Phyllis Frelich and John Rubinstein in a scene from Children of a Lesser God.
Children of a Lesser God is a play by Mark Medoff, focusing on the conflicted professional and romantic relationship between Sarah Norman, a deaf student, and her former teacher, James Leeds. It premiered at the Mark Taper Forum in 1979, was produced on Broadway in 1980 and in the West End in 1981. It won the 1980 Tony Award for Best Play.
Background
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. It was seen by Gordon Davidson, Director of the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, who insisted that the male role needed to be played by a more experienced professional actor.[citation needed] The title comes from Alfred, Lord Tennyson's Idylls of the King: "For why is all around us here / As if some lesser god had made the world".
Following a highly successful run at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, the Broadway production, directed by Gordon Davidson, opened on March 30, 1980, at the Longacre Theatre, where it ran for 887 performances. The cast included Phyllis Frelich as Sarah and John Rubinstein as James. David Ackroyd later replaced Rubinstein. Deaf actress Elizabeth Quinn later replaced Frelich, and Linda Bove, another deaf actress, known to television audiences for her more-than-30-year-long run on Sesame Street, had a successful turn in the role as well.
Reviewing a 1982 Boston production of the play, critic Carolyn Clay wrote, "Don't believe what you hear about Children of a Lesser God. This much touted, Tony Award-winning exercise in affirmative-action theater does not constitute a great play. It is a nice, rather prosaically written love story that happens to focus on a bright and defiant ‘pure deaf’ woman who marries her speech teacher yet refuses to speak. The production is unusual, however, in that it uses a deaf actress in the role of the deaf woman and two hearing-impaired performers as her hearing-impaired cohorts. This is — depending on how you choose to regard it — either the play's gimmick or its very soul. Certainly the fact that half the drama is spoken in American Sign Language — fleet and eloquent and often delightfully snide — is the only extraordinary thing about it."[4]
