Breaking down communication barriers

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This article was published 21/10/2017 (2371 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The wall has ears — 32 of them to be precise.

Designer Linda Beech’s set for the Nina Raine play Tribes, featuring an imposing wall of stylized ears, is reminiscent of ’60s Euro pop art, an unusual, but not inappropriate, backdrop for what turns out to be an intense family drama.

Emotions tend to run hot in this particular British family, and this has something to do with hot-headed patriarch Christopher (Arne MacPherson), a fiery intellectual resentful of the fact he and his peacemaker wife, Beth (Terri Cherniack), are still housing three of their adult children under his roof.

Only two of those children are sources of tension, actually. Son Daniel (Ryan James Miller) is an academic struggling with a thesis that seems pointedly intended to contradict his father’s notions of language-as-expression-of-self. Ruth (Paula Potosky) is a singer whose stalled career may be the result of crippling insecurity.

It is the deaf son Billy (Jordan Sangalang) who acts as the calm centre holding the family together. He reads lips and his mother has taught him to speak. But he has been denied an education in American Sign Language largely due to his father’s insistence that his deafness is not a barrier to communication within the family.

That notion is tested when Billy meets Sylvia (Stephanie Sy), a woman whose upbringing by deaf parents means she is adept at signing, a useful talent now that she herself is beginning to go deaf due to an unspecified genetic condition. When a romance develops between the two, Billy is compelled to re-evaluate his place in his birth family as his world grows to encompass the deaf community and his lip-reading talents prove to be a potential livelihood.

In his capacity of artistic director of Winnipeg Jewish Theatre, director Ari Weinberg offers a provocative drama that challenges the insularity of given communities, whether familial, academic or deaf. (While the family is Jewish, religion doesn’t have an overt bearing on this particular bunch.)

The play offers juicy roles for everyone. MacPherson rages superbly and Cherniack, in a largely reactive, conciliatory role, proves a credibly practised foil. Miller does solid work with what is the play’s most dramatic character arc as Daniel grows ever more susceptible to the voices that haunt his consciousness. Anyone who has heard Potosky sing may laugh inwardly at a role in which her character lacks confidence in her abilities, but she sells it nicely anyway.

A member of the local mime troupe 100 Decibels, Sangalang, who really is deaf, takes on his first dramatic role with a commanding presence and no small amount of charm. His acting work seems tentative compared with his more seasoned stage-mates, but this condition seems likely to change the more performances he gets under his belt.

In any case, it is Sy who creates the most powerful performance here as Sylvia, in her voice work (her enunciation declines in tandem with her character’s hearing) and her sign language. Challenged by Billy’s family to prove that sign language can be as nuanced as the spoken word, Sylvia rises to the occasion, and the same must be said for Sy, who charges the drama with energy without necessarily having to say a word.

randall.king@freepress.mb.caTwitter: @FreepKing