"Tribes" is a play to see

“You never listen to me. I told you. Weren’t you listening? That’s not what I said. You never pay attention.” Relationships are all about communication, what is said and unsaid and English playwright Nina Raine tackles these issues in her award-winning play “Tribes” at the Barrow Street Theater.

When you enter the theater, you feel as if you are eavesdropping on lives of a literate British family that’s prone to intellectualism and arguments. They eat around a large wooden table in the middle of the theater discussing language and communication. Christopher, the father (played by Jeff Perry) is a retired academic and mocking his wife, Mare Winningham, about the detective book she’s writing. They have three adult children; daughter Ruth is a struggling opera singer, and son Daniel is struggling to write a thesis asserting, “language is worthless.” They yell over one another and get into heated discussions. Quietly, sometimes studying them intently at the end of the table is the third child, Billy (Russell Harvard), who rarely adds to the familial din. Despite the loudness, this is a family filled with affection and love.

Billy is deaf (and actor Harvard is actually hearing-impaired). To keep him from feeling as if he’s marginalized and a minority, his parents taught him to read lips rather than learn to sign. Christopher refers to the deaf who sign as the “F----ing Muslims of the hearing world.” Things change when Billy dates Sylvia, a lovely young woman born to deaf parents. She has learned to sign and is now growing deaf herself. At dinner, Christopher badgers her, referring to signing as “broken English.” He is an intellectual bully and hammers away at Sylvia convinced of the limitations of signing. “How can you feel a feeling unless you have a word for it?”

Eventually Billy rebels, demanding that his family learn to sign to communicate with him. By the end, brother Daniel (brilliantly portrayed by Will Brill) has reverted to a debilitating stammer that plagued him as a child. His stammer is so severe that it is physically painful for the audience to witness.