Tribes

Barrow Street Theatre, New York

(212) 868-4444

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Nina Raine’s comic drama about a deaf young man and his offbeat family could easily have been overwhelming, said Elisabeth Vincentelli in the New York Post. It includes supertitles and extensive use of sign language, and its intelligent, complex characters communicate both their love and frustrations via “witty zingers and biting put-downs.” In the case of this award-winning import from London, though, “too much is a good thing.” Raine’s protagonist, Billy (Russell Harvard), is a deaf young man whose headstrong father (Jeff Perry) prevented Billy from ever learning sign language because he believed it would be an abandonment of the “mainstream.” The deaf, he proclaims, are “the f---ing Muslims of the handicapped world”; no son of his, he says, will vanish into “the capital-D ‘Deaf Community.’”

In this home, dinner-table conversation is “a rhapsody of jabs,” and Billy must lip-read to keep pace, said Peter Santilli in the Associated Press. Not surprisingly, he’s “perpetually relegated to the outskirts of the family dialogue.” The dynamics shift, however, after he falls in love with a young woman (Susan Pourfar) who was born to deaf parents and is gradually going deaf herself. She introduces Billy to sign language and connects him with the deaf community. When she steps inside the “well-insulated cocoon of Billy’s family,” she becomes the catalyst for an overdue rebellion.

The resulting battle “touches on a dizzying assortment of daunting topics,” said Ben Brantley in The New York Times. The play’s remarkable ensemble energetically argues about cultural hierarchies and the relative strengths of sign and spoken language, and one can’t help but admire how the script “keeps all these weighty thematic balls twirling in the air.” Raine’s plot loses some steam in the second act, when some “self-conscious Important Moments occur.” But by then this play has granted viewers a heightened sense for the way that each of us is only capable of hearing “in his or her own imperfect way.”