Chicago Theater Review: TRIBES (Steppenwolf)

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by Lawrence Bommer on December 18, 2013

in Theater-Chicago

ONCE AGAIN, ATTENTION MUST BE PAID

British playwright Nina Raine’s Tribes, which played Off-Broadway last year and has been produced regionally, depicts an oppressively intellectual British family, rich with colorful eccentricity and denied dysfunction. However, the real context for Steppenwolf Theatre’s bold new winter show—no holiday play in any way—is silence, the non-negotiable world that surrounds this family’s born-deaf second son who puts their pretensions in perspective. The production is instantly, astonishingly engrossing.

(left to right) Sylvia (ensemble member Alana Arenas) and Beth (ensemble member Molly Regan) in Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s Chicago-premiere production of Tribes by Nina Raine, directed by ensemble member Austin Pendleton.Raine’s seminal script puts powerful questions in play: How much is speech crucial to language? Does sign language cut off the deaf community from hearing  people, imprisoning them in a quiet ghetto? Can a family—or tribe—hold together without a common tongue? Should a deaf boy be defined by his disability—or transcend it by accommodating the hearing majority? Austin Pendleton’s deft and supple staging never slows these arguments into abstractions.  Seldom has a forensic debate about communication’s challenges been so kinetically rooted in actual strugglers.

(right to left) Beth (ensemble member Molly Regan) gives words of encouragement to her daughter, Ruth (Helen Sadler) in Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s Chicago-premiere production of Tribes by Nina Raine, directed by ensemble member Austin Pendleton.Passionate about words, the parents, manic Beth (Molly Regan) and drier Christopher (Francis Guinan), are teachers and writers: Alert to ambiguity and deft with deadpan irony, they collectively delight in learning Chinese, spinning out detective stories mired in marital misery, and harboring unexamined prejudices that undermine their intellect if not integrity (Christopher has a kneejerk detestation of Northern England from which he escaped). Daughter Ruth (Helen Sadler) is an unaccomplished opera singer who nonetheless understands the relationship between language and music.

(left to right) Daniel (Steve Haggard) and Billy (John McGinty) in Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s Chicago-premiere production of Tribes by Nina Raine, directed by ensemble member Austin Pendleton.Finally, we meet two very diversely different sons: Billy (John McGinty, deaf like his character) has never heard a sound. Instead, he’s learned to lip-read and speak the words that are lost on his ears. If Billy can’t hear real sounds, his mentally distressed brother Daniel (Steve Haggard), more dependent on Billy than anyone guesses, hears imaginary voices, his sudden bouts of stammering as difficult to understand as Billy’s forced speech.

Raine’s adept script cannily balances the isolation that engulfs a silenced, cut-off Billy, whose “speech” is often confined to specifics, and Daniel, with his auditory hallucinations with the almost frantic, brittle, and ironically nuanced speechifying of the rest of the clan. The gulf is only enlarged when Billy meets and falls in love with his exact opposite in the non-hearing world: Sylvia (Alana Arenas), a young woman from an all-deaf family who has learned sign language from birth. Now she’s losing her hearing too (the play reveals this slow loss with aching immediacy).

(left to right) Christopher (ensemble member Fran Guinan) and Beth (ensemble member Molly Regan) get worked up preparing for the arrival of their son, Billy and his new girlfriend in Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s Chicago-premiere production of Tribes by Nina Raine, directed by ensemble member Austin Pendleton.Teaching him to sign, Sylvia opens Billy up to all he missed when his family refused to learn sign language (they thought it would confirm Billy as a permanent member of a handicapped minority). Billy fears he’s a “second-class son.” His disability has been so stubbornly denied that he’s now cut off from the deaf world into which he was born.

With Sylvia on the scene, the play now wonders: Has Billy been condemned to the worst of both worlds, never learning sign language to communicate with other deaf folks and only approximating language by lip-reading and imitating sounds? Does he belong to either world? Or is he trapped in himself? All he knows is that if his loved ones don’t learn his language, however imprecise it seems to Christopher’s hierarchal thinking, Billy will never “talk” to them again. They can no longer reject his individuality by denying his disability.

These meaty matters would be fuel enough for any drama, but Raine goes a bit overboard in the second act. She tries to cover too many crises. Time seems to rush by as Billy rather improbably becomes famous as a signer in the law courts, then infamous because, like a certain South African fraud, he’s been “bluffing” about the testimony he’s translated, making it up as he goes. He now faces imprisonment for falsifying evidence.

(left to right) Daniel (Steve Haggard) and Billy (John McGinty) in Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s Chicago-premiere production of Tribes by Nina Raine, directed by ensemble member Austin Pendleton.Right after springing this manufactured scandal, Raine makes Billy force the family to choose between learning sign language and his own silence. Desperate to keep Billy so that he can stay sane and erupting in his own identity crisis, Daniel makes the first move in what we know is a long, belated process of accommodation. Much like the supposed reconciliation at the end of Next to Normal, the group hug that ends Tribes is catnip for the crowd but not entirely convincing. Too many demons have escaped from Raine’s box: They won’t return to sender.

(left to right) Sylvia (ensemble member Alana Arenas) and Billy (John McGinty) in Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s Chicago-premiere production of Tribes by Nina Raine, directed by ensemble member Austin Pendleton.Notwithstanding the overwrought second act and a certain sitcom slickness to the dialogue, this Steppenwolf Theatre Company local premiere is a wise wonder. It’s perfectly tuned to the chords of compassion that radiate through these 135 minutes. McGinty is eloquence itself as a young man caught in the crossfire of far too-separate worlds. The hearing actors give his rebellion depth and detail. It’s an ear-opening evening, a “coming out” play about a sense rather than sex but just as compelling.

(left to right) Christopher (ensemble member Francis Guinan), Sylvia (ensemble member Alana Arenas), Daniel (Steve Haggard), Ruth (Helen Sadler), Billy (John McGinty) and Beth (ensemble member Molly Regan) “have an argument” in Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s Chicago-premiere production of Tribes by Nina Raine, directed by ensemble member Austin Pendleton.

photos by Michael Brosilow

Tribes
Steppenwolf Theatre Company
Steppenwolf’s Downstairs Theatre, 1650 N Halsted St.
scheduled to end on February 9, 2014
EXTENDED to February 15, 2014
for tickets, call 312-335-1650 or visit www.steppenwolf.org

for info on this and other Chicago Theater, visit http://www.TheatreinChicago.com

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