Season Select: Tribes

Tribes

By Nina Raine

Directed by John Langs

Fast Facts

Playing: Touchstone Theatre | August 2 - September 27
Featuring: Joshua Castille, Jim DeVita, Maggie Cramer, Casey Hoekstra, Colleen Madden, Lindsay Welliver
Genre: Contemporary Drama
Last Seen at APT: First time!
Go If You Liked: Constellations (2024), Proof (2023), Romeo & Juliet (2023), A View from the Bridge (2017)

About Tribes

How well do we really know the people we love? The answer, inevitably: not nearly as well as we think. Take this family – creative, charismatic. Razor sharp in intellect and in tongue. It’s a routine they’ve been running forever, and with their once empty nest recently refilled, they’ve got every beat in its perfect place. Or so they think. For one son who is Deaf, a new world is opening; one his family has long locked away from him. If he walks into that world, can they hold onto their funny, dysfunctional dynamic? Should they? Family drama of the best variety – hilarious and fearless and messy, featuring a cast that will make you feel right at home.

British playwright Nina Raine’s collection of contemporary plays have achieved critical and popular success due in part to her signature mix of dark, often profane humor and complicated, drawn-from-life characters. Each new play written by Raine, however, finds a jumping off point from her previous work. In an interview from 2014, Raine shared she was terrified of being accused of writing the same play over and over, and as a result, her plays feature a breadth of styles, genres and characters.

Tribes, first premiering at London’s Royal Court theater in 2010, originally came from Raine’s desire to write a play about “individuals obsessed with themselves,” manifesting in the play’s family of well-educated and egotistical “creatives.” Raine also found inspiration for the play’s central plot after watching a documentary about a Deaf couple and their growing family.

The play’s title is a reference to the countless identifiers people use when finding community through family, through religion, through language and so on. Protagonist Billy, the only Deaf member of an all-hearing family, must navigate the complexities of his own life when he begins to find independence in the signing Deaf community, shifting his role within his family. Billy’s experience has resonated deeply with both Deaf and hearing audiences, especially those who Raine interviewed during her writing process.

Since its 2012 Off-Broadway run at the Barrow Street Theatre, Tribes has become a popular pick for regional theaters across the country and beyond. The play’s inclusion of scenes performed using only sign and accompanied by projected captions flips Deaf and hearing audience members’ experiences in a dramatic and artful way, reassigning who has the power of language throughout the play.

A perfect fit for this season and this team, Tribes is sure to make our audience laugh, cry and leave the theater with a newfound appreciation for the power of authentic, unselfish communication and all the ways it makes us human.