Janice Schacter knows she can be a pain in the neck, and she doesn’t care. “People may perceive of me as a pushy mom, and I am,” she said. “But you do what you have to do.”

She has many of the attributes of that stock pariah, the stage mother, except that she does not want her child to be onstage; she simply wants her to be able to hear what the actors are saying. That has not been a simple desire, since her daughter Arielle, 10, has moderate-to-severe hearing loss, a disability that has often confounded or been ignored by cultural institutions.