Tribes listens closely to one family talking in several frequencies
A deaf son, and a family deaf to his emotional needs, share the stage in the Unicorn Theatre’s production of Nina Raine’s Tribes, a play that speaks with uncommon clarity about assimilation and frustrated communication.
The playwright’s views are filtered through a family of self-absorbed academics and artists who may as well be laborers at the Tower of Babel. Nightly dinners become punishing critical panels as contrarian patriarch Christopher (David Fritts) lectures while his wife, Beth (Jan Rogge), a well-intentioned but clueless novelist, attempts to keep the peace.
The couple’s neurotic adult children further crowd the small London flat (warmly designed by Gary Mosby). Ruth (Nicole Marie Green) is an aspiring-slash-expiring opera singer, and Daniel (Jake Walker) is a driftless student struggling to complete his thesis and outgrow a rotten love. Trapped in the middle of the linguistic fray is their deaf brother, Billy (Paul Ososki), a skilled lip-reader who was never taught sign language (and whose family never bothered to learn).
Raine lends each family member a palette of amusing, sometimes endearing quirks, such as Beth’s music-minded tittering (“Of course it’s silly — it’s Wagner”). But there’s plenty to begrudge, too — see Christopher’s crass polemic on deaf victimhood, in which he calls such persons the “Muslims of the handicapped world.” And the perilously sharp writing makes no attempt to welcome us to this family tribe, thrusting us immediately into warp-speed harangues that make Billy’s perspective plain. While we lag behind the family dialogue, leaning forward in our seats to chase the words, we find it hard to imagine a less hospitable home for a deaf person.
When Billy’s new girlfriend, Sylvia (Lisa Lehnen), comes for dinner, the family’s micro-aggressions become the main course. Christopher badgers Sylvia into berating the deaf community (her parents are deaf, and she’s losing her own hearing) and admitting the limitations of sign language even as we see that she signs fluently and beautifully. Fritts is exceptional here, as playful as he is pigheaded.
Though Christopher is undoubtedly a villain to some, the actor subtly suggests vulnerability underneath, the academic’s crippling need for validation. He’s invested in painting the deaf as cultish and crude because he’s invested in isolating Billy from that tribe.
Rogge is similarly strong as the clueless matriarch, bringing her usual casual grace; we can’t help but feel fond of her Beth, whether she’s squinting, lizard-like, through reading glasses or shuffling around stage in a bubble-gum-pink kimono, plotting her “marriage-breakdown detective novel” on the fly.
Walker and Green have great chemistry as the jockeying siblings, and Walker is especially good in Act I, his aggressive quips stretched taut by insecurity and an unspecified mental illness.
Although very little happens in Act I, Raine’s sharp-honed dialogue reveals the intricate family dynamics that will carry the show. The language alone is enough to propel us through a somewhat scattered Act II, which fascinates even as it stumbles. A work blunder from Billy isn’t given time enough to pay off, and Daniel’s late-play communication breakdown feels too thematically convenient. Raine may be juggling one motif too many.
These factors aside, though, Tribes provides supremely rewarding characters. When Billy embargoes any non-signed communication with his parents, Raine achieves a reversal that’s as heartbreaking as it is just. (Ososki is commanding throughout, relaxed but resolute about claiming his voice.) The hearing members of the family are now the ones panicking over missed cues, shouting “What? What?” like a chorus of dull parrots.
As Billy assimilates further into the deaf community, Sylvia grows more and more estranged from him. Lehnen, herself an American Sign Language interpreter, is hypnotic in the role, signing with the poetic expression of a symphony conductor. As her character’s hearing fades over the course of the show, she also loses the crispness in her voice, and Lehnen shows us that upsetting devolution with memorable skill.
The Unicorn’s sensitive production — skillfully directed by Theodore Swetz — is an empathetic but unpreachy exploration of how tribal affiliations leave us alternately sated and starved. Raine invites us, like Sylvia, to straddle two worlds and tribes, to encounter a snippet of music and a stanza of sign with the same untempered wonder.
