Joshua Bastian Cole Vocality and Embodiment Prof. Peraino

“How Do You Like My Voice?” Vocality and Deaf Theatre

When a hearing actor was cast in the role of a deaf character in Rebecca Gilman's 2009 adaptation of Carson McCullers’s The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, a major mêlée erupted in New

York as deaf actors protested the production at the New York Theatre Workshop. Linda Bove, a founding member of the National Theatre of the Deaf who is most well-known for introducing a generation of children to sign language with her long-running role as Linda the Librarian on

“Sesame Street,” told , “A hearing actor playing a deaf character is tantamount to putting a white actor in blackface” (Jones, “Deaf Star of Wants Theater

World to Listen”).

Figure 1: Linda Bove, center, with NTD, 1968 Bove’s strong statement reflects a belief maintained by many Deaf actors, but it does not hinder casting directors from continuing to hire hearing actors in deaf roles. When Tribes premiered in London’s Royal Court Theatre in 2010, playwright Nina Raine knew the deaf Cole 2 character Billy had to be cast with a Deaf actor, though some hearing performers did audition.

Raine states:

It just felt like patronizing the character somehow in doing this Deaf voice that wasn’t

their own and they had no knowledge of what it means to be Deaf. When you start

rehearsals, it’s also brilliant to have a Deaf person in the room because the play is about

Deafness, so what would be the point of doing a play about Deafness and not having

someone in the room who can tell you what it’s like firsthand? It would just be insane, I

think. (qtd. in Buchwald, “Deaf Talent Seen and Heard”)

It wasn’t until James (Joey) Caverly, who played Billy at SpeakEasy Stage in Boston,

Studio Theatre in Washington, D.C., and Berkeley Rep, contacted Raine to tell her that a hearing actor had been cast in one of the U.S. stagings that she was even aware that this was happening.

In response to Caverly’s request that she go on record and say that Billy had to be portrayed by a Deaf actor, Raine decided to include a note in the play’s reprinting strongly encouraging theatres to cast a Deaf actor. She also talked to her agent about making the same stipulation when theatre companies get the rights to Tribes. Speaking to American Theatre

Magazine, Raine was hesitant to say that if you can’t find a Deaf actor, you can’t do the play, because as a director, she knows that sometimes things happen, like an actor becoming unavailable at the last minute. Still, she feels, a hearing actor should be a last resort. In the Off-

Broadway production, the Deaf actor playing Billy, Russell Harvard, had a hearing understudy who also understudied the hearing role of the brother Daniel; that’s the way it’s usually done

(Buchwald). In the article, Raine states, “What I wouldn’t want is for people to cast some totally ordinary actor and say, ‘Just act Deaf—it can’t be that hard.’ The thing is, if you can’t get a part as a Deaf actor when there’s a Deaf part, when are you going to get cast?” Cole 3

Raine prioritizes casting Deaf actors in deaf roles partially for their understanding of

Deafness, but also because, as stated above, she is concerned with actors “doing this Deaf voice that wasn’t their own.” Katie LeClerc, star of the ABC Family series Switched at Birth, plays a

Deaf character as a hearing actor with Ménière’s disease. She calls upon her own fluctuating hearing loss, resulting from Ménière’s Disease, to infuse her role with a dash of authenticity. She plays Daphne Vasquez, a Deaf teen who meets the family she never knew she had, and gets to share the screen with Lea Thompson (of Back to the Future fame) and Deaf actor , winner of the 1987 Academy Award for Children of a Lesser God. In the show, LeClerc puts on a “deaf accent” and wears hearing aids to enhance her visibility/audibility as a Deaf person.

There are several episodes when the character LeClerc plays, Daphne, has dreams or hallucinations where she envisions herself as hearing. In those episodes, LeClerc uses what she calls her “real voice,” one that passes as hearing. To represent Deafness, she emphasizes certain speech patterns. In an interview for Ability Magazine, LeClerc explains that she was asked to

“try a ‘deaf accent.’ It’s something we discussed in depth. We wanted to make sure my portrayal was respectful and done correctly. At the same time, we felt that using a deaf accent would be a really strong choice for the character” (Cooper, “Katie LeClerc Hear and Now”).

In an interview for Wetpaint Entertainment, reporter Carita Rizzo asked LeClerc, “Do you think many people know that you don’t actually speak with — is it called a speech impediment?”

LeClerc: I call it an accent.

