MacBook Air can't use external DVD drive anymore

I have an LG Slim Portable DVD Writer (model # GP65NW60) that worked perfectly with my MacBook Air for several years... but at some point it stopped. I know this is a problem specific to the computer, because the drive works perfectly when connected to a MacBook Pro.

First it stopped being able to burn CDs UNLESS they were music CDs being burned out of iTunes. (Yesterday I inserted a blank CD while iTunes was open and the computer crashed but a reboot solved the problem and I was able to burn a music CD without problems. It was able to also read that CD.)

Now it has stopped being able to *READ* DVDs. I tried several - the DVD loads, DVD player opens, it gets three notes into the 20th Century Fox theme music (for example), and then goes dead - black screen, no input taken from wired external keyboard, laptop, bluetooth mouse, or trackpad. The only way to recover is to paperclip-eject the disk and force-reboot the computer.

I've looked and there are no driver updates for the Mac (there is one dated August 2018, but it's Windows only).

Any ideas? I went looking through my library for likely .plist files to trash and didn't find anything that seemed like it was related.