaf characters use ASL to sign more descriptively or to leave the hearing characters out of the conversation altogether. Moreover, when the play is staged, there must be some way for the audience to get simultaneous interpretation of what the actors are signing. The most recent revival of the play accomplished this with text electronic displayed along the top of the stage – like live subtitles.

The play’s title comes from a line in Tennyson’s The Idylls of the King, a set of narrative poems about the mythical King Arthur. As Arthur contemplates his failure to perfect the world around him, he wonders, “why is all around us here / As if some lesser god had made the world / But had not force to shape it as he would.”



“Children of a Lesser God” is set in the 1970s at a State School for the Deaf. In Act I, we meet James Leeds, a speech therapist who is appointed to the faculty after three years in the Peace Corps. James is assigned by Mr. Franklin, the hearing head of school, to teach lip reading to Sarah Norman, a school dropout who works as a janitor in the School, where she has lived since she was five. Because she is profoundly deaf, and has been from birth, Sarah refuses to communicate in anything other than ASL.

Sarah immediately clashes with James when she says that teaching deaf people to approximate the hearing by making them read lips and speak is damaging and demeaning. James worries that only using ASL will limit Sarah’s world, since it is only used by the deaf. But Sarah counters that because he wants to change such a fundamental part of who she is, James is trying to play God and remake the deaf in his hearing image. For Sarah, her deafness isn’t a tragic disability – instead, she hopes to become a teacher for the deaf, and even to have deaf children.

James and Sarah’s initial hostility turns into attraction, and the two of them decide to get married. Sarah’s hearing-impaired friend Orin Dennis, another lifetime resident of the school, tries to convince her that this would be a mistake. Meanwhile, Mr. Franklin tries to tell the same thing to James – to Mr. Franklin, Sarah and those like her are profoundly disabled and shouldn’t be treated as able-bodied people. As James is defending their engagement, he finds himself hiding some of what he says from Sarah – and realizes that he is perpetuating the same system of censorship and patronizing that Sarah is fighting against. The Act ends with the pair married.



Act II opens on a happy and fulfilling relationship, as Sarah and James rent a house across the street from the university. However, problems soon arise. Sarah’s school friends, including Orin, accuse her of abandoning her deaf culture and community. To them, she has sold out her ideals for the middle-class lifestyle James is able to provide – are a new TV and blender worth abandoning everything she stood for?

At the same time, Lydia, one of James’s hearing-impaired speech therapy students, is constantly trying to seduce him. Her attention is clearly unwanted, but Lydia thinks that if James could be into Sarah, then he would probably also be into a different deaf girl.

The increasingly activist Orin convinces Sarah that they should sue the State School for its discrimination practices. The suit’s primary argument is that the school should hire deaf teachers to teach its deaf students. The more Sarah gets involved in this suit and its accompanying protests, the more adamant she becomes that only she can speak for herself – but at the same time, she also refuses to speak. Her activism alienates James, and Sarah feels trapped: she can never admit that deafness has any limitations because that would be tantamount to accepting how the world (or Mr. Franklin) sees her – as someone to be pitied.



As the case goes to court, Sarah delivers a beautiful speech about deaf culture and language. She ends by saying that a relationship between the hearing and deaf worlds is impossible until the hearing respect the deaf and treat them as individuals rather than patronizing them.

James takes the speech personally and is deeply wounded by her words – after all, he has always tried to show her how much he sees her as her own unique person. She can’t seem to accept the fact that he doesn’t actually want to change her. Although it seems like this fight will separate them for good, the play ends on a hopeful note – the couple reunites and tries to start anew.