Word: deafness
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Silence may be golden, but one would never dream of saying that to the deaf. Yet Sarah (Phyllis Frelich), the heroine of this play, who was born deaf, believes that silence is a magic realm of treasure in which her mind can richly imagine sounds. She is so stubborn in this belief that she has refused to learn how to lip-read or attempt to speak, although she is fluent in the use of sign language. At 26, she works as a cleaning maid in a speech-therapy dorm, although tests indicate that she is capable of college work...
...characters and the play seem to fall apart. Almost arrogantly having refused help from James, Sarah joins a "cause"-putting deaf and hard-of-hearing people on the school staff. James complains that he wants to "rest his hands." Finally, in an echo of A Doll's House, Sarah resolves to be utterly her own woman until she can meet James again in some space that transcends silence and speech...
...charge might not seem unusual, except for one thing: the pupil was not a human child but a young chimpanzee named Nim. Like several others of his primate kin, Nim had been taught to communicate with humans in American Sign Language, a system of hand gestures developed for the deaf.* He eventually learned to make and recognize 125 signs. But the frisky little chimp and other apes who have received such "language" instruction are now the center of a raging academic storm. The issue: can apes really master the essence of human language-the creation of sentences...
...reader may agree wholeheartedly with such statements and still have an uneasy feeling. Greenberg displays little of the sympathy she expended on the mentally ill in I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (1964) and on the deaf in In This Sign (1972). People in these stories are self-maimed, and get treated accordingly. The artistic regimen is ascetic. "Talmudic Law," one of her characters explains, "forbids the overdecorated letter, a letter for art's sake and not for the formation of legible words." Nothing is overdecorated here; Greenberg spends little time telling where her characters live or what...
...audience, music itself and a certain evasive, almost evanescent kind of spirituality that has its roots in the teaching of the Indian mystic Meher Baba, to whom Townshend is devoted. Tommy, which became the most widely known Who work, was a two-record "rock opera" about a deaf, dumb and blind pinball champ who was raised into a kind of pop artifact and rock-'n'-roll godhead. It sold more than 2 million copies, bought the band out of years of accumulated debt from broken instruments, leveled hotel rooms and erratic U.S. touring. It also brought the members...