is the discovery by the protagonist of his or her own identity, a discovery often precipitated by the introduction of the possibility of violence. All of his plays are really moments when the search for self is intensified by circumstances.Children of a Lesser God is not merely James’s play, in which he discovers that deaf people are whole people; it is, most important, a journey taken by Sarah into articulating a truth for herself, one that has lain embedded in her anger and defensive attitudes. When she tells James about the “joining” that they can never have, she is telling herself for the first time as well. The whole “speech” to the panel is in fact her manifesto for her future, and she comes to it only after her relationship with deafness is replaced by her relationship with James. It is no coincidence that James’s last name is Leeds, the name of the character in The Wager, because in both cases a man hurries to assumptions about a woman, who must during the course of the action set him straight about those assumptions. Honor and Sarah are alike, too, in that they both are clearheaded about their defense systems against humanity but must discover who they are during the play itself. They both become more satisfied with themselves after the male (in both cases Leeds, a name that takes on significance in the abstract) helps them through the complexities of self-argument.

The War on Tatem

Thematically, there seems to be an underlying sense of incipient violence in many of Medoff’s plays. The early one-act play titled The War on Tatem, far from a fully mature work, begins the exploration of a theme that seems to follow Medoff from play to play in steadily more sophisticated form. The “war” is a gang war in Miami Beach, between adolescents who do not even know the function of a gang but know only that they must “fight it out” for some sort of vague control over an even vaguer territory. Here is the primeval impulse toward winning and keeping a territory; the young boys make a comedy of an inclination that becomes deadly serious a few years later in urban areas and that carries with it the seeds of nationalism and war. Tough-guy King Myron sends his challenge to Louis Dunbar via messenger. Louis, the leader of a sorry group of youngsters known as the Tatem Perch, knows that a showdown is inevitable, but he avoids it as long as he can, with glibness and clever talk. When, however, Myron picks on Louis’s little brother, Louis sees that it is time for action. He gets a bloody nose for his trouble, but the lesson is learned and a reputation is saved. Most important, Louis comes to know things about himself that he carries with him into adult life and, as twenty-year-old narrator, explains in retrospect to the audience.

The Wager

From this modest beginning, Medoff continued to explore the basic human trait of avoidance of violence. His notion is clearest in the two early full-length works that made their way to New York: The Wager and When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder? In The Wager, for example, two college men, Ward and Leeds, lounge in their dormitory room discussing the possibility of seducing Honor, the wife of a neighbor, Ron. Very early, and for no immediately explainable purpose, Leeds carries a revolver, an image that shadows the play as it moves toward its climax, exaggerated in a second-act scene in which Honor’s husband brandishes a machine gun. The play moves within the possibilities of violence; Leeds is described in a stage direction: “A dangerous explosiveness rages beneath his very cool exterior.” The sense is that underneath the complex patina of social conventions lies the ever-present possibility of physical violence, which exposes all the hypocrisy behind which normal personalities hide from raw forces. The “dance” of word games, double entendres, subtle reverse psychological ploys, and the like is interrupted by the unequivocal burst of energy implied in the violent act.

The Kramer

The Kramer is an allegory of power relationships reminiscent of the work of Harold Pinter. It reveals Medoff as not simply a social realist but also someone concerned with the clash of principles on a suprapersonal level. Art Malin, a hapless, ordinary man, is manipulated by the brilliant but demonic Bart Kramer into acting amorally. Kramer urges Malin to be unfaithful to his wife and to generally exploit people. Unlike in most of Pinter’s plays, the intended victim of the ontological scam fights back. Malin stands up to Kramer and tells him that he will not have his values distorted or preyed on. Yet his escape has been a narrow shave, as Kramer’s promise of an alleviation of his mediocre condition was surely a temptation for Malin.

When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder?

Violence bursts to the surface in When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder?, a play that explores more directly and visually the question of bravery and cowardice in the face of danger. Teddy, a dangerous man who is making his way across the country by his wits, confronts the self-protective and falsely safe inhabitants of a run-down wayside restaurant. At stake—besides the very expensive violin held “hostage” by Teddy throughout the play—is the presence or absence of bravery in the face of violence: Stephen, a frightened young man, is forced into humiliating acts before his girlfriend, Angel, and in the process discovers his own manliness. Teddy is not so much a real threat as he is the embodiment of all the threats to one’s comfortable mental existence, a challenger not simply to the body but also to protective attitudes and self-deceit. Nor is Teddy a simpleminded brute; his cruelty is calculated and clever, and it stems from a rudimentary but accurate understanding of how humans act toward one another. He instinctively senses the affection of Angel for Stephen and forces Stephen to “look bad” in front of her.

