The tribes of Nina Raine’s play of the same name are Jews,
intellectuals, those who are born deaf, those who are going deaf, those who
sign and those who reads lips and for that matter those who do both.
Christopher (Jeff Still) is a sixty year old writer who would definitely to quote
Woody Allen “never join a club that would have him as a member.” For starters
he’s an elitist who’s repudiated his membership in the club of Jews who emanate
from the North of England. He’s the resident intellectual shock jock of Raine’s
play, who calls the deaf the “muslims of the handicapped world.” His son Billy (Russell Harvard), who was born deaf, meets Sylvia (Susan
Pourfar), a young woman who is going deaf, and is an advocate of signing.
Christopher is opposed to signing and the self-imposed separation that it
creates. Christopher is an assimilationist both in his attitude towards Judaism
and to handicaps, self-imposed or otherwise. He’s wary of the meeting of the minds that
occurs when people are united by virtue of their frailties. The fact that
Sylvia and Billy eventually become separated by their varying states of
deafness seems to be a good argument for his point, though the playwright is
constantly adding themes and variations based on the subtleties of the
conditions she describes. For instance one of the things Sylvia is afraid of
losing is her sense of linguistic irony—something which Billy never shared due
to his congenital deafness. Tribes is not about deafness. It’s really about
language and communication. Christopher’s other son, Daniel (Will Brill) who is
stutterer, is writing his dissertation on language, his sister Ruth (Gayle
Rankin) is studying opera (music heard and unheard is another subplot) and
Christopher himself is learning Chinese. But the subplot about signing is, in
fact, a very controversial issue in the deaf community today, as is evidenced
by the conflicts that have plagued Gallaudet University, the world renowned institution geared to the needs of the deaf. As if to underscore the issue Tribes projects sections of
dialogue on the walls of the Barrow Street Theater like translations say from a Berliner Ensemble production
one might encounter at BAM. A scene in
which the partially deaf Sylvia tries to read the aggressive misanthropy on the
lips of the family she’s just been introduced to (which ends with Sylvia
playing a piano piece she herself cannot hear) demonstrates the dizzying way in
which Raine embellishes the many and often overlapping themes of her play.
Tuesday, August 28, 2012
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