In the following review of Children of a Lesser God's original Broadway run, Brustein offers a positive review of Medoff'splay. The critic categorizes the work as part of a dramatic subgenre that he terms the "disability play"—a drama whose intentions are so well-placed and politically correct that a viewer feels morally compelled to speak positively of it.

Mark Medoff s Children of a Lesser God (Longacre) is a supreme example of a new Broadway genre—¦ the Disability Play. The origin of the species, I suppose, was William Gibson's The Miracle Worker, written 20 years ago—but only following the success of such recent extensions of the formula as The Elephant Man and Whose Life Is It Anyway?, has the Disability Play taken Broadway by storm as its dominant "serious" drama. It's not hard to understand the success of the genre, since it has...