The violence he does to the married couple Richard and Clarisse, who have stopped for breakfast, is parallel to the Stephen-Angel plot: Richard is forced by Teddy to choose his wife’s humiliation over the dollar value of the violin; when he turns his back on Clarisse, the false values of their marriage are exposed. It should be remembered, however, that Richard has been shot (a flesh wound) by this time and that Teddy still holds the gun, so the choice is not as simple as the wife chooses to interpret it. The dilemma, however, does seem to expose the duplicity and thinness of the marriage. Thus, Teddy, without destroying the violin, destroys the marriage. Ironically, after Teddy’s departure, Richard himself destroys the violin in anger and as a gesture of what he has lost. Like Stephen, however, Clarisse is freed by the violence of the events to identify herself, finally, as a whole person no longer burdened with the falseness that the marriage forced on her. Thus, Medoff’s plays explore how honest the characters are with themselves, given a situation that forces them to back away from all the facades and face who they really are behind the masks of social acceptability. Although on the surface the plays are about violence, they are in fact about the realizations that come from the introduction of violence to an otherwise false and superficial life. Acting as a catalyst for the reaction that lies dormant within the human personality, violence, like agitation in a test tube, begins the chain reaction that results in a satisfaction, a neutralizing, of the disparate “chemicals” of the human personality.

Children of a Lesser God

Children of a Lesser God is about minorities faced with the choice of whether or not to join the mainstream. As such, it is relevant not only to deaf people but also to women, African Americans, Latinos, Asians, gays and lesbians, and other American minorities. Children of a Lesser God is particularly salient in a feminist perspective. As a person with a disability, Sarah is assigned, because of her disability, a vulnerable and dependent position parallel to the one traditionally assigned to women, a category to which she also belongs. Sarah has to face the decision of whether to “join” James and therefore the mainstream or remain true to her previous identity. However, she also has to come to terms with the way in which she is genuinely disadvantaged and disempowered. This realization must be made before Sarah can come to terms with her own predicament. Long before the academic alignment of disability and gender studies, Medoff had arrived at an intuitive apprehension of their congruence.

The Hands of Its Enemy

The themes of self-awareness and the difficulties of verbal communication are continued in Medoff’s next play, The Hands of Its Enemy, in which a stage director guides a woman on her journey to self-realization. The title refers to the existential saying “Life is in the hands of its enemies.” Here, the play-within-a-play form is employed as a device for exploring the ways in which a novice playwright (a deaf woman, played by Frelich in New York) hides the truth from herself about a violent incident in her past. As the rehearsals progress on her autobiographical play, the director admonishes her for writing a “little revenge play” instead of a “large play about domestic violence.” The playwright has written a play about a wife’s revenge on her husband, instead of about the pain and violence of her own experience. This self-disguise of one’s real anguish is central to all Medoff’s plays. He sees his characters as exposing themselves to themselves in the course of the play.

Crunch Time

Toward the end of the 1990’s, Medoff cowrote two plays, Crunch Time with Phil Treon and Showdown on Rio Road with Ross Marks . Though there is no way of knowing for what portion of the plays Medoff was responsible, the two works do have similar themes. One of them is the metaphor of team sports as a way to discuss competitiveness and community in contemporary America. The other is how children growing up are often repressed or constrained by socially normative identities.

