His play marked a breakthrough for deaf actors and was adapted into an Oscar-winning movie.
By Harrison Smith Harrison Smith Obituary writer Email Bio Follow April 24 at 6:46 PM Mark Medoff, who helped bring unhearing characters and actors to Broadway in his play “Children of a Lesser God,” a vibrant portrait of deaf identity that earned him a Tony Award and an Oscar nomination after he helped adapt it into a hit film, died April 23 at a hospice center in Las Cruces, N.M. He was 79.
In a departure from that work’s brutal, drug-addled atmosphere, Mr. Marks then wrote “Children of a Lesser God,” a romantic drama about an idealistic speech therapist who falls in love with a deaf woman at his school. The play grew out of Mr. Medoff’s friendship with Phyllis Frelich, a deaf actress whom Mr. Medoff met at a drama workshop in 1978.
Some critics saw the work as melodramatic and derivative, part of a wave of inspirational “disability plays” that included “Whose Life Is It Anyway?,” about a paralyzed sculptor. For the most part, however, the production was met with acclaim and reverence, seen as groundbreaking for its accessibility for deaf and hearing viewers.
“Deaf people are like hearing people — they all have different opinions about the movie,” Kevin Nolan, a guidance counselor at the Clark School for the Deaf in Massachusetts, told the Times upon its release. “But the movie is still a very important work for the deaf because it educates the hearing. Hearing people still have so many misconceptions — like deaf people can’t read or dance or cry or laugh.
Mr. Medoff graduated from the University of Miami in 1962 and, after receiving a master’s degree in English from Stanford University in 1966, he began teaching at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. Initially, he told People magazine, he was a hostile and unhappy colleague, so depressed by the desert campus that he drove home to Florida, where his parents persuaded him to return to the university.
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