It takes a mere 2 minutes to realize, however, that the family within these book-blessed walls are not dwelling anywhere near paradise. Flinging obscenities and insults at one another as casually as other families pass the mashed potatoes, a table of wounded or wounding parties is the audience's first glimpse of Nina's Raine's raw, poignant exploration of what it means to belong. While Christopher, a father of so little warmth one wonders if we would have rather had cats instead of children, alternates between mocking his daughter's dating choices and degrading one son's vocational failures, our protagonist sits quietly at the end of the table, occasionally asking for clarification on the origin of the table's anger.
Billy, our protagonist and the youngest of Christopher and Beth's children, is deaf. But his family, and most vehemently his father, has raised him in the world to be something other than deaf. Never taught to sign, Billy lipreads and evaluates expressions in order to translate the world around him. Repeatedly he asks his family what is going on, and repeatedly he is lovingly dismissed. "It's nothing." "Not important." Even before we meet the woman that will break Billy out of his communicative vacuum, the audience can sense that there is a well of feeling in Billy being casually brushed aside. Repeatedly.
Not only surrounded by the book-laden walls, constant reminders of a mutual language without mutual expression, the sound designers also awaken us to the sound inherent in deafness. Not a blank, empty silence, but a constant roar and scratch emerges, made more poignant by Sylvia's comment that she never knew how noisy it would be to be deaf.
Sylvia, played beautifully by Tracey Maloney, meets Billy at a party. Avoiding the peril of being in a room of deaf signers and being unable to communicate, Billy's conversation with Sylvia, hampered though it is by Sylvia's failing hearing and Billy's inability to sign flows surprisingly well. Sylvia straddles the hearing and non-hearing world as a woman with deaf parents who is slowly, herself, going deaf. Her ability to communicate fluently with the deaf community, a community Billy's father has looked upon with disdain, fascinates Billy. But behind the apparent attraction, there is a hesitance in Sylvia, perhaps from that first moment, as she finds herself moving more fully towards a world she wishes she would not enter. How do you mourn the loss of your hearing in the company of those who've never had it?
As Sylvia and Billy's relationship strengthens, as Billy is heard by those outside his family, we watch his family crumble into a mess of missed cues, mixed messages, and stammering (literally, in the case of Billy's brother, Dan) attempts at communication. Sally Wingert, as Beth, tries to soften the barbs flung between her husband and children but as we listen to her clumsily describe a novel she has no clue how to write, we're left with the suspicious that she's equally clueless as to how to manage the language used and abused in her own home. And while Billy's sister, Ruth, played by Anna Reichert, comes to the realization that her vocal talent is no match for the operatic talents around her, Billy's brother, played by Hugh Kennedy, struggles with voices of a different kind. Dan, especially, decays with the absence of his brother. Insomnia and the incessant voices in his head (more of the anxious variety than schizophrenic) reduce him to the stammering boy he was as a child. Apparently, despite Billy's frequent dismissal, his form of communication and connection was a necessary balm for his brother's wounds.
As the play reaches its crescendo (I won't give it away), every character, at some point or another, seems to be saying, "you're not listening to me, you're not understanding." Billy's defiance, his brother's brokenness, his father's desperate justifications, and Sylvia's sad admission, all echo the desperate need for connection within those book-laden walls. And upon curtain, we're reminded that even those who loved us first and may have done their best to love us right, may still fail us. But if out of that failure comes a desire to listen and to speak the same language, then maybe the failure is not fatal.
Tribes is a brilliant, emotionally raw, often funny exploration of the language we know as a family, the tribes we have no control over and the tribes we choose. See (and hear) it. Tribes plays at the Guthrie through November 10.
*Just a note, lots of cussing, so if you're sensitive to that, take note.
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