Rizzo: Do people know that you don’t speak with an accent in life?

LeClerc: No. [Laughs] I am so excited for the fans of the show to get to be a part of my

real voice. It was really, really funny because we’ve all been working together for about Cole 4

three years now, so as soon as they called “cut” after that first scene, Vanessa [Vanessa

Marano co-stars as the hearing character Bay, who was switched at birth with LeClerc’s

character, Daphne] went up to me like, “There’s something wrong. What's happening?”

So it was kind of strange to use my normal speaking voice. I am so excited for people to

see it, and when I get stopped on the street, the first thing they say is, “How do you do

that thing with your voice?” And I just say, “Lots of practice.”

Rizzo: How do you do it, actually? The accent — was that hard to perfect? Was it

something you had to work on?

LeClerc: It was the biggest challenge that I had ever had in my acting career, ever. It was

a fine line to walk. I didn't want to come across as offensive because I don’t use that

voice in my normal life, but it is also a requirement to add authenticity to the character.

So I'm very familiar with the Deaf community, and my sister [who has a more advanced

case of Ménière’s] and I sat down with an audiogram and really mapped out what

Daphne’s specific hearing loss would be. And based on that specific hearing loss, what

sounds she would be able to say and what sounds she wouldn’t be able to say. So it was a

lot of work, and I’m so thankful for my sister’s assistance in that because without her, I

don’t think the voice would have sounded as good. But it’s something I’m very proud of.

(Rizzo, “Katie Leclerc Hypes Switched at Birth’s Alternate Reality Episode —

Exclusive!”)

As I have been writing this essay, I have gone back and forth between deaf and Deaf, and there is a reason for that. Before I continue exploring Deaf characters and actors, I am going to provide some context for the development of the Deaf community. Cole 5

Although sign language, or “manualism,” has been in use for centuries, originating in

France and Spain, it has been viewed by many American hearing educators as “primitive” or

“grotesque.” For more than a hundred years, a “methods war” raged in the U.S. over the use of sign language versus oral communication.

Figure 2: an iconography of French signs, 1856 In the second half of the nineteenth century, the oralist movement spread through Europe and North America, inspiring politicians, philanthropists, and teachers with the dream of converting all deaf children from solitary outcasts into active citizens by merging them into hearing society (Rée 230). The debates were intensified by the inventor of the telephone,

Alexander Graham Bell, who disapproved of sign language as an educational method for teaching deaf children. Bell espoused speech, lip-reading, and auditory training as the most Cole 6 practical methods for preparing deaf children for an oral/aural English-speaking society

(Baldwin 12).

Sign language institutions were reformed prohibiting the use of sign, and oralist schools were founded to integrate the deaf world into the hearing one. A hundred years later, oralist schools would be almost universally condemned on the grounds that they cater to the prejudices of hearing adults rather than the needs of deaf children.

Figure 3: A speech lesson at the Royal School for the Deaf, Exeter, 1899 Though the oral method had some success, particularly for those with some vestigial hearing, the deaf schools did not work out as their founders had hoped—they were allowing the deaf to create a whole new social world for themselves, an exclusive society. With oralist schools, the deaf, for the first time, became a conspicuous social group. Many of them married and had children, selecting partners they met through their school. The oralist opponents of sign language were helping to bring about the separate deaf society they had intended to prevent. By Cole 7 constructing separate communities for themselves, based on their schools, the Deaf have been able to live together on their own terms without having to defer to the hearing world. By the middle of the nineteenth century, they were radically transforming their reputation. Instead of being taken as isolated representatives of natural, pre-social humanity, they were now seen to constitute an enigmatic secret society. The newly confident Deaf communities of the twentieth century saw themselves as inheritors and custodians of a sort of divine system of communication, purer and truer than speech. As I will elaborate later in discussion with Children of a Lesser God, for many in the Deaf community, sign language is too subtle and flexible to be interpreted by the clumsy rigidities and compromises of conventional speech (Rée 230-41).

A standard introduced in the 1970s, to be Deaf with a capital D, you needed to be brought up in a Deaf community, rather than simply unable to hear. For example, a hearing child of Deaf parents can still be accepted as Deaf. As Michael Davidson elaborates, to speak of “Deaf culture” as a single entity generalizes a broad continuum of people positioned in various degrees with respect to deafness. “Deaf” could include children who are deaf but whose family is hearing

(as in the story of Tribes) or hearing children of deaf adults (called CODAs). Also included are people who have become deaf later in life or who still retain some hearing (Davidson 82).

