"Tribes"
A Play by Nina Raine
SpeakEasy Stage Company
Directed by M. Bevin O’Gara; Scenic design by Cristina Todesco; Costume design by Mary Lauve; Lighting design by Annie Wiegand; Sound design by Arshan Gailus; Projection design by Garrett Herzig
Roberts Auditorium at the Stanford Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts, 527 Tremont Street, Boston, MA
October 18, 2013
Growing up in a family of five can be challenging enough. Add a father who has a Mensa chip on his shoulder and a son who is born deaf poses problems this play explores. Communication is as much about what is said (and heard) as how much is not.
The play begins at the family dinner table in a well to do upper middle class home. It’s a lively sarcastically amusing dinner conversation especially if you’re accustomed to four letter epithets being passed around like the broccoli. Although father, wife, son and daughter have equally foul mouths, the other son at the end of the table is not engaged in any of the conversation and left alone as the dishes are cleared away. That would be Billy, a young man we learn has been deaf by birth. Billy (james Caverly, who was born deaf) can read lips and has learned (we’re never clear how) to vocalize. He has not participated in any of the rip-roaring conversation, or even been glanced at by the other shouters. What is his place here, we wonder.
Twenty-something Daniel (Nael Nacer) and his sister Ruth (Kathryn Myles) are living at home. Neither has gained enough air speed to lift off into the world of commerce or relationships – a fact pointed out by their father Christopher (Patrick Shea) with what he considers tough love but we hear as demeaning belittling rants that clip whatever wings his children may be spreading. Christopher’s wife Beth (Adrianne Krstansky) seems immune to his rants, even when insultingly directed at her.
Growing up in this combustible family constellation ruled with gravitational force by the father, Christopher is challenging to say the least. Christopher uses his sharp intellect to throw words around like bricks, denigrating ideas and people with gusto. By the end of Act 1, you suspect his high decibel rants are emanating from a failed academic who has no room for the company of successful wife, children, or anyone else in his galaxy.
Erica Spyres and James (Joey) Caverly in SpeakEasy Stage Company’s “Tribes.” Photo Craig Bailey
Billy’s family has never made an effort to enter his universe. This becomes clear when Billy falls for a young woman he meets at a social gathering of deaf people. Sylvia (Erica Spyres) is slowly going deaf, as has happened to her parents.
Billy brings Sylvia home to the family. Christopher baits Sylvia, takes issue with deaf ‘culture’, defends the choice not to enroll Billy in schools for the deaf (“out of principle, we didn’t want to make you part of a minority world”), maintaining he wanted Billy to feel ‘normal’, and dismisses deaf the deaf community as being inbred and exclusive… a ‘tribe’ he scorns. To him, their signing is a way that separates them rather than connects them to the speaking world.
When Billy learns sign language from Sylvia, worlds collide. Billy’s family stands by in confused silence as Billy and Sylvia “talk” to each other. If you’ve ever been in the company of foreign language speakers, had no idea whether they were discussing the weather or the piece of spinach in your teeth, you get the point. Four digital screens set above the stage translate conversations as Billy and Sylvia ‘talk.’ Sylvia gets Billy a high-powered job as a lip reading expert in court cases.
His success, unexpected, unanticipated, upsets the family dynamic. Billy’s making it. They aren’t. Beth is an aspiring opera singer challenged with pitch problems, Daniel is attempting to write a thesis we suspect will never be completed, mother Ruth is working on a “marriage/detective breakdown novel,” and Christopher, an academic with authorial ambitions. None of them have succeeded yet.
The second act begins with heavy-handed exposition. Billy confronts his father for not allowing him to be in the company of other deaf kids and for dismissing deaf culture. “This is the first time you’ve ever listened to me,” Billy shouts at his father, who belittles sign language. Billy and Sylvia struggle with their differences of being deaf at birth versus becoming deaf as an adult when you know what you’re in the process of losing.
Sylvia, Daniel, and Beth deal with their failures as Billy thrives. Billy is in jeopardy of losing his job as he fabricates parts of testimony he’s lip reading to fit his own circumstances. Sylvia decides to be with hearing people until she becomes completely deaf, even though she despises the tribal hierarchy within deaf culture: the highest level being deaf children born of deaf parents.
The play’s set, a sprawling living room/dining room/ kitchen, is ingeniously designed for theater in the round. The dining room table, living room chairs, at stage level, surrounded by kitchen sink, cabinets, bookshelves, and armoires in a low perimeter that surrounds the stage elicit the feel of well-worn comfort. The music - opera, rock, pop - played before the play begins and during scene changes reminds us of how our ears take in the world around us.
The play’s final scene feels like the only forced moment, although still touching, and seems to find a truce between the tribes of hearing and non-hearing. The ensemble acting is as good as it gets. Add it to the superb sound and set design and you have a rich night at the theater.
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