Tribes

As my teachers will attest, I do not like feeling like I have missed something.  I am well known for coming in for extra help regarding topics that I know full well will be elucidated in the next class.  So perhaps you can imagine my opinion of a play that centers on the concept of missing things.  Nina Raines's Tribes at the Barrow Street Theater is that play.  An import from London's Royal Court Theater, this dramatic comedy is about passive and active listening and hearing.  And very probably about deciding who is the biggest ass in the show.  Because, to be perfectly honest, even the hearing characters don't hear each other.  Everyone lacks some ability to connect to the outside world and almost all of them fundamentally do not or cannot hear some majority of the other characters.  And the actors do an amazing job of acting it.  Really, that is very well done.  As is the scenic design.  Scott Pask has created a wonderfully neurotic living/dining room for the family whose interactions drive the play.  The problem is that the play they're driving is a rather heavy handed one.  It is pretty funny in the first act; it just gets preachy in the second.  The characters the actors inhabit are nothing new.  Dad is an academic critic who is never anything other than critical, mom is vaguely writing a "marriage breakdown detective novel", Daniel is writing a thesis (kind of), Ruth is trying to pursue a career singing arias in pubs, and Billy is generally a bystander to their cacophonous arguments because he's the deaf one.  On the surface they may seem unique, but there's not much to distinguish them from any of the dysfunctional families you’ve probably met before in fiction (like J. D.Salinger’s tales of the Glass family) or film (like Wes Anderson’s “Royal Tenenbaums”).  They're all pretending at some kind of significance and none of them are succeeding.  Only the actors seem to win in this show because they carry off these stereotypes as though they were in fact as new as the writer seems to think they are.  The ensemble really does an excellent job with a play that is heavy handed at best.  As staged by Mr. Cromer supertitles are projected during signed sequences, but irregularly, so sometimes we lose the thread. The in-the-round configuration for this production means that at different points different actors will have their backs to us. And you’re increasingly aware of the importance of where everyone is standing, how bright or dark the stage is (according to Keith Parham’s lighting) and how loud or muffled offstage noises are.  


All in all I think it was interesting.  I just can't say I enjoyed it.