Like the intellectually raucous, creative clan at the center of Tribes, playwright Nina Raine holds an impressive artistic pedigree—she’s the daughter of a poet and a literary scholar, with an ancestry sprinkled with novelists, linguists, and Impressionist painters—but the spark for the play came not from her family, but a documentary. The film chronicled a couple awaiting the birth of their first child—and hoping the baby, like them, would be born deaf. "It made me think about tribes,” Raine recalls, “People like their offspring to be a member of their tribe. If you are of a particular religion you take your children to that church. You don't say to your children ‘I am not going to say to you anything about my beliefs, make your own minds up.’ You can't help but slightly indoctrinate them into your way of life.”
Her interest sufficiently piqued, and with a friend’s assistance, Raine immersed herself in Deaf culture. The intricacies and varieties of deafness enthralled her: she spoke to people born deaf, conversing through sign language interpreters, and others who, like her friend, lost their hearing later in life. As Raine’s research progressed, she was struck by the universal dynamics of communities: “Once I started looking around, tribes were everywhere. Any kind of group, they all share certain qualities…a set of values, beliefs. Even a particular language.” She thought of her own family, “full of its own eccentricities, rules, in-jokes, and punishments,” and wondered, “What if someone in my (hearing, garrulous) family had been born deaf?” Tribes envisions (and fictionalizes) this scenario, examining the gulf between hearing and listening, and the inevitable clash between our dueling, innate desires to belong and to be understood.
In Tribes, Billy, a young deaf man who was raised to lip read by his voluble academic family, begins a relationship with Sylvia, a young woman fluent in sign language and raised by Deaf parents. As their relationship deepens—and he finds acceptance within the Deaf community—he decides it’s time to speak on his own terms, sending shock waves through his insular family.
Playing out in sign language, argument, music, and mesmerizing silence, Tribes examines identity, meaning, and the limitations of language. The sprawling ideological scope of the play ultimately distills to a simple subject for its creator: “It boils down to the family—it’s like the smallest niche you can get,” explains Raine, “The family is a tiny little kingdom with its internal rules and hierarchies and weirdnesses that are unquestioned.” Tribes explores the ramifications of questioning those idiosyncrasies, cracking open our foundations and revealing the true composition of our connective tissue.