Writing on performance, Davidson states that some Deaf performers elect not to have their works voice-interpreted. He calls this a refusal of hearing culture that, although understandable in terms of cultural independence, limits the venues and audiences the performers can reach (83). Though based on a phonocentric model, stage plays written with text, the

National Theatre of the Deaf did not let hearing audiences guide their path. Cole 8

Figure 4: a poster for NTD Prior to the birth of the National Theatre of the Deaf, deaf theater in the U.S. primarily meant weekend skits, mime shows, and signed songs or poems. Until 1967, in order to see “deaf theater,” one could attend the local deaf club and see impromptu mime shows performed on a raised platform in a rented hall. Schools for the deaf sometimes presented long one-acts, sign- singing, or poetry (Baldwin 4).

Three major, sometimes overlapping, deaf grass-roots theatre groups emerged in New

York City. The Metropolitan Theatre Guild of the Deaf was established in 1957. Two other amateur deaf theatre groups, The New York Hebrew Association of the Deaf and the New York

Theatre Guild of the Deaf came next. These three groups rarely used interpreters or performed for the non-signing public. Their primary goal was to entertain the deaf community and affirm deaf culture. As began offering drama classes in 1961, deaf theater was about to enter a new era when Anne Bancroft prepared for her role in the Broadway production Cole 9 of The Miracle Worker, a retelling of the early life of Helen Keller. Although The Miracle

Worker was not the first play with a deaf character, it was the first that used sign language as an expressive medium. To research her role, Bancroft met with a well-known psychologist who worked with deaf clients, Edna S. Levine, and this meeting has been said to be the impetus behind the formation of the National Theatre of the Deaf. Levine’s passions for theatre and the

Deaf community led to putting the wheels in motion for a professional troupe of deaf actors (3-

10).

The National Theatre of the Deaf was at its height in the 1960s and 70s and inspired the creation of other companies, such as The New York Deaf Theatre (NYDT) which was established in 1979. As the third oldest Deaf theatre company in America, they are still producing work now “35 years strong” as noted on their website. NYDT was founded by a group of Deaf actors and theatre artists who wanted to create opportunities for the production of a dramatic art form that was not found elsewhere in New York City: plays in American Sign

Language (ASL). The majority of the company’s Board of Directors are Deaf, Deaf-Blind, and hard of hearing.

Figure 5: photo by Conrado Johns for NYTD Cole 10

Founded in 1991 with a mission to improve and enrich the cultural lives of the 1.2 million deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals who live in the Los Angeles area, Deaf West is another company that has recently achieved success. Providing exposure and access to professional theatre for deaf artists and audiences, Deaf West first made waves away from the

West Coast in 2003 with their large-scale revival of Big River on Broadway. The production featured deaf and hearing actors performing together. The cast was split equally with about half of the characters, including the leading role of Huck, played by deaf or hard-of-hearing performers. Making the production equally accessible to hearing and deaf audiences, all dialogue and lyrics in the production were spoken or sung and signed.

This year, Deaf West has returned to Broadway with Spring Awakening. Cole 11

Figures 6 and 7: photos by Kevin Parry for Deaf West Like Big River, this production also has both Deaf and hearing actors and double casts the main characters with singing actors who “voice” the roles. In Big River, Tyrone Giordano played

Huck, but Dan Jenkins voiced the role of Huck and also played Mark Twain. Adding to the layers of a production with two actors embodying Huck in different ways, Jenkins was nominated for a Tony when he played Huck in the original 1985 production of this Roger Miller-

William Hauptman musical (Hernandez, “Deaf West’s Big River Shines on Broadway as

Roundabout Revival Opens”).

Jeff Calhoun, the director of the Deaf West Big River revival, told Playbill, “What we wanted to do was make the signing the center of the focus and not split focus.” The tradition of theatre for deaf audiences places an interpreter on the side of the stage, forcing the eye away from the physical drama. Calhoun continues:

What I tried to accomplish — and what I hope we’re accomplishing — is a marriage of

the hearing world and the deaf culture. Every moment of the show is both signed and Cole 12

spoken. I didn’t want there to be one moment in the show that favored the hearing

audience or the deaf audience. (qtd. in Hernandez)

Figure 8: Big River, photo by Joan Marcus for Theater Mania Much like this goal to make signing the center of focus, Deaf West’s Spring Awakening enmeshed ASL into the choreography for all the performers, Deaf and hearing. As Michael

Paulson explains in the New York Times, musicals are built around sound. To make a musical work for Deaf actors as well as for Deaf audiences, choreographer Spencer Liff and director

Michael Arden devised an array of silent and discreet cues for actors who could not hear musical or lyrical cues: “hidden lights, coded gestures, timed touches, and prompting props” (Paulson,

“Lights, Gestures, Action!” 6).

