The playwright Mark Medoff, who has died aged 79, wrote Children of a Lesser God, the story of a deaf woman and a male speech therapist, which won the 1980 Tony award for best Broadway play. He also co-wrote the screenplay for the 1986 film version, with William Hurt and Marlee Matlin, which earned him an Oscar nomination, while Matlin won the best actress award in her film debut. It was the first Academy Award to go to a deaf actor. “He insisted and fought the studio that the role be played by a deaf actress,” Matlin recalled.
The play originated when Medoff met the actor couple Phyllis Frelich and Robert Steinberg, who were active in the National Theatre of the Deaf at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center in Connecticut, at a workshop. Frelich’s performances in sign language captivated him and when she complained there were no good parts for deaf actors, Medoff promised to write a play for her.
The three worked on his material at New Mexico State University, where Medoff taught; Gordon Davidson, the director of the Mark Taper Forum, saw it there and brought it to Los Angeles. Davidson replaced Steinberg with John Rubinstein, a more experienced actor, in the male lead. It became a hit and both Frelich and Rubinstein also won Tonys. Trevor Eve and Elizabeth Quinn won Olivier awards for their leading roles in the London production, in 1981, with Medoff winning best new play, and play of the year. It ran originally at the Mermaid theatre, then at the Albery (now the Noël Coward theatre in the West End).
Medoff wrote 30 plays, and worked on 19 films. His writing often deals with conflicts and the difficulty of communication within families, or family-like groups. He was influenced by social injustice, he said in 2004. “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.”
Born in Mount Carmel, Illinois, he grew up in Miami, Florida, where his father, Lawrence, was a doctor and his mother, Irene (nee Butt), a therapist. He played basketball at Miami Beach high school, then studied English at the University of Miami, where he began writing.
After graduatiing he did a master’s degree at Stanford University. He worked briefly in Washington, where he wrote his first play, The Wager (1966), a one-act black comedy reminiscent of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, then began teaching at New Mexico State in Las Cruces, where, after initially returning home to Miami unable to adjust, he would stay for more than 50 years, founding its Creative Media Institute as well as the American Southwest Theatre Company.
His first big success was When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder?, set in a decaying diner in small-town New Mexico. It debuted in 1973 at the Circle Repertory theatre in New York, starring Kevin Conway, Brad Dourif and Elizabeth Sturges; then moved to the Eastside Playhouse and won an Obie, the off-Broadway Tony, as “most distinguished play”, as well as awards for Conway and Sturges. Medoff himself won a Jefferson award for his performance in a Chicago production of the play.
He wrote the screenplay for the 1979 film version, starring Marjoe Gortner and Candy Clark. Following Red Ryder, Eastside staged an expanded version of The Wager, which the New York Times called “dexterous and witty”.
Medoff’s western influence was evident in his first screenplay, for the 1978 Chuck Norris vehicle Good Guys Wear Black, but after Children of a Lesser God, during which the actor John Basinger, who had a small part in the film, was struck by how “smart and simpatico” Medoff was, he was brought on to more thoughtful films. He adapted Joseph Olshan’s novel for Robert Mulligan’s Clara’s Heart (1988), which starred Whoopi Goldberg and a young Neil Patrick Harris in his debut role, and Dominique Lapierre’s City Of Joy (1992), set in the slums of Calcutta, which starred Pauline Collins and Patrick Swayze, for Roland Joffé.
Meanwhile, his plays were staged regionally and in festivals. He and Frelich continued to collaborate, most notably on The Hands of Its Enemy (1984).
In 2004, Medoff finally returned to Broadway with Prymate; Frelich playing an animal behaviourist fighting with her biologist ex-lover over the fate of a gorilla with whom she communicates through sign language. Echoing much of his previous work back to The Wager, and featuring the gorilla signing the word “foreplay”, it drew some incredulous reviews and prompted controversy over the casting of the black actor André De Shields as the gorilla, although at least one reviewer found his performance the best of the cast. It lasted only four nights. But a revival of Children of a Lesser God on Broadway last year ran for nearly two months.
Medoff’s recent work included Marilee and Baby Lamb, staged at the Rio Grande theatre in Las Cruces in 2015, about Marilyn Monroe and her seamstress Lena Pepitone, co-written with his former student Dennis D’Amico, who had interviewed Pepitone before she died. It attracted a legal complaint from a producer who said that the Pepitone family had given him the rights to her story after her death.
In 2010 Medoff wrote and directed a TV movie, Refuge, in which Linda Hamilton goes on the run in a motorhome with her husband’s corpse decomposing in the back.
He wrote and acted in the 2016 independent film The Heart Outright, a sequel to Red Ryder directed by his son-in-law Ross Marks and featuring his daughter Jessica, in which Ryder returns to New Mexico for his mother’s funeral. Another film directed by Marks, Walking With Herb, adapted by Medoff from the Las Cruces writer Joe Bullock’s novel, a meditation on ageing and golf, is due out this year, starring Kathleen Quinlan, who was in Clara’s Heart.
Medoff’s first marriage, to Vicki Eisler, ended in divorce. He is survived by his second wife, Stephanie (nee Thorne), whom he married in 1972, three daughters, Jessica, Debra and Rachel, and eight grandchildren.
• Mark Howard Medoff, playwright, born 18 March 1940; died 28 April 2019