In Crunch Time, after Coach Larson, the beloved coach of the local high school women’s basketball team, dies, he is replaced by Fluffy Murdock, who claims to have formerly been an assistant coach with perennial college basketball powerhouse Duke University. Murdock stuns the star of the team, Robyn Wingstrom, by jettisoning Coach Larson’s ethic of interdependency and team play. He urges instead a more ruthlessly competitive approach. Murdock is revealed to be a satanic figure who threatens harm to Robyn’s beloved grandfather if she does not adhere to his philosophy. Robyn, though, manages to con Murdock into thinking she has adopted his point of view when she really has not. In this way, she wins the game and (for the moment) vanquishes Murdock. At the end of the play, she is reunited with her grandfather (who had been hospitalized, then disappeared) and her boyfriend Brendon. As her grandfather helps Brendon with his paper on the Vietnam War, a sense of generational continuity and social fellow-feeling is reconstituted, dispelling Murdock’s devilish individualism. Medoff and Treon capture the grain of what it feels like to be an American teenager—the clothes they wear, the food they eat, and the way they talk. Crunch Time was a very relevant play to the time in which it was produced, a time that Medoff and Treon imply was plagued by vindictive self-aggrandizement. Crunch Time served to enlighten audiences in a time in which the prominence of women’s sports was growing along with worries about competitiveness among child and teenage athletes and their parents.

Showdown on Rio Road

Showdown on Rio Road concerns Victor, a teenage gang member from Brooklyn who moves to New Mexico. There, he finds socially conformist teenage identities of machismo and assertiveness that conflict with his interest in playing the piano, which he worries people will see as effeminate. Mirroring this conflict, Big Meat Boyle, the feared gang leader whose reputation percolates throughout the earlier portion of the play, is in fact revealed to be a girl named Marilisa. At the end of the play, teenage stereotypes are dispelled and everyone gets to be the constructive, healthy citizens they really wish to be. This conclusion is a a rare victory for incipient civilization over looming barbarism in Medoff’s and much other contemporary American drama. Although the sociological portraits seem to come from an earlier era, perhaps the 1950’s, the slang and reference used by the teenagers are completely of the 1990’s. Both Crunch Time and Showdown on Rio Road are presumably intended for performance by high school theater students, yet they raise issues relevant for a more general audience.

Road to a Revolution

Shortly thereafter, Medoff returned to the theme of deafness and to working with Phyllis Frelich. Road to a Revolution concerns the controversy in 1988 at Gallaudet University, the renowned university for deaf students in Washington, D.C., when the students demanded a deaf president. Premiering at Deaf West Theater in Hollywood, The Road to Revolution expands Medoff’s exploration of disability as a marker in the way people construct power relationships. As the deaf students fight for their rights, they learn that disability does not mean disenfranchisement. A rare example of student revolution in the 1980’s, the Gallaudet students’ struggle is an inspiration for marginalized people everywhere. More straightforwardly political than Children of a Lesser God, Medoff’s play lacks some of the earlier work’s dramatic power—perhaps because Road to a Revolution was originally conceived as a film script. Road to a Revolution went on a national tour in spring, 2002.

Tommy J and Sally

In 2002, Medoff had a new play premiered by the Woolly Mammoth Theater Company in Washington, D.C., under the direction of Paul Devin Baker. In Tommy J and Sally, Medoff explores the tangled racial legacy of American history and memory. The title alludes to president Thomas Jefferson’s rumored sexual liaison with his African American slave, Sally Hemings, which became prominent in late 1990’s headlines as historians unearthed new evidence and reanimated debate ensued from all quarters. Here, the races are reversed: Tommy J (played in the premiere by Craig Wallace) is a black man obsessed by the celebrity allure of Sally Hemmings (Medoff changed the spelling from the historical person), a white, bubbly blonde star pop singer played in the Woolly Mammoth production by Sue Anne Morrow. Tommy breaks into Sally’s room, thinking that he knows her under another name. The play is quite remarkable; it is a phantasmagoric reverie that uses historical themes as an abstract template to underline a thoroughly contemporary and independent drama. It can be compared to another play on similar issues, Suzan-Lori Parks’s Topdog/Underdog, which won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize in Drama. Medoff might have been expected to simply replay themes from the 1970’s, the era when his drama received the most public acclaim. Instead, Tommy J and Sally shows he has remained, albeit very neglected, at the cutting edge.

Medoff is most linked to the cultural climate of the 1970’s. Had American literature and culture continued on the path they seemed to be on in 1980, Medoff might well be a seminal American playwright. His last four plays, including Tommy J and Sally, show him regaining the element of relevant social commentary that so intrigued his earlier audiences. This may animate a comeback. As it is, his work, though obscure other than for Children of a Lesser God, offers a vivid and various portrait of the late twentieth century United States.