'Jumpers for Goalposts'

The final play in my series at Washington, D.C.’s Studio Theatre was Tom Wells’s Jumpers for Goalposts, a U.S. première.  I caught the official opening performance in Studio’s Metheny Theatre, the matinee on Sunday, 17 May; the play started previews on 13 May and is scheduled to close on 21 June.  This was not only a play I didn’t know, but a playwright whose name I’d never heard before as well.  It was a delightful introduction to the work of an artist from whom I think we will hear more in the near future because he has an interesting and striking approach to theater and an eye and ear for human behavior which he portrays with a rare sensitivity.

Wells is a Britisher, born in East Yorkshire in 1985.  The son of a farmer, Wells won admission to Oxford University and graduated with a degree in English.  He returned to Yorkshire to study playwriting at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds; the company would début his first play, Me, As a Penguin, in 2009.  Though he’d wanted to be a writer, Wells wasn’t considering playwriting—but the WYP program was free, so, the young dramatist now says, “It was a happy accident that I got there and loved it.”  

Like Jumpers for Goalposts and many of his other plays, Penguin is set in the fishing town of Hull, a port city of a quarter million inhabitants where Wells grew up.  (“It’s about what happens when you’re outside your comfort zone,” said Wells in an interview five years ago.  “Obviously there’s a penguin involved . . . .”)  The WYP production toured Britain and ended up on the stage of London’s Arcola Theatre in 2010.  His next work, The Kitchen Sink, premièred at the Bush Theatre, London, in 2011, and was a break-out hit, garnering Wells the 2011 Critics’ Circle Theatre Award for Most Promising Playwright and the 2012 George Devine Award for Most Promising Playwright.  Jumpers for Goalposts premièred at the Watford Palace Theatre in London in 2013, a co-production of the Watford, London’s Paines Plough Theatre Company, and the Hull Truck Theatre, then toured Britain in 2013 (stopping in Hull) and ended with a well-received run at the Bush in 2014.  Other plays by Tom Wells include Notes for First Time Astronauts (2009), About a Goth (2009), Spacewang (2011), and Cosmic (2013).  (Wells has also written for TV and radio.)  From what I have been able to discern, none of his work has been staged in the U.S. until now—but I predict that Studio’s Jumpers won’t be Wells’s last stateside outing.  He’s far too interesting to expire on a stage in the Logan Circle neighborhood of Washington, D.C.  (As I write these words, no reviews of the U.S. preem of Jumpers have been published.  I guess we’ll see if I’m right about his critical reception in a day or two.)

All of Wells’s scripts include at least one gay character.  (Jumpers has four—out of five.)  His plays, however, aren’t “gay” plays the way that descriptor usually signifies.  He’s gay and uses his experience of growing up and living as a gay man in Northern England as the material out of which he crafts his plays.  The plot and the dialogue reference gay events and topics—Jumpers’ story is about a gay pub soccer league, for instance—but what the play’s about is friendship, reaching out, looking for love, trust, and helping each other out.  It just happens that the people working all this out are mostly gay; but the issues are universal.  As David Muse, Studio’s artistic director, explains, Wells “writes a straightforward story with characters who happen to be gay, presenting their lives as varied, mainstream, and normal.  And he waits for a world where that act doesn’t feel so surprising.”  In other words, what Wells is doing is writing about ideas important to him (and, I believe, most of the rest of us) in a medium with which he’s intimately familiar.  Like any good, serious writer.  (Tennessee Williams wrote plays on important themes set in the American South; Neil Simon wrote his plays populated by Jews from New York; Marsha Norman and Wendy Wasserstein wrote about women; David Henry Hwang’s plays are mostly about Chinese-Americans.  ‘Write what you know,’ right?)

Muse says that Wells’s effort “to turn the assumptions of the ‘gay play’ on its head” is the second of the writer’s “two quietly subversive” intentions.  “The first,” writes Muse, is “upending the notion . . . that drama is conflict.”  The Studio head observes that Wells “is driven to write honestly about his experience of life, which seems to him to involve conflicted people trying to do right by each other far more frequently than people in direct conflict.”  ( I guess you could argue that the dramatist’s “conflict” is internal instead of external.)  Comparing Wells’s dramaturgy to that of Studio favorite Annie Baker, Muse concludes that the playwright “has a gift for making art out of the everyday.” 

Since I haven’t seen or read any of Wells’s other plays (some of his texts are published in British editions that are available at U.S. libraries and through Barnes & Noble or Amazon), I have to take Muse’s word that all of Wells’s work exhibits these characteristics.  I can attest to the fact that Jumpers does, and though some may find the writer’s dramaturgy sentimental or soft-hearted, I found the play charming and touching.  The characters are all likeable, even endearing, though hardly high-achievers, and I wanted them to succeed—if not at soccer, at least in their other, small (or, perhaps, not-so-small), personal desires.  (In tandem with Wells’s writing, of course, this effect is tremendously aided by the quality of the performances and the astuteness of Matt Torney’s direction.  I’ll get to these successes shortly.)

