ABSTRACT
Mark Medoff’s 1980 play, Children of a Lesser God, probes the linguistic, cultural, emotional and social distances between Sarah, a profoundly deaf woman who works at a deaf residential school, and James, a hearing teacher at the school who becomes her lover and husband. The characters communicate through speech and American Sign Language. The play ends as it begins:
Silence. Close by each other. James reaches to touch her. She bolts away. They’re in the same positions they were at the beginning of the play.
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