Playwright known for Children of a Lesser God

Born: March 18, 1940;

Died: April 23, 2019

MARK Medoff, who has died aged 79, was a provocative writer whose play Children of a Lesser God won Tony and Olivier awards; his screen adaptation of it also earned him an Oscar nomination.

Medoff wrote 30 plays and wrote, produced or directed 19 movies in all but he found his greatest success with Children of a Lesser God, the tale of a troubled love affair between a speech teacher and a deaf woman who struggle to overcome the communications gap between their two cultures.

Phyllis Frelich won a Tony in 1980 for her Broadway portrayal of Sarah Norman, the deaf woman at the heart of the play, which ran for almost 900 performances. The movie version won an Academy Award for Marlee Matlin, who co-starred opposite William Hurt.

A Broadway revival last year starred Joshua Jackson and Lauren Ridloff, a former Miss Deaf America who earned a Tony nomination.

Medoff’s work often tackled social issues, from animal testing and AIDS in the play Prymate, to American myths and disorders in When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder to poverty in India in his screenplay for the 1992 film City of Joy. His 2015 play, Marilee and Baby Lamb: The Assassination of an American Goddess, is about the last days of Marilyn Monroe.

“Everything I do probably starts more from a social-issue impulse than anything else,” the playwright once said. “I went to a psychologist when I was 18 or 19 and he said I was the first kid he’d ever met who was rebelling against a happy childhood. So when I started writing, I began to expropriate social issues and quickly roped myself out of my angst.”

Medoff was inspired to write Children of a Lesser God after meeting Frelich and her husband, Robert Steinberg, a lighting designer. “I told him there were no roles for deaf actresses,” Frelich recalled. “He said, ‘OK, I’ll write a play for you.’”

Medoff was co-founder of the American Southwest Theatre Company and head of the Department of Theatre Arts for nine years at New Mexico State University, where he taught for years. He helped form the Creative Media Institute for Film & Digital Arts in 2005.

Medoff’s other works include the plays The Wager, The Hand of Its Enemy, The Heart Outright, The Majestic Kid and the screenplay for the HBO movie thriller Apology. He also penned the 1978 Chuck Norris action film, Good Guys Wear Black and the black comedy Refuge starring Linda Hamilton in 2010.

His second original Broadway play was in 2004 with “Prymate,” which closed quickly after 23 previews and five performances. It tells the story of two middle-age scientists and former lovers — an animal behaviourist and a biologist — in a tug-of-war over the fate of an ageing gorilla rescued from an AIDS lab.

Medoff was born in Mount Carmel, Illinois, grew up in Miami Beach, Florida, and received his bachelor’s in English from the University of Miami in 1962. He completed graduate studies in English in 1966 at Stanford University.

He is survived by his second wife, Stephanie Thorne, whom he married in 1972, three daughters and eight grandchildren. In 1981, he also received an honorary degree from Gallaudet University for exemplary service to the deaf community.