'Tribes' is a justifiably intense drama at American Players Theatre

Rebecca Jamieson, Isthmus

Nina Raine’s Tribes dives headfirst into questions of exclusion and belonging: What makes a tribe? Who gets to belong, and who is left out? Who gets to speak and who is silenced? These questions feel especially relevant at a time when tribalism is almost everywhere one turns.

In American Players Theatre’s production of Tribes, the family dining room — perhaps the most intimate and charged of domestic spaces — becomes an arena where allegiances are tested, outsiders are scrutinized, and love is tangled with cruelty.

As the lights rise on a family dinner, words fly like darts — layered with private jokes, intellectual jousting, and long-nursed grudges. All three adult children have moved back home, and tensions run high as the older siblings vie for their parents’ approval. Daniel (Casey Hoekstra) wants his father, Christopher (Jim DeVita), to weigh in on his jargon-loaded thesis. Ruth (Maggie Cramer), an aspiring opera singer still performing in church basements, asks her mother, Beth (Colleen Madden), to help translate a libretto.

The family’s identity is built around their self-image as unconventional creatives. Beth is writing a “marriage breakup detective novel,” while Christopher, a sharp-tongued writer, seems to relish using words to wound as much as to illuminate.

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