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The play, Children Of A Lesser God, written by Mark Medoff, was the winner Tony Award winner for Best Play in 1980, and also won the Laurence Olivier Award and the Drama Desk Award. In essence, the play is about a deaf girl named Sarah and her relationship with a hearing man named James. The play is told from the perspective of James’ memory.
According to Fuchs, the first step in analyzing a play is to envision the world on which the play resides.
Children Of A Lesser God, takes place in a world where scenes can meld into one another and space is relative to the memory James is focusing on at the moment. There is no defined space because all the scenes can meld together. The given circumstances the describes the stage as “bare,” so the characters can appear and exit quickly and because of this the passage of time is also unlike that of reality.
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Time in this world is not linear. There are no flashbacks, there are simply stories told in the present that describe the past. This is contrasted by the fact that the entire play happens in the past and is therefore simply a memory, a story in the present about times that are past. There are some scenes from his memory that the audience can detect a light-hearted and bright mood. For example, in the beginning of Act One, James decided to climb a window outside Sarah’s room in order to get her attention and he makes jokes while he attempts to woo her from the tree.
Yet throughout most of the play, that light-hearted mood seems to be infected by a more serious, dark mood that surrounds the character of Sarah. Music has an especially strange role in this play because one character can hear it and the other cannot, which also infects the mood and brings a new light to the subject. In the second Act, Sarah and James are in their home, and James simply wants to relax his hands from signing and listen to his music. Sarah lets him, but still wishes to be near him and participate in this with him. Their conversation grows bleaker when James tries to explain music, with no success, and thus creates another divide between them. However, mainly the tone of this play is created through silence.
The social world of this play is an important one. There is a division between the deaf community and the hearing community. While they can communicate, sometimes communication is not enough because of the difficultly in understanding the other side’s perspective. Despite the play’s awareness that this social issue goes beyond the deaf school, the world of the play is still a private one. It touches on these social issues a great deal; however, the play looks very closely about how this social issue affects the relationship of Sarah and James. At the beginning of the play, many characters seemed small and insignificant, eager to please, but by the end of the play, they have thought, ideas, and ambitions of their own. This follows James’ understanding of who these people in the deaf community are. As he gets to know the community better, he begins to see how strong and fierce and determined they are. He begins to see them as real people instead of projects. The last part of the social world in this play is that of language. Language is the fundamental issue in this play. There are three different languages: English, ASL, and Signed English. All of these languages have their own inherent value; however, all of these languages also makes communication difficult. Many times when the characters are speaking, or signing, to one another, the person listening repeats back what the first person said to make sure they understood the meaning correctly. This is something different from what the hearing reality is like and it accurately portrays the speech of those who use signing as a way of communication.
Change is a reality in life, and because theater reflects qualities of life, there is change in theatrical productions. There are many changes in Children Of A Lesser God. There are two major changes in the play. The first major change is in Act One, when Sarah decides she wants to move out of the deaf school to go live with James. The significance of this change is due to Sarah’s history. The deaf school had been her only home since she was five. She chose to leave the only home she had ever known, living among the deaf community, to go live with a man outside the deaf community. The second major change was in Act Two, when Sarah decided she wanted to fight for her rights as a deaf woman on her own. She wanted to write her own speech and use her own words, thoughts, and feelings. She decided she was tired of having people speak for her when she had the ability to communicate on her own. Her decision on this caused a rift between her and James. As mentioned before with the music, they tried to communicate about it but James could not understand her choices and her defiance because he himself has never had to walk in her shoes. Sarah ends up leaving their home and running to her mother. She no longer has her friends, or the deaf school, or James. For the first time since the beginning of the play, they are no longer together. However, the one thing that does not change throughout the whole play which is exemplified excellently at the end, is that both characters continue to work to help the other see each different perspective.
Throughout the change in the play and the difficulties each character has faced, the world makes demands of the audience. The biggest demand the play makes is that the audience should be aware of the social issues between the hearing and the deaf. People must acknowledge that there is an issue with the way the world is currently working when it comes to people who are different from the status quo. The second thing the play asks of it’s audience is that we try to learn. The end of the play is clear when James asks Sarah to teach him. Throughout the play, he had been trying to teach Sarah the ways of hearing people, but in the end, he asked her to teach him because the effort to learn needs to go both ways. Those how can hear need to learn about those who cannot and those who are deaf must learn about those who can hear because that’s how things can start to get better. People attempt to make themselves into “lesser gods” and shape people into their own image, as suggested by the title of the play, people tend to do this because they do not understand the other person, and that is why the play is demanding that people make that attempt to learn, because otherwise, people run around trying to fix things that aren’t broken simply because it is different from what they know.
Mark Medoff’s Children of a Lesser God Analysis. (2024, Feb 15). Retrieved from https://studymoose.com/mark-medoff-s-children-of-a-lesser-god-analysis-essay
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