Spring Awakening works so well for Deaf West because it is a morality tale for the dangers of communication failures. Because Wendla is not educated on the consequences of sex, or even what sex is, she becomes pregnant and dies in a botched abortion. Moritz is so confused by his own puberty that he shoots himself in the head (in the original play, he continues on, Cole 13 headless). As extreme and absurd as these elements are, the frustration the Deaf community faces to be listened to by hearing people, is still current—much like how teen pregnancy and suicide are also still current issues, although the original play is one hundred years old.

Without altering the Stephen Sater- book or lyrics, Michael Arden added a new context for the story. The Deaf West production takes place in a deaf school that does not allow the use of sign language, an implicit nod to the mandatory use of oralism contemporaneous with the play’s setting in nineteenth-century Germany (Paulson 6).

As mentioned earlier, oralism versus signing has been an on-going controversy in Deaf education throughout the twentieth century and continues on now. Mark Medoff’s 1979 play,

Children of a Lesser God, took this controversy head on. Set in a state school for the deaf, the play depicts several key issues facing the Deaf community, including the right of Deaf individuals to determine their own role in society. James Leeds, a new speech teacher using oral method, is assigned to Sarah Norman, a twenty-six-year-old deaf woman and graduate of the deaf school where she now works as a custodian. Sarah does not speak, but prefers to communicate exclusively in ASL. She informs James that it is a waste of time trying to force deaf people to speak and read lips so that the deaf can pass for hearing. When James counters that ASL is only good among the deaf (and therefore useless and isolating—concepts that reflect the ideals of the nineteenth century oralist movement), Sarah accuses him of wanting to be God, wanting to make her over in his own image. Deaf students do not want to be changed simply because hearing teachers want to change them. Sarah confides that she dreams of becoming a teacher for the deaf and having deaf children. They eventually realize that they want to communicate with each other no matter what the language and decide to get married. Orin, a hard-of-hearing student, tries to convince Sarah that their marriage cannot work. The Cole 14 schoolmaster, Mr. Franklin, tries to convince James that the marriage is unwise. While arguing,

James catches himself trying to censor the conversation for Sarah and realizes that he has no right to decide what she can or cannot “hear.”

This romantic drama was actually written as a tribute to a former National Theatre of the

Deaf actor, Phyllis Frelich who played Sarah in the first productions. The play was highly successful with hearing audiences, opening at the Mark Taper Forum in 1979 and then moving to

New York, where it won three Tony Awards (Best Play, Best Actress (Frelich), and Best Actor

(John Rubinstein as James Leeds). The play was made into a film in 1986, and as referenced earlier, Marlee Matlin was not only the youngest person to ever win an Academy Award for best actress, but she was also the first Deaf person to win (Baldwin 52-3).

The play is accessible to hearing people for a number of reasons. First, although it highlights several Deaf characters and creates a romantic lead and hero in the role of Sarah, the play itself as described by the playwright, “takes place in the mind of James Leeds. Throughout the events, characters step from his memory for anything from a full scene to several lines”

(Medoff 8). James, the hearing person, is telling the story. Second, all of the signs are vocalized by James as he interprets them. Saying someone else’s signs outloud in a conversation is really only a theatrical device for a non-signing audience to understand what Sarah, or the other Deaf characters are saying. When reading the script, the lines all appear duplicated—to be signed first by Sarah or another Deaf character and then spoken by James.

James represents the hearing prejudice (called “audism”) that assumes deafness is inferior to hearing. In order for deaf people to be able to participate in the world, James believes they must speak. Otherwise, they will be isolated as outcasts who cannot communicate with the majority of people. The culminating moment that the play (and Marlee Matlin) is famous for Cole 15 comes near the end:

(Sarah starts to sign something. [James] pins her arms. The rest of this is unsigned.)

