Tribes
Tribes By Nina Raine
Directed by Aradhana Tiwari
Mad Cow Theatre, Orlando FL</strong>
All families are dysfunctional on some level, but you need to be in a special class of wackiness to succeed on stage. The “Tribes” family might qualify; all we know is they’re British, Jewish, and “Conventionally Unconventional.” Sounds like a fast food promo, doesn’t it? Patriarch Christopher (Mark Edward Smith) holds everyone to an ill-defined standard of moral roughage and intellectual purity; no one may enter the house if they do not know Dvorak. Long suffering mother Beth (Marty Stonerock) suffers slowly as she argues about food and half-heartedly teaches daughter Ruth (Hannah Benitez) how to iron sheets but honestly what’s the use? Daniel (Peter Travis) hears voices but his other brother Billy (Britt Michael Gordon) is stone deaf; Billy reads lips like a champion but deep down he’s a massive jerk. Subtext: no one is getting laid. At least not until Billy meets Sylvia (Lexi Langs). She’s losing her hearing as well, and sadly that’s just not good enough for the Deaf Community of London. They can’t hear you, and that’s a mark of pure British snobbery. In your typical “handicapped issues” plays you are told “be nice and try to understand” but here the message is the brusque “You’re not in my tribe, so don’t tell me how to feel.” I love it when I can make my own decisions about an Important Issue!
“Tribes” is both funny and disturbing; Smith’s father figure is particularly brutal to his own family and friends; and Gordon’s Billy callously disregards the damage caused by his faulty lip reading work for the police. He’s hard to hear on stage as well; he accurately reproduced the lack of consonants that the deaf display. While Ms. Langs seems loving and supportive her main concern is self; apparently it’s hard to bond if you can’t hear each other snore. I was particularity fond of Travis’s Daniel. He progressively covers more and more of his head as we progress, and he’s the only one studly enough to smoke cigarettes without permission. In some sense he’s the Pope of Sin in this Cathedral of Self-Loathing; he offers indulgences and mocks the higher authority of parenthood.
“Tribes” isn’t just funny, touching and enlightening, it displays some truly wonderful stage effects in the smallish Zehngebot – Stonerock Black Box. Sign language translates into upstage projects that relish a graceful san serif font. If we can’t hear intonation, why should we see it? But I always write in a serif font; so this is clearly a different voice here. To me san serif feels so…apologetic. Along with words and images a swirl of stars swallows Daniel in the first act; he’s the real loser here but not in a pathetic sense. Rather he hears and thinks and enjoys human voices but he cannot be alone, ever. His inner voices are almost the sum total of the ultra silence enjoyed by Billy and Sylvia, and all that sonic energy must end up somewhere…
For more information on Mad Cow, please visit http://www.madcowtheatre.com
