What is TRIBES about?

Tribes is a play which builds bridges between several elements. It navigates the intersection of love and language. What does it mean to communicate? Where is the meeting ground between noise and understanding?
It asks questions regarding restriction and autonomy. How do we relate to one another and to our ourselves within a group? What are the challenges within families, belonging, and demands of a community?

What role do you play and how does she fit into the story?

I play Sylvia, a CODA (child of deaf adults), who meets Billy and changes his direction in life. She empowers him: with language, with agency and with love. She is dynamic, magnetic, strong headed. As often comes with those traits, she is also mercurial, temperamental and clawing for help. 

What do you find challenging about playing Sylvia?

Sylvia has lived her life acting as a support system for those around her. She is proud of her dual life in the deaf world and the hearing one. It gives her freedom and a deeply rooted sensibility of the world.

The play follows her as she begins to feel adrift between two identities and must reckon with the balance of hearing loss and her own deaf gain.

That is a challenge to portray: to give breadth to each element, and to imbue her with empathy and anger, love and self-hatred.

Another fun enterprise is to give her an authentic body and spacial awareness true to those who grow up in the deaf community...It goes far beyond learning ASL.

However, studying ASL for the past several months has been an immense reward, and I have 3 people to thank for that: Stuart Soboleski, Alex Lynch & Patrick Galasso. They shared with me their time and their enormous knowledge to develop a meaningful vernacular and style for Sylvia, a native signer. I am honored to share our work with you and to continue relationships with those in the deaf community after this performance.

What is exciting about TRIBES?

Nina Raine has written a gorgeous piece. The language is enigmatic, brutal, playful, and charming. It is a linguistic playground, full of nuance and allusion. The characters are like animals in a cage fight, and the prize is freedom and love.
It is not to be missed.

“Tribes” by Nina Raine is a play centered around Billy, deaf from birth and raised in a fully hearing family. Billy’s family was adamant he not be raised as “handicapped”, and taught him to get by in the hearing world by learning to speak and not learning sign language. Billy’s world is upended when he meets Sylvia, who was born into a deaf family and fluent in sign. Sylvia introduces Billy to the deaf community and sign language, which sets up a confrontation with his family and their worldview. The play asks us to look at how we communicate with each other across our differences.

I play Billy, who has an uncanny ability to read lips and understand people while not being able to hear. He’s very sensitive and perceptive, yet isolated in how he was raised. I, myself, was born with severe hearing loss in both ears, and have worn hearing aids since I was 3 years old. Like Billy, I was raised by a hearing family adamant I not be treated differently because of my hearing loss. I never learned sign language as a child and also adapted very well in the hearing world. I immediately identified with Billy when I read the play. I totally understood not feeling entirely a part of the hearing world, nor the deaf world. I know what it’s like to be “sort of, but not really” included in the conversation. I know what it feels like to be dismissed by people – “never mind” – when asking “what?” because I didn’t hear the first or second time. I also get what it means to get by “bluffing”, as Sylvia and Billy talk about in the play – making believe you heard and understood something when you really didn’t catch it.

The big challenge for me playing Billy is that Billy is profoundly deaf, while I am not. With today’s technology, I am now able to live and hear as most hearing people do. While a lot of the physical characteristics are similar – the need to be still and to see the speaker in order to “hear”, the speech impediment was a challenge as well as, obviously, learning ASL in such a condensed period of time. Having played the role in Cincinnati last year, most of the difficult ASL learning has already been done. In reviving the role here in Vermont, I don’t feel quite the panic I felt in learning ASL like I did the first time around!

What I love most about this play is the way the writer wove in the sign language and spoken language to include hearing and deaf audiences alike. Sign language is an art form and a powerful form of expression. “Tribes” is a play that deals with the universal themes of family and romantic love layered with the choreography and poetry of ASL. It’s a wonderful play and I’m delighted to be a part of this production at Vermont Stage.

What is Tribes about?

We are born into a specific tribe and as we mature we select our own tribes. Where we work, what we do, who we desire, even where we live. I also think that the piece is finding your autonomy within a tribe – how do you be a part of a tribe, and how do we stay true to ourselves within the tribe?

What do you like about Tribes?

I like all the moving pieces. I love that the lead in this play, and a good chunk of the play deals with a deaf man navigating through his world, navigating through his family, and navigating intimate love for the first time.

What scares you about Tribes?

Like every play I have ever directed, I am always worried, before we begin on Tuesday September 15th, about whether the cast I have chosen will get along. Will the play make sense to an audience – will their, “willing suspension of their disbelief” be honored?

What will you be trying to accomplish directorially with Tribes?

I want to be ahead of the audience. I want the play to come roaring out of the gate from the beginning – an onslaught of words and thoughts.

What kinds of conversations would you like the audience to have after experiencing this play?

I want people to ask themselves if the members of their tribe are being heard, and honored.