JAMES: Shut up! You want to talk to me, then you learn my language! Did you get that? Of course you did. You’ve probably been reading lips perfectly for years; but it’s a great control game, isn’t’ it? You can cook, but you can’t speak. You can drive and shop and play bridge but you can’t speak. You can even make a speech but you still can’t do it alone. You always have to be dependent on someone, and you always will for the rest of your life until you learn to speak. Now come on! I want you to speak to me. Let me hear it. Speak! Speak! Speak!

(She erupts like a volcano in speech. She doesn’t sign.)

SARAH: Speech! Speech! Is that it? No! You want me to be your child! You want me to be like you. How do you like my voice? Am I beautiful? Am I what you want me to be? What about me? What I want? What I want! (She can’t be sure how this sounds except by his reaction to it. It is clearly sentences, the sense of it intelligible, but it is not a positive demonstration of speech—only of passion. Only a few words are even barely understandable. She sees this in his face, knows for sure now that she does speak as badly as she has supposed she does. Silence. Close by each other. James reaches to touch her. She bolts away. They’re in the same positions they were at the beginning of the play.) Me have nothing. Me deafy. Speech inept. Intelligence—tiny blockhead. English— blow away. Left one you. Depend—no. Think myself enough. Join. Unjoined. (She goes, but does not leave the stage. James puts his mufflers on, is alone in some silence inside there.) (Medoff 67-8)

Figure 9: Screen capture of Marlee Matlin's "deaf scream" in Children of a Lesser God, 1986.

Cole 16

The last lines of Sarah’s response are spoken but are in the grammar of ASL. Speaking in ASL grammar displays both the incompatibility of direct translation and emphasizes James’s cultural insensitivity toward Sarah’s language.

According to Stephen Baldwin’s book Pictures in the Air, 1959 was the year that set the stage for deaf theater to emerge. 1959: Marilyn Monroe, Elvis, Eisenhower. Space flight was about to become a reality. Martin Luther King, Jr. was gaining momentum in the Civil Rights

Movement, and the U.S. was about to face significant social change.

In 1959, Black theater was beginning to win commercial attention. Lorraine Hansberry’s

A Raisin in the Sun won the New York Drama Critics Circle Best Play of the Year Award. The play is a drama about a black family’s life, and proved to be a major step forward for black theater professionals. Not only was it written by a black woman, but it was directed by a black man (Lloyd Richards) and featured a primarily black cast that included Sidney Poitier and Lou

Gossett, Jr. (3).

The winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize and the 2012 Tony Award for Best Play is a reimagining of Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun: Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park. The play has two acts set fifty years apart. Act I takes place in 1959, as white community leaders anxiously try to stop the sale of a home to a black family. Act II is set in the same house in 2009, as the present-day predominantly African-American neighborhood battles to hold its ground in the face of gentrification. All the actors are double cast as different characters for Act I and Act II. One of the characters in Act I is deaf, but the same actor plays a hearing character in Act II.

In an interview with Bruce Norris, Rebecca Rugg the Artistic Producer of Steppenwolf

Theater Company asks, “I wonder if you can talk about the deaf character and the choice to include her.” Bruce Norris responds: Cole 17

Well the first thing I’ll say is that deaf is funny. And I defy anyone who tells me

differently. But it’s not that the deaf woman herself is funny, or her deafness that’s funny,

it’s everyone around her and how they treat her and act towards her that’s funny. And it

makes it clear how awful everyone is around race, that there is this false CARE taken

towards her deafness. It shines a light on race, by contrast.

It’s true, audiences find the deaf character, Betsy, funny. Her voice is funny, and it is the fact that she is outside of what is going on, always needing to be clued in, that people laugh at. The actor who plays Betsy must be hearing; as mentioned previously, due to the double casting between acts, in Act II the character played by the same actor to play Betsy in Act I, plays Lindsey who is hearing. Norris intends for the jokes around Betsy to comment on audism, but because the part must always be played by a hearing actor, and more importantly because hearing audiences don’t get the jokes as pointing out audism, what we end up with is the “blackface” simulacrum Linda

Bove named for when hearing people play Deaf.

