Nina Raine’s ‘Tribes’ by PTC (1st review)

Christopher, the overbearing 60ish head of the family, longs for the day when his three children will move out so he can finish his novel in peace, but he never pauses to wonder why they seem incapable of leaving. “We don’t know what feelings are until we put them into words,” Christopher says; but when the noise level in the house grows unbearable, he retreats to the friendly confines of his earphones and his laptop.

Beth, his wife, claims to have a novel up her sleeve. Their mutually antagonistic older children are engaged in a pointless and enervating battle over the relative advantage of music and words as communication tools: Ruth has perfect pitch but can’t seem to put it to practical career use; Daniel, a loudmouth with a stammer, seeks refuge in his boom box when Ruth torments him for his failure to finish his thesis.

Lucky to be deaf

Just when you find yourself thinking that maybe Beethoven’s deafness was an asset rather than a liability — it enabled him to listen to his ethereal muse rather than the clutter of everyday noise — it occurs to you that the best-adjusted member of this dysfunctional family — the seemingly quiet and ingratiating youngest son, Billy, just home from college — is in fact deaf. He must read lips to understand what his parents and siblings are saying, which, given the blather that mostly emanates from their mouths, is no great loss. At the same time, they must accommodate Billy’s special needs with the sort of attentiveness that they never accord to one another.

“You’re lucky being deaf,” Daniel tells Billy. “You don’t know what you’re missing.” Indeed.

It’s not that Billy lacks a language; on the contrary, he possesses a superior language. Writers as diverse as John Lukacs and Erica Jong have observed that words on paper trigger a thought process that doesn’t occur when you simply open your mouth. In sign language, as in written language, the mind must convert abstract symbols into words and sentences. But signing also requires you to heighten your facial expressions and body language. It requires not merely intellectual capacity but full-fledged acting skills, as Tad Cooley and Amanda Kearns amply demonstrate in the roles of Billy and his girlfriend Sylvia. In effect Billy is a first-class mind being patronized by a house full of his intellectual inferiors. (As Christopher, his father, ludicrously puts it, the deaf are “the fucking Muslims of the handicapped world.”)

The trouble with tribalism

Not the least of the charms of this ambitious, provocative, original work is its refusal to paint Billy as either a saint or a victim. The vehicle for Billy’s evolution from cipher to perpetrator is his relationship with Sylvia, a young woman who’s gradually losing her hearing. She introduces Billy to a circle of deaf acquaintances whose sign language conversation inevitably strikes him as more sophisticated than what he finds at home; but this new milieu narrows his universe and provokes his contempt for the hearing world.

Nina Raine, the playwright, thinks Tribes is a play about tribes. “The family is a tribe,” she contends in the program notes, “an infighting tribe but intensely loyal.” On the contrary, several studies have concluded that there are greater differences within families than between families (which explains, for example, why just about every U.S. president has some sibling who’s a major embarrassment). Even assuming that tribalism is an admirable trait, which I don’t — it’s the source of the notion that, say, all Germans are good and all Jews are bad, or all Jews are good and all Arabs are bad — I think Raine has sold herself short with this title. Tribes is only peripherally a play about tribes; it’s a remarkable and often moving work about a rarely explored subject: the multitude of languages with which people communicate, or fail to communicate.

To read another review by Naomi Orwin, click here.

To read another review by Steve Cohen, click here.