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A CurtainUp Los Angeles Review
Tribes
By Jon Magaril
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"
You didn't understand a thing I just said? You didn't miss anything."— Sylvia to Billy
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Russell Harvard and Susan Pourfar. (Photo by Craig Schwartz)
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The family members at the play's core are thoroughly enmeshed in each others' lives. But they're empathy-impaired. Director David Cromer's immersive production offers a corrective. He helps us feel like a member of the tribe.
The assimilation process can be a bit unsettling. The set itself requires some re-orientation. Set designer Scott Pask has added an extra wedge of seating behind the right side of the thrust stage and skewed the orientation of the set towards the left. I've seen approximately fifty shows at the Taper and, when I first focused on the stage, I lost my bearings. It seemed like the left and right walls were no longer equidistant from the center.
The opening scene requires a more substantial shift in perspective. The “conventionally unconventional” family sits around the dining table that dominates Pask's airy yet delightfully detail-drenched room. Parents Christopher (Jeff Still), a teacher, and Beth (Lee Roy Rogers), a homemaker and would-be novelist, conduct a no-holds-barred conversation with their three adult children.
Daniel (Will Brill), the eldest, has returned to the fold after a misbegotten love affair with a woman whom the family never accepted. Ruth (Gayle Rankin), the youngest, gets little support for wanting to be an opera singer. Middle brother Billy (Russell Harvard) watches intently as everyone else talks boisterously over each other.
He leans forward. He bobs sometimes to each side. And so do we because every audience member is looking at the back of at least one character, making it difficult to hear. Stage blocking has never been more aptly named. We move with the hope that an inch or two will give us clearer sound or a glimpse of their face.
One by one the family members go off, leaving Billy alone. The lights dim, placing us within his mindset. He asks Dan, passing nearby, “What happened?” and from Billy's monotone and the context, we realize he's deaf. Cromer's staging gives us a tiny taste of what Billy's experienced his entire life, being forced to work hard to understand what's going on around him with even his closest relations.
When Billy meets Sylvia (Susan Parfour) at a disco, he joins two new tribes. He starts to identify with the deaf and hard of hearing community. And, for the first time, he falls in love. Sylvia teaches him sign language, which his parents have rejected. They say they just want him to function in the world at large. But he starts to see selfishness in their demand that he read lips.
Raine nimbly places this issue, common to many affected families, within the compellingly specific realm of her tribe of characters. She shows how each of them, even the hearing, have problems calibrating their own private voice with the chorus of others in their intimate and social spheres.
Dan, for instance, seems to have incipient schizophrenia. He plays the radio incessantly to block out the voices in his head, which sound like his parents and sister. And Ruth comes to the shameful realization that the singing voice she hears in her head has little in common with what actually, and tunelessly, comes out of her head.
In the second act Raine amps up these more metaphorical aspects of the issue. The balance could use some equalization. With Sylvia's encouragement, Billy gets a job in the justice system as a lip reader for security tape evidence with faulty sound. To impress her, he makes up what he can't make out. It turns out he gets it wrong more than he gets it right.
Then there's Sylvia's despair over her growing deafness. She starts to disconnect from Billy. He's never been able to hear so she feels he can't understand her feelings. And all the while, Dan's voices start to drown out his own. He starts to twitch. And though Brill's performance is disarmingly eccentric, the character's progressive decline seems programmed by authorial fiat.
Raine's too smart not to be aware that her strategy may rankle. She has Ruth describe how she's structuring her “marriage breakdown detective novel” by focusing on the crime, then going back to plug in false clues along the way. It seems Raine is letting us know how she's developed this piece, starting with the problem of miscommunication and assigning various aspects to each of her characters. Lines of dialogue like “you're shifting the parameters of the argument yet again” float as homeopathic defenses against potential criticism.
Even when Raine overstates her case, she and the production never overstay their welcome. They never stop finding compelling ways to convey the sensibilities of its challenged characters.
Daniel Kluger's sound design places us in the discordant headspace of Sylvia and Dan. Pask ingeniously places Jeff Sugg's projected surtitles in nooks and crannies all over the set. They're tailor-made for each audience subsection. With this and the staging, each part of the audience gets a satisfyingly complete experience that's nonetheless distinct from the other.
The surtitles allow us to understand the sign language and, in a wonderful touch, the thoughts of two characters who finally come to a mutual, and silent, understanding. As Ruth says of her novel, “It's all about empathy. I have to think my way into my character's heads.” Raine, Cromer, and the actors have all done this and generously share what they've learned.
Harvard and Pourfar, in particular, are abundantly alive to one another on stage. The heart-rending immediacy of their connection will ring out loud and clear to most anyone who's hard of hearing or has a hardened heart.
Editor's Note: Director Cromer, most of the cast and the design team are reprising their work from the long running production in New York's intimate Barrow Street Theater ( review)
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Tribes by Nina Raine Directed by David Cromer Cast: Will Brill (Daniel), Russell Harvard (Billy), Jeff Still (Christopher), Susan Pourfar (Sylvia), Gayle Rankin (Ruth), Lee Roy Rogers (Beth) Scenic Design: Scott Pask Costume Design: Tristan Raines Lighting Design: Keith Parham Sound Design: Daniel Kluger Projection Design: Jeff Sugg Prop design & Coordinator: Kathy Fabian/Propstar Hair & Make-Up: Leah J. Loukas Dialect Coach: Stephen Gabis Production Stage Managers: David S. Franklin and Richard A. Hodge Running Time: 2 Hours and 15 minutes, including one intermission Center Theater Group's Mark Taper Forum 135 North Grand Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90012 (213) 972-7353 centertheatregroup.org Runs Tuesday through Sunday until April 14, 2013 Reviewed by Jon Magaril |
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