The 100-minute, intermissionless Jumpers for Goalposts, as I’ve already hinted, is set in the locker room of a public playing field in Hull where the five teammates of Barely Athletic, the pub soccer (they call it football, of course—silly Brits) team which makes up the cast, change after the five-a-side league games.  This is hardly World Cup soccer; it’s one step above pick-up or sand-lot games, and Barely Athletic easily measures up to its (intentionally) sarcastic name.  (A word about the title here: in street soccer, the popular equivalent I gather of stickball in New York City, the field is whatever empty space the players can find and the equipment is whatever they can improvise.  Often the goal is marked off with bits of clothing, such as jumpers, the common British word for sweaters or sweatshirts.  “Jumpers for goalposts” is a colloquial name for this kind of soccer game and is the title of a series of video games and at least one book on the sport, published in 2011, that has nothing to do with the play.)  Barely Athletic have the ignominious rep of losing all their games, so when 30-ish Viv is kicked off the Lesbian Rovers for being bossy, she appoints herself player-coach of Barely Athletic, a team made up principally of patrons of the pub she owns.  There’s 20-something Danny, her assistant coach who is trying to become a youth-soccer coach; Beardy Geoff, a stocky (and, I guess obviously, bearded) Falstaffian street busker, in his later 20’s; Viv’s widowed brother-in-law, Joe, turning 40 and the team’s token straight guy; and the new boy, 19-year-old Luke, an almost painfully shy library worker who still lives at home and dutifully returns after each game for dinner with the folks even as his new teammates gather at the pub. 

The five each have slightly different motives for wanting to be on the team.  Only Viv (Kimberly Gilbert) actually sees it as a sports outlet: she wants to beat the lesbians and hopes Barely Athletic will be her means—though she gets her coaching ideas from a Soccer Coaching for Dummies manual.  The others want to be part of the team for social purposes, the comradery and friendship: Danny (Zdenko Martin) has a crush on young Luke and wants Barely Athletic to be proof of his skill for the sports center’s manager.  Joe (Michael Glenn) is still grieving the loss of his wife and the team is a way to keep from sitting at home alone in despair.  Geoff (Jonathan Judge-Russo), unattached, isn’t beyond some serious flirting with members of the opposition; he’s also Danny’s best friend and confidant—for Danny has a secret which only Geoff knows.  Luke (Liam Forde), who has no friends of his own and confides the insignificant details of his ordinary life to his diary, was attracted to Danny the first time the older boy came into the library to hang a recruitment poster.  That’s just a nutshell summary, of course.  Wells’s characters and situation have a few quirks and curlicues I won’t disclose that prevent Jumpers from being simplistic or predictable.  Even the ending, which is a little pat and neat, isn’t inevitable—though the nature of the play suggests that it’ll be happy-ish or at least bitter-sweet.  Just as there are speed bumps along the way to the final scene, however, we can predict there’ll be more to come after the play’s over. 

Each scene of Jumpers begins as the lights come up on the thrust stage of the 200-seat Metheny with an unseen radio announcer (the voice of James Alexander Gordon, Scottish radio broadcaster famous for reading the soccer scores on BBC Radio) reeling off the scores of the matches played that Sunday.  (The sound design is by Kenny Neal.)  The five players file into the changing room and banter as they change out of their soccer uniforms and back into street clothes.  This is how we meet them; the backstories and exposition is excellently handled by Wells—even Danny’s secret comes out naturally.  Viv launches into her performance notes—but remarkably without recriminations or scolding.  Losing, in Wells’s world, is okay, as long as you try your hardest and take your best shot—even if it’s at the other team’s goal!   (Viv does try to get Beardy to lose his childish knit hat, his “good-luck” charm—not that it’s really working!—but he resists, revealing that he wears it to hide the scar on his forehead from a recent gay-bashing he suffered.)  As the play unfolds, and we learn more bits about each player, they actually manage to win one game (against Tranny United—Get it?  Like Manchester United—a team that played in leopard-print skirts and high heels on a muddy field!) and tie another.  The rest, Barely Athletic loses, so Viv doesn’t beat the lesbian team this season—but there’s always next year! 

