Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
A cochlear implant, not a hearing aid in the traditional sense, is a sort of computerized transmitter placed inside the ear via wiring inserted through a hole drilled in the skull and hooked up to a contraption worn outside the body. The implant doesn’t enable the deaf to hear sounds in the same way that a hearing person does; it converts sound into signals that are transmitted to the brain, which often must relearn how to interpret them. Even after the implantation, it’s difficult for the person to speak or hear “normally” without extensive work with therapists.
A large contingent of the deaf community regards the implant as an unwelcome and offensive intrusion designed to destroy the richness of deaf culture and create a netherworld of people who can never fully assimilate into either the deaf or the hearing world. One character in Sachs’s play describes cochlear implants as a form of genocide, likening them to a pill designed for the black community that would make everybody white.
The scenes in which Laura and Dan interact with their son are so treacly, in fact, that they make the Waltons look like a case for DCFS intervention. “You are a wonderful boy; don’t you ever forget that,” Dan tells Adam, who at eight is still being given baths. Arguing against the implant, Laura tells Dan that Adam is perfectly happy: “He loves life. He loves his family.” It’s not that the immense love the parents feel for their child isn’t credible; it’s just that, with one homily after another, their love becomes cloying. Even when Laura and Dan’s relationship turns strained and argumentative, their conversations remain trite; Dan even argues that one should embrace new technology because “things are different now—it’s a new world.”