Norris writes out the “deaf accent” in the script so the hearing actors can sound

“authentically deaf”:

BETSY: Hehhyoooh, Behhhh. [Hello, Bev.] BEV: (Over-enunciating for Betsy’s benefit.) Well just look at you! My goodness. You are just the biggest thing. BETSY: Ah nohhh!! Eee toooor. Ah so beee!!! [I know!! It’s true. I’m so big!!!] KARL: Took the liberty of not ringing the bell. BEV: Betsy, you know Jim. JIM: Indeed she does. BETSY: Hah Jeee. [Hi Jim.] (Jim shows off his sign language skills to Betsy, finger- spelling the last word.) BEV: Oh, well, now look at that. Look at them go. What is that about? Somebody translate! BETSY: (Laughing to Karl.) Huhuhuuh!! Kaaaaa!! JIM: (Chuckling along.) Uh-oh! What did I do? Did I misspell? (Betsy signs to Karl.) KARL: (Chuckles.) Uh, it seems, Jim, that you, uh, told Betsy that she was expecting a storm!! Cole 18

BEV: No! He meant stork! You meant stork, didn’t you? BETSY: (Pantomimes umbrella.) Ahneemah-umbrayah! [I need my umbrella!] (All laugh.) BEV: Her umbrella! (To Betsy.) I understood that! (Norris 24)

Later in the act: JIM: Need you to calm down. RUSS: And you can go fuck yourself. KARL: Well, that is over the line, mister. That is not language I will tolerate in front of my wife. RUSS: (Beat, then.) She’s deaf, Karl!! Completely—(Waving to Betsy, fake-jolly.) Hello, Betsy! Go fuck yourself! (Betsy smiles, waves back.) (Norris 39)

The “go fuck yourself” line gets a huge laugh, not because Russ is making a joke at the expense of a deaf person, but because the deaf person doesn’t know what’s going on around her.

Samantha Cormier, who wrote her MFA thesis on her portrayal of Betsy and Lindsey said that she “sympathized with the character Betsy right away, not only because she was born deaf, but because she is a bit of comedic relief for the audience when things begin to get tense” (12).

Cormier connected to Betsy right away because ASL is Cormier’s second language, as her brother is deaf in one ear. As a performer, Cormier wanted to learn “kinesthetically what it was like to be deaf”:

[…]Obstacles in playing a deaf character vocally include producing a genuine sounding quality along with providing enough volume for with [sic] space without losing the colorization of the voice of a deaf person. To approach my work in deaf speech I first found a primary source, which is a person I used for inspiration who had a genuine deaf speech. […]I started to develop an oral posture for Betsy, which unlike hearing Americans who have root of tongue tensions, deaf people do not possess that tension and their tongues are relaxed and tend to stick out past their bottom teeth. Some hearing impaired people also have a slight glottal fry, which is an action that happens in the back of the throat in the lowest vocal register and it is produced through a loose glottal closure which will permit air to bubble through slowly, resulting in a popping or rattling sounds. To produce this sound without creating strain, because a glottal fry can cause damage to the vocal folds, I had to have enough air support and I had to release tension in my neck and shoulders. Betsy’s oral posture was that of the tongue forward placed, tapping into vocal fry, feeling sounds in the throat, relaxed tongue, lip and cheeks, raised soft palate, narrow pitch range with no sliding of pitch like Americans. (20-2) Cole 19

Clearly, it takes a lot of work to sound deaf when you’re not.

Unlike Norris’s phonetically written deaf text, Nina Raine’s Tribes, though it also requires a “deaf accent,” simply mentions it in stage directions. For example, “He speaks in a slightly ‘deaf’ voice” (10) and “she starts to use her voice—which is not ‘deaf’” (12). Some of the text is written in ASL grammar, knowing it will be signed by the actors, and some is in ASL grammar with text that is intended to be “surtitled” or “supertitled” on a screen. There are also parts of the text that instead of mimicking a “deaf accent” replicate what it might sound like for a person with significant hearing loss:

