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It’s been nearly 40 years since this drama about the stormy love affair between a deaf woman and a hearing man won a Tony Award for best play. Since then, stories on New York stages in which deafness is part of the dramatic conversation — let alone, the key to it  — have been scarce. “Tribes,” a family drama, and Deaf West’s “Spring Awakening,” are recent ones that come to mind.  For that reason alone “Children of a Lesser God” deserves props.

The world is a much different place than it was when the 1980 Tony-winning play first brought much needed attention to the complicated issues facing the hearing-impaired. Technology has eased communication for many, and in fact the play is using a new GalaPro system that offers closed captioning via a cellphone app.But the drama’s impact remains as it unfolds in the mind of James Leeds (Joshua Jackson), a speech therapist at a school for the deaf who looks back on his relationship with Sarah Norman (Lauren Ridloff), a former student who became a maid at the school, unable to face life away from the only home she’d ever known

There are two intense scenes in Children of a Lesser God’s first Broadway revival, opening tonight at Studio 54 almost 30 years after its Tony-sweeping debut, that are already reason enough to see it. In the first showstopper, late in Act One, Sarah Norman — deaf from birth and mute by choice — uses sign language to explain what her silence “sounds” like to her teacher and future lover. Sarah’s long fingers flutter and bloom like gestural fireworks, pure manual lyricism. And then, toward the end of the play, there is Sarah’s single eruption of speech, a long and angry roar from the depths of that silence as primal and disturbing as anything in Lear.