If you like life to be loud, messy and combative, Tribesis the play for you.
First produced at the Royal Court Theatre, then off-Broadway last year, Tribes deals with an ASL vs. Oralism debate in a British family that does not believe in stiff upper lips. On the contrary, the mother, father and three siblings in Nina Raines' play spend their time arguing with each other at peak volume. They also think nothing of using sarcasm, insults and black humor to make their debating points.
It isn't until an outsider, a determined slip of a girl named Sylvia (Susan Pourfar), enters the family compound that things begin to quiet down. Sylvia was raised in a deaf family (which practiced sign language) and is now going deaf herself. Having fallen in love with the youngest of the siblings, Billy (Russell Harvard) -- a hearing-impaired legal aide -- she forces them to listen to what she has to say. Billy, she believes, would be better off following her lead in life -- that is, choosing to use sign language over lip-reading, if only because it is a more effective and satisfactory means of communication.
Billy ups the stakes when he tells the family that if they should refuse to learn ASL, as well, he will split from them and join the deaf world. This challenge gives Tribes its main dramatic thrust.
Christopher (Jeff Still), Billy's motormouth of a father, refuses to even consider the ASL option, explaining that "the reason we didn't learn sign wasn't because we couldn't be bothered. Out of principle, we didn't want to make you part of a minority world." Billy's mother (Lee Roy Rogers), sister (Gayle Rankin) and brother (Will Brill) weigh in with their own opinions on the subject. It's all very passionate and intense -- and quite touching too, especially when the love affair becomes paramount.
TRIBES is a thick stew of a play, one which isn't easy to chew on. But once it goes down, it lives with you, in a good, sustaining way.
