Michael Brosilow
A group of five people having a conversation in a kitchen and living room.
Maggie Cramer, Casey Hoekstra, Joshua M. Castille, Lindsay Welliver and Colleen Madden, from left, in "Tribes," American Players Theatre, 2025.
Nina Raine’s Tribes dives headfirst into questions of exclusion and belonging: What makes a tribe? Who gets to belong, and who is left out? Who gets to speak and who is silenced? These questions feel especially relevant at a time when tribalism is almost everywhere one turns.
In American Players Theatre’s production of Tribes, the family dining room — perhaps the most intimate and charged of domestic spaces — becomes an arena where allegiances are tested, outsiders are scrutinized, and love is tangled with cruelty.
As the lights rise on a family dinner, words fly like darts — layered with private jokes, intellectual jousting, and long-nursed grudges. All three adult children have moved back home, and tensions run high as the older siblings vie for their parents’ approval. Daniel (Casey Hoekstra) wants his father, Christopher (Jim DeVita), to weigh in on his jargon-loaded thesis. Ruth (Maggie Cramer), an aspiring opera singer still performing in church basements, asks her mother, Beth (Colleen Madden), to help translate a libretto.
The family’s identity is built around their self-image as unconventional creatives. Beth is writing a “marriage breakup detective novel,” while Christopher, a sharp-tongued writer, seems to relish using words to wound as much as to illuminate.
The youngest sibling, Billy (Joshua M. Castille), is the odd one out. He has no artistic pursuit — and he’s the only deaf member of the family. His parents never taught him to sign, insisting he rely on lip reading. The family seems oblivious to how often they shut him out of their rapid-fire banter. When Billy asks what was said, the refrain is always, “Nothing. You’re not missing anything.” Occasionally, the family’s chatter falls into silence, and a spotlight isolates Billy, offering a glimpse into the loneliness of his world.
Everything changes when Billy meets Sylvia (Lindsay Welliver), a young woman raised in a deaf family who is losing her hearing. She’s stunned to learn his parents prevented him from learning to sign.
Sylvia and Billy’s romance blossoms, and a new world opens as Billy discovers the Deaf community. But when Sylvia teaches Billy to sign, cracks appear in his family’s fragile equilibrium. Worried Billy will abandon their codependent tribe, Daniel warns him not to expect too much from his new relationship. But for Billy, this is more than romance: “It’s like there was an empty place at the table,” he tells Daniel. “I was alone. Now I’m not.”
Yet just as Billy finds the belonging he’s craved, Sylvia becomes disillusioned with the Deaf community’s cliques and hierarchies as she struggles with her hearing loss and new identity as a dDeaf person. Meanwhile, Billy’s conflict with his family boils over. Which tribe will he choose?
Directed by John Langs, the production sustains a stomach-knotting tension that never fully eases. Capturing the complexity of family dynamics is challenging in any medium — especially when love and dysfunction are so tightly intertwined. Every member of the cast is outstanding, but Castille shines as Billy, conveying a wide range of emotion as his character gains the confidence to question the status quo. He’s supported by nuanced work from Hoekstra and APT veterans DeVita and Madden. DeVita’s role could easily have slipped into caricature as the story’s villain, but he brings an emotional subtlety that invites compassion even for this difficult father.
The only place the play falters is midway through the second act, when one too many plot twists are thrown into the mix and never fully explored. I wished Raine had kept the play focused on the family dynamics rather than muddying the water with unnecessary narrative tangents. However, the cast is skilled enough to navigate the plot hiccups and bring the play to its emotional conclusion.
In Tribes, words are both weapons and shields—treasured, gifted, or withheld. The play confronts the power and limits of language, love, and the messy bonds of the first tribe we ever belong to: our family.
Tribes runs through September 27 at the Touchstone Theatre at APT.
