Los Angeles may be seen primarily as a movie town, but there’s often some great theatre to be enjoyed here too, a case in point being “Tribes”, the provocative and engaging play from rising British playwright Nina Raine, now playing at the Mark Taper forum in downtown LA.
The play debuted at the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square in 2010 before moving to off-Broadway last year. Tribes‘ genesis lies with a documentary Raine watched about a deaf couple who were expecting a child, and they said that they hoped their child would be deaf. She said that it occurred to her that a family was a tribe, whose members wanted to pass on values, beliefs and language to their children. She began to see that there were “tribes everywhere,” in groups including individual families and religious communities, with their own rituals and hierarchies that are hard to understand by “outsiders.”
The play focuses on a Jewish family with a son who is deaf (with two hearing siblings) raised without knowledge of sign language. When he meets Sylvia, a hearing woman born to deaf parents who is now slowly going deaf herself, his interaction with her (including her teaching him sign language) reveals some of the languages, beliefs, and hierarchies of the family and the “extended family” of the Deaf community.
The clamor and the noise which assails the ears can take some getting used to, especially when the head of household Christopher (Jeff Still), patriarch and intellectual author of “argumentative” books, is loudly pontificating to his long-suffering family.
The play’s moral compass and anchor is Billy (Russell Harvard) the youngest of the family, deaf since birth who has withdrawn into himself rather than fight against a world he cannot hear and a family which will not accommodate him. But hidden depths emerge when he meets Sylvia (Susan Pourfar), and storm clouds begin to gather as he heads for a showdown with his family over the use of sign language and their failure to make any allowance of his condition.
There is sterling support work from Will Brill as Billy’s brother, Daniel and Lee Roy Rogers as Beth, Billy’s mother, who for their own reasons desperately want to hang ont to the status quo.
For tickets, go to www.centertheatergroup.org
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