December 4, 2015
The Montreal GazetteBy Jim Burke
December 4, 2015
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To sign or not to sign, that is the question at the heart of Nina Raine’s 2010 play about a young deaf man and his eccentric, loudly argumentative family. That’s not necessarily a question which promises an entertaining or dramatically arresting evening. Yet Raine has surrounded it with enough deliriously un-PC repartee, and bolstered it with enough fascinating thematic material about various modes of (mis)communication, to ensure Tribes has gone from hit play to international phenomenon in just a few years since its London première.
It centres on a squabbling family of hyper-competitive London bohos whose cacophonous bickering leaves the youngest, Billy (Jack Volpe), who was born deaf, smilingly, patiently bemused. It’s only when he falls in love with Sylvia (Andrea Runge) that he realizes just how much his family has neglected his needs.
Sylvia, still hearing but gradually going deaf, teaches Billy sign language, thus causing a rift to open up between him and his family. They see the deaf community as an exclusive club, and sign language (translated here via surtitles) as its secret code. It all begins like a potty-mouthed version of Noël Coward’s Hay Fever, with wannabe opera diva Ruth (Lisa Norton) laying into her contemptuously egg-headed brother Daniel (Daniel Brochu), while writer parents Christopher and Beth (real life couple Greg and Toni Ellwand) squabble about prose style, dinner preparation and kimonos. Though Billy is the emotional heart of the play, Christopher is the play’s most colourful creation, not least because he says the unsayable, often, in Ellwand’s elegant performance, with a dainty charm sweetening the venom. Five seconds in and he’s dropping the C-bomb and alluding to a sex act with a crustacean in the crudest possible terms.
The pity of this production from director Sarna Lapine is that much of this scintillating dialogue gets swallowed up in the vastness of the Segal stage. Lara Dawn De Bruijn’s set design strands the actors in what looks more like a cavernous corner of Elsinore than a middle-class home in Hampstead, and the result is fatal for any sense of free-flowing banter. For the first forty minutes the whole thing seems, awkwardly and incongruously, like a raucous sitcom shot in CinemaScope and sorely missing a laughter track.
Thankfully, the focus narrows to more manageable proportions in the more intimate scenes. A dinner-party-from-hell, in which Christopher goes all sulphurous on the subject of the deaf community, has real dramatic clout. And when Volpe – here making his professional debut (he works with deaf community theatre company Seeing Voices) – finally takes centre stage with Billy’s sign-language assault on his family’s assumptions, the result – in Volpe’s raw fusion of ASL and physical rage – is both visually mesmerizing and emotionally devastating.
Recently, La Licorne cast a hearing actor in this role (big no-no!) and, as good as he was, Volpe takes this scene to a whole new poetic level. Whatever else this production gets wrong, casting a deaf actor was clearly very much the right thing to do, not just ethically but artistically as well.
AT A GLANCE
Tribes is playing at the Segal Centre, 5170 Côte Ste-Catherine Rd, to Dec. 20. ASL-interpreted performances on Dec 7 at 7 p.m. and Dec. 13 at 2 p.m. Tickets:$44 to $59. Call 514-739-7944 or visit segalcentre.org.