TWITTER WATCH: CHILDREN OF A LESSER GOD Playwright Mark Medoff Visits SPRING AWAKENING

When Mark Medoff's CHILDREN OF A LESSER GOD premiered on Broadway in 1980, it was the first time the Main Stem hosted a play with a leading role written to be played by a deaf actor. Phyllis Frelich was awarded a Best Actress Tony for playing a deaf woman with conflicting ideologies from those of her husband, a hearing man who is a speech pathologist for the deaf.

Marlee Matlin was only 21-years-old when she won the Best Actress Academy Award for starring in the 1986 film adaptation of CHILDREN OF A LESSER GOD; the only deaf person to win an Oscar for an acting category.

The fact that Medoff wrote such a vivid role for a deaf woman helped change the careers of these two actors, and Matlin was certainly overjoyed that the playwright came to see her at last night's performance of SPRING AWAKENING.

Deaf West Theatre's acclaimed production of Steven Sater and Duncan Sheik's SPRING AWAKENING, directed byMichael Arden and choreographed by Spencer Liff, opened on Sunday night, September 27, at Broadway's Brooks Atkinson Theatre.

SPRING AWAKENING, the Tony Award-winning Best Musical of 2007, runs 18 weeks only, through Saturday, January 9. It will be performed simultaneously in American Sign Language and spoken and sung in English by a cast of 28. Deaf West Theatre was last represented on Broadway with the triumphant production of Big River in 2003.

Based on Frank Wedekind's controversial 1891 expressionist play of the same name and featuring an electrifying pop/rock score, SPRING AWAKENING follows the lives of a group of adolescents as they navigate their journey from adolescence to adulthood in a fusion of morality, sexuality and rock & roll. An extraordinary creative team including Michael Arden and Spencer Liff has reinvented the groundbreaking musical about lost innocence and the struggles of youth in true Deaf West style.