BETH: What’s her name? BILLY: Sylvia. (Beat. When Billy next speaks, his voice is fragmenting to the extent that what he says is not quite intelligible. It is like listening to someone on a mobile phone with fragmenting reception—ends and beginnings of words.) Wh I met h’, so thing ju — … fe —. Into ‘lace … here. (Beat.) CHRISTOPHER: Say again? (Billy makes an effort.) BILLY: It was li … so— thi ‘witched on … in my mind. (Pause.) CHRISTOPHER: His aids. Batteries going. DANIEL: She reminded you of someone? BILLY: I tho — , she — the … nn. BETH: Billy. Consonants. (Surtitles start to come up as Billy struggles with ends and beginnings of words, and they look at him, uncomprehendingly.) [When I met her, something just clicked in my head.] BILLY: When I met her … something … jus … lic … my head. [It was like a light being lit in my mind.] It was li … a ligh … be’ li’ … in my mind. [I thought, she’s the one.] I ‘anted to ‘ell you. (Billy falls silent. They look at him. Another aria has started to play, faintly, from Ruth’s laptop. “Porgi, amor” from Le Nozze Di Figaro — in at the singing.) DANIEL: … You like her? (Billy nods silently. They all look at him, in silence. The music swells. Black. Surtitles.) [Oh love, bring some relief To my sorrow, my sighs: Oh give me back my loved one Or in mercy let me die.] (Raine 22-3)

Tribes is a very different play than Clybourne Park. Norris’s play is about race, with other elements thrown in for comparison: homosexuality, developmental delay, mental illness, Cole 20 and deafness. Raine’s play is about communication and the lack thereof in a hearing family with a deaf son. Similar to Clybourne Park, Tribes is also a thoughtful, yet funny play with unconventional characters. Although he is deaf, Billy’s family has tried to raise him as part of the hearing world and neglected to learn ASL. Billy is deaf, not Deaf, and he struggles to integrate into his hearing family. When Billy meets Sylvia, a young woman who is becoming deaf and has been raised by a Deaf family, he finally discovers what it means to be heard. She teaches Billy sign language and exposes him to a whole new community. Tribes follows Billy’s attempt to be a part of many worlds at once: his family’s, Sylvia’s, and the Deaf community, all while striving to find his own identity (Canadian Stage 4).

Raine first had the idea of writing Tribes when watching a documentary about a deaf couple. “The woman was pregnant. They wanted their baby to be deaf. I was struck by the thought that this was actually what many people feel, deaf or otherwise.” In learning sign language, Raine discovered sign has a different grammar. She describes that in the learning curve, “I felt stupid, slow, uncomprehending. Was this what it might be like to be a deaf person trying to follow a rapid spoken conversation?”

For many Deaf audience members, Raine achieved “the real deal” as noted in The

Guardian (Swinbourne, “For Deaf People, Tribes is, Finally, the Real Deal”). Writer Charlie

Swinbourne describes:

[…]Nina Raine shows us the crossroads every deaf person reaches. Do you make the best

of being deaf in a hearing world, straining and guessing at words you cannot hear? Or do

you seek out other deaf people, and start to communicate in a way you can more easily

understand? Cole 21

Figure 10: Tribes, photo by Sara Krulwich for The New York Times One of the issues Tribes addresses is the complex continuum along which different people chose to live their lives in different ways. According to Chris Jones, a critic for the

Chicago Tribune, Tribes is “a remarkably balanced play that treats the hearing family’s determination that their son not be stigmatized with considerable sympathy” (“Deaf Star of

Tribes Wants Theater World to Listen”). John McGinty, the actor who played Billy in the

Steppenwolf production, is an only child and the only deaf person in his family. So, similar to

Billy, McGinty lives in the dichotomous worlds of deaf and hearing. He told Jones, “I incorporate both the deaf and the hearing worlds into my life. It is a constant negotiation. In the play, my character wants to be known as Billy, not as a person who is deaf.”

Jones asked McGinty if he felt that deaf audiences who came to see Tribes got something different out of the play. He discusses one scene in which Billy signs his fury at his highly educated father’s refusal to learn sign language, despite being perfectly willing to study Chinese. Cole 22

McGinty claimed, “I don't think the hearing audience fully understands the implicit slight there, but when we have deaf people in our audience, we really can feel their reaction.”

McGinty was clear about his feelings regarding hearing actors in deaf roles. Noting that there are many deaf actors who compete for every such role, he said, “I think it is crucial that deaf characters are played by deaf actors because only deaf actors can understand what is going on with a deaf character” (qtd. in Jones).

