Tribes, the current offering from St. Louis Actors’ Studio, is definitely not a comedy. It’s a drama with some very funny lines, the sort of unsettling combination that makes audiences sit up and pay close attention. It’s engrossing enough that the night I was there, at the end of the first act, the audience was silent, not a sign of disapproval – in those cases, there’s still some applause – but of thinking about the play, what it’s saying and how it works.
It’s an angry family we’re meeting onstage. They live in the south of England, Dad Christopher (Greg Johnson) harboring a high disdain for, among others, “Northerners”, perhaps because he came from northern England himself. He’s a former professor who now writes, his tongue as sharp as a scalpel but not used with surgical finesse. Beth (Elizabeth Ann Townsend), the mother, is trying to write fiction, lighter stuff, disdained (of course) by her husband. Their three grown children all live at home, Ruth (Hailey Medrano), who is attempting a singing career, and Daniel (Ryan Lawson-Maeske) writing a thesis and recovering from an abortive love affair, both returned to the nest and baiting each other. Billy (Miles Barbee), the youngest, has never moved out.
We quickly learn that Billy is deaf. He was born that way, and his parents decided that he should learn to lip read and speak, doing what in America would be called mainstreaming him. But the arguing between his siblings and parents is so intense that he can’t turn his head fast enough to catch it all – and, of course, when he can’t see faces, he’s not even aware someone is speaking. He doesn’t get involved in the arguing much, and we’re not sure if that’s because it flies too fast for him to catch or if it’s not really his nature. He does try to be a peacemaker but that’s bailing the boat with a teacup.
Billy meets a girl, Sylvia (Bridgette Bassa), at a party. Born to deaf parents, she’s losing her hearing, and has grown up fluent in signing, something Billy never learned. His father is scornful of the deaf community, something he sees as excluding and isolating, and both parents and perhaps his siblings don’t want Billy pulled out of their immediate circle. She, on the other hand, is very much a part of that deaf community by parentage and even her job. Now, though, she’s angrily, involuntarily, being dragged into it totally.
Emotions will have their way. Does he dare bring Sylvia to the backbiting household? He does. And the game’s afoot.
Some excellent acting from Barbee, who really is deaf, and Bassa, whose collapse into tears is pretty nigh perfect, is framed by good performances from the rest of the cast. It’s hard not to want to smack Johnson’s smug superiority playing the father. Townsend gives as good as she takes when she’s really pushed hard, and Medrano as the would-be diva is very convincing. Lawson-Maeske, though, is the one who smolders as we see his layers being peeled back. Find work from the whole gang.
Annamarie Pileggi directed a play that leaves us thinking about families we’re born into and those who chose to belong to. There’s been a lot of writing about that in the past couple of weeks, that “tribes” in this country are being defined by different things than they once were, so it’s particularly timely. It’s also an interesting beginning of a glimpse into how the dynamics of a physical disability, not just a mental one, resonate throughout a family unit, from protectiveness to resentment and beyond.
A small, tightly woven but memorable evening.
Tribes
through December 16
St. Louis Actors’ Studio
Gaslight Theater
360 N. Boyle
314-458-2978
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