Sylvia is going deaf.
And she's not happy about it.
"You don't know what it's like going deaf! You don't!" she says to Billy, who was born deaf and reads lips. She begins to sign while speaking. "I just keep thinking, Am I different? Am I different? Am I different? Am I turning into somebody different? I'm becoming a miserable person. I feel like I'm losing my personality—can't even be ironic anymore. I love being ironic. I feel stupid. When I lose something in the house I have to put my hearing aids in to look for it. I have these dreams when I'm talking on the phone again. And I can hear perfectly. It's all so clear. I don't know who I am anymore. I'm going deaf."
We're at rehearsals for the Everyman Theatre's production of
Tribes
, which opened May 28 and runs through June 22. The actors are working on an emotional scene in which Sylvia (Everyman company member Megan Anderson), distances herself from Billy (actor John McGinty, who is deaf), who has clung to her as a refugee from his neurotic, noisy English family. As they run through the scene, Everyman Artistic Director Vincent Lancisi, who directs the production, stands on one side of the stage, taking occasional notes. On the other side Willy Conley also takes notes. Conley, who is deaf, is Everyman's first-ever director of artistic sign language—or as company members call him, "sign master."
After the second run-through, Lancisi approaches the stage and offers his notes on blocking, timing, and lines in the scene, in which the actors communicate both with speech and sign. Two interpreters alternate signing for McGinty, and relay his responses back. When Lancisi is done, he turns to Conley.
"Do you have anything?" he asks and an interpreter signs.
"A couple things," Conley signs back. He approaches Anderson and talks to her about her sign for the word "dreams," in which her pointer fingers don't extend far enough from her head to be accurate. Anderson took lessons in American Sign Language (ASL) for six months before the play premiered. She also learned to play piano for the role.
While
Tribes
is specifically about a young deaf man and his struggles to connect with his family, it also, as the title suggests, addresses the idea of community and the search for a place to fit in.
"It's about communication and about what you will do to reach someone when there's a barrier between you," says Anderson. "What you are willing to do—or not willing to do—to solve a conflict between you."
In that way, Everyman's journey in producing
Tribes
is really a meta-play, in which the cast and crew have learned how to communicate with each other and how to make art together—and it's been a long process.
"I really had no idea what would be involved," says Lancisi. On a tip from an Everyman board member's wife, he first saw the show during its Off-Broadway run in New York and was immediately taken with it. He set off to secure the rights to produce the play for Everyman without realizing the time and expense it would take, including hiring Conley and the interpreters, creating a system for projecting surtitles for the unspoken sign language in the play, and becoming one of the first theaters in the country to provide hand-held closed-captioning devices—which will be available for every Everyman show going forward—for hard-of-hearing audience members.
"We are
way
over budget," Lancisi admits with a chuckle. "But this is the most fascinating production I've done in 10 years—and I've done some fascinating productions."
Every aspect of the production is elaborate and seems well thought out, from the cluttered stage set and lighting to the sound, music, and the projections, which include not only surtitles, but also visual art that taps into the play's themes.
The play opens to the sounds of an orchestra tuning up, sounds that get louder and louder until they block out all other sounds, giving us a very brief idea of what it might feel like to be deaf (as Sylvia says in the play, "No one told me it was going to be this
noisy
going deaf.") There are separate surtitle screens on different parts of the stage to minimize the distance your eyes must move to read them while keeping track of the action.
And the acting is nuanced and superb. McGinty, a Washington D.C.-based actor who has played Billy in two previous productions of
Tribes
, has to pull some impressive feats. As someone who was born deaf and began reading lips early, like Billy, he uses his speaking voice for much of the first act, and in one particular scene, has to make his voice intentionally unintelligible to reflect that his hearing aid batteries are going out. In the second act, after Billy learns to sign, he delivers a tour de force impassioned monologue taking his family to task for never learning to sign and shutting him out of their intellectual world.
"I can see Billy in my experience," McGinty says through an interpreter. "I didn't learn sign until I was in college. I come from a hearing family and they were incredibly supportive and they can sign. I always say everyone in [Billy's] family is more dysfunctional than mine. In terms of communications, I'm comfortable with both worlds."
Beyond the efforts that went into the production itself, Everyman formed an accessibility committee as part of the project. They brought in members of the local deaf community to advise them on not only how to make
Tribes
as accessible as possible, but how to make future productions accessible as well. It was the work of that committee that led to the development of the hand-held closed captioning devices.
"We are learning to be better listeners and more patient listeners in the rehearsal room so that nobody is left out," says Anderson explaining how the process of producing
Tribes
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has changed the company. "We really are like a family." ■