Figure 11: Spring Awakening, photo by Joan Marcus As Linda Buchwald states, “if Deaf stories and actors are having a moment, from Spring

Awakening to Tribes, it’s only because the rest of the world is finally discovering a well- established theatrical tradition.” Although Deaf actors have historically been relegated to the sidelines, even in plays with Deaf characters, visibility as well as opportunity is becoming more available. However, much of the material still portrays Deafness in relation to hearing. Even in

Switched at Birth, which features multiple Deaf characters, the two main characters are Bay and

Daphne: one hearing, one Deaf. The time has come for the hearing to listen to what the Deaf want, without Sarah Norman being forced to scream it. According to Allegra Ringo in her article,

“Understanding Deafness: Not Everyone Wants to Be ‘Fixed,’” hearing people often assume that Cole 23

Deaf people would naturally want to take advantage of any method that could lead them to become part of the hearing world — especially cochlear implants, a technology that does just that. In reality, the assumption that Deaf people want to hear is far from true. Audism assumes the ability to hear is more natural than the ability to not hear. To truly overcome an audist position, perhaps we need to start actually watching theatre and not expect to listen to it.

Works Cited

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Buchwald, Linda. “Deaf Talent, Seen and Heard.” American Theatre. Theatre Communications Group, 20 Oct. 2015. Web. 5 Dec. 2015.

Children of a Lesser God. Prod. Burt Sugarman and Patrick Palmer. Dir. Randa Haines. By Hesper Anderson and Mark Howard Medoff. Perf. William Hurt, Marlee Matlin, and Piper Laurie. Paramount Pictures, 1986. DVD.

“Children of a Lesser God Summary.” Enotes.com. Web. 05 Dec. 2015.

Cooper, Chet. “Katie LeClerc Hear and Now.” Ability Magazine. Aug. 2011. Web. 05 Dec. 2015.

Cormier, Samantha. My Journey to Finding Betsy and Lindsey in ‘Clybourne Park’. Thesis. Savannah College of Art and Design, 2015.

Davidson, Michael. "Hearing Things: The Scandal of Speech in Deaf Performance." Concerto for the Left Hand: Disability and the Defamiliar Body. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan, 2011. 80-99. Print.

Hernandez, Ernio. “Deaf West’s Big River Shines on Broadway as Roundabout Revival Opens, July 24.” Playbill. 24 July 2003. Web. 05 Dec. 2015.

Jones, Chris. “Deaf Star of Tribes Wants Theater World to Listen.” Chicago Tribune. 09 Jan. 2014. Web. 05 Dec. 2015.

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Kitchens, Emily. “Hearing in a Deaf World: An Actor’s Clybourne Park Lesson.” American Conservatory Theater Blog.18 Feb. 2011. Web. 05 Dec. 2015.

Medoff, Mark. Children of a Lesser God. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1980. Print. “New York Deaf Theatre.” New York Deaf Theatre. Web. 05 Dec. 2015.

Norris, Bruce. Clybourne Park. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 2012. Print.

Ouzounian, Richard. “Nina Raine’s Tribes Gets Tone Deaf Production: Review.” Toronto Star, 07 Feb. 2014. Web. 05 Dec. 2015.

Paulson, Michael. “Lights, Gestures, Action!” The New York Times 4 Oct. 2015, Arts & Leisure sec.: 1+. Print.

Powers, Helen. Signs of Silence: Bernard Bragg and the National Theatre of the Deaf. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1972. Print.

“Race, Pulitzers and Punchlines.” Steppenwolf Theatre Company. 2011. Web. 05 Dec. 2015.

Raine, Nina. Tribes. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 2013. Print

Rée, Jonathan. “The Making of the Deaf: The Reproduction of Sign Communities, 1880-1980.” I See a Voice: Deafness, Language, and the Senses--A Philosophical History. New York: Metropolitan, H. Holt, 1999. 230-43. Print.

Ringo, Allegra. “Understanding Deafness: Not Everyone Wants to Be ‘Fixed’” The Atlantic. Atlantic Media Company, 09 Aug. 2013. Web. 05 Dec. 2015.

Rizzo, Carita. “Katie LeClerc Hypes Switched at Birth’s Alternate Reality Episode - Exclusive!” Wetpaint. 01 July 2013. Web. 05 Dec. 2015.

Schachter, Erin, Holly LaFlamme, Melissa Farmer, and Sally Spofforth. “Study Guide: Tribes.” 2014. Web. 5 Dec. 2015.

“Spring Awakening on Broadway.” Web. 05 Dec. 2015.

Swinbourne, Charlie. “For Deaf People, Tribes is, Finally, the Real Deal.” The Guardian. 12 Nov. 2010. Web. 5 Dec. 2015.

Zinoman, Jason. “Keen Company Stages a Love Story Beyond Words.” The New York Times. 22 Mar. 2006. Web. 5 Dec. 2015.