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The Theme Of Identity In Willy Conley's Play 'Falling On Hearing Eyes'

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Coming into the light consists of a Deaf person’s journey towards finding their Deaf identity. As we learned in class, some Deaf people struggle to find their identity due to not knowing the resources available to them or having bad experiences with hearing people. This causes them to have a little d but when they find who they truly are they develop a big D and embrace being Deaf. As for the visual scream, it is when someone makes a visual gesture that seems like they’re making a loud sound but there is no sound with it. This is often seen in silent films or done by Deaf performers to add emotion to their performances.
A piece of literature that includes these themes is Willy Conley’ s Deaf play “Falling on Hearing Eyes.” Conley’s play uses …show more content…

This doesn’t necessarily mean that they can’t talk but it often means they feel uncomfortable talking. This makes sense because as a hearing person I would feel uncomfortable attempting ASL because it’s not what I’m used to. The film Children of a Lesser God captures the theme of struggling with speech when Sarah play by Marlee Matlin is pressured into using her voice. The film captures many times where characters don’t want to speak but are pressured into doing so. One of the main characters, James played by William hurt looks at Sarah as a kind of project that he can fix. Little does he know Sarah doesn’t want to be fixed and that brings up a lot of issues regarding the use of her speech. The theme in this movie shows that Deaf people are smart and capable of doing anything and they don’t need speech to accomplish their goals (Sugarman & Haines, 1986).
There are a lot of misconceptions that Deaf are not intelligent because they can’t speak or choose not to. I think this often why Deaf people choose not to speak because they think that other people will judge them. It’s sad because Deaf people are just as smart but just because they don’t have confidence with their speech they can sometimes be looked down on by hearing people. This topic also strengths their love for ASL because it’s a since of pride and people are able to communicate with that just as

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Amanda Morris has written for many news organizations, most recently at The New York Times, where this article was published. Before her career began, she received a degree from New York University after majoring in journalism, as well as media culture and communications; these degrees gave her the authority and opportunity to begin working on news articles. Her authority continued to show as she wrote this specific article. Morris is part of a deaf family and has been fluent in ASL almost all of her life. She uses hearing aids to help her communicate when needed, but generally uses sign language as her communication technique.

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