The single set, a bare-bones changing room with a shower off-stage up left, designed with spot-on look by Studio’s house designer, Debra Booth, is the world of this play.  The five characters may have outside lives—the pub, their jobs, their homes—but this is where the people we get to know live.  The cast dwells here as if they’d been coming to this place for years, amid the left-overs of other teams, the dirt they track in from the field (which Danny sweeps up as the rest of the team filter out), the first-aid box on the wall, the folding chars stacked against a wall.  Shared with other players in other leagues, this is still their universe when we see them, and Michael Giannitti’s lighting brings the whole place to drab, harsh—but familiar—life as the players file in after the match.  The same’s true of Kathleen Geldard’s sports-kit costumes.  These folks live in them, for all their lack of athletic prowess, they’re as comfortable in the gear as they are in their own skins.  (Halfway through the play, Viv brings in new jerseys personalized for each team member: “Coach Viv,” “Assistant Coach Danny,” and even “Token Straight Joe.”  They’re all comfortable with who they are to one another.  This is not a fish-out-of-water play: these people are perfectly content with who and where they are.)

Torney’s staging is natural and straightforward, nothing fancy or showy; some of the actors even sit with their backs to us on occasion.  He’s created with his actors a sense that these five are comfortable with one another and with their surroundings—this is everyday life for them.  The movement, though minimal in the confined quarters of the locker room, is plenty for keeping the play from seeming static—horseplay, an occasional bit of practice (they try to make a goalie of Joe), changing, sweeping up, and so on.  The life on stage seems neither practiced nor gratuitous.  The play’s emotional life, too, is naturally modulated—no histrionic highs or depression lows.  As Studio dramaturg Adrien-Alice Hansel puts it, “The conflicts and triumphs are modest but potent—exactly life-sized,” and Torney’s company conveys this on stage superbly.

With the help of dialect coach Gary Logan, Torney’s cast masters the Yorkshire accent consistently and (to my ear) accurately enough to be convincing.  (My companions did mention that they sometimes had trouble understanding the dialect, and I did, too, but that didn’t detract from the point of the play, which doesn’t depend on foreknowledge of the Yorkshire idiom or British soccer culture.  The things that do matter come through loud and clear, trust me.)  Torney’s major directorial achievement, though, is to have melded the five actors, who don’t seem to have ever worked together or at Studio or for Torney before, into a perfect ensemble.  For 100 minutes, I had no trouble believing that these folks are buds.  Individual stage characters are the creations of the actor, guided, certainly, by the director—but a real acting ensemble is the accomplishment of the director.  It starts with the casting, but it’s not easy to manage.  Jumpers doesn’t work on stage if the five actors aren’t a team—just like Barely Athletic are supposed to be on the soccer field (. . . er, football pitch).

Creating the ensemble may have been Torney’s job, but those individual character portrayals are well seen-to as well.  (This is an actors’ play—the cast and their work must carry the production.)  I’m not familiar with any of this cast’s work, even the D.C.-area vets in the company, but they all give exemplary performances.  No one falls back on stereotypes or clichés—not that Wells’s writing leads in that direction anyway—and no one shies away from committing to the characters’ more unappealing traits.  Gilbert’s Viv, for instance, is bossy, but she’s no bitch dyke with a brush cut.  In fact, Gilbert plays her as almost maternal—a little brusque around the edges, but if Barely Athletic were the Lost Boys, Gilbert’s Viv would be Wendy.  If Wendy were a lesbian, that is. 

Though young Luke is the obvious shy guy in the bunch, Martin plays Danny with almost equal diffidence.  While Luke’s timidity comes from lack of worldly experience, Martin’s Danny is just a gentle person.  His awkwardness when he reveals his secret to Luke makes palpable Danny’s reluctance to tell his new friend what we can also see he knows he must.  Martin’s disappointment at the way Luke takes the news is almost too intense to watch (even though we can guess that a reversal must be coming).  If Martin could pass for a healthy young athlete, though, Forde is the classic geek—tall, gangly, skinny, beanpole-straight.  He could be a goalpost!  He absolutely looks like the kind of awkward kid who’d have trouble constantly trying to push on a “pull” door.  But Forde makes Luke so endearing, so in need of peer companionship, that his welcome into the group is self-justifying.  Of course, Forde’s portrayal of the long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs makes Luke’s quiet return to the locker room after a breach all the more powerful. 

If Viv is the mom in this ad hoc surrogate family, and Luke and Danny the little brothers, Judge-Russo’s Beardy is the older brother; though not always wise or even reliable—no Wally Cleaver or David Nelson, this big bro—his Beardy’s innately protective and present.  Judge-Russo’s a bear of a guy, roly-poly with a big, round face, but he’s a teddy, not a grizzly.  His Beardy is just as needy as any of the others, and as vulnerable, but he keeps putting himself out there, even when it’s not so advisable.  Beardy’s a busker, a street entertainer, but Judge-Russo (who has some operas on his résumé) doesn’t present him as someone who sings or plays his (hot pink) guitar like a pro—yet his aim throughout the play is to select and perform a song in the audition for a Pride celebration coming up.  (In the last scene, Beardy decides on a pop cover of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “You’ll Never Walk Alone” from Carousel that’s become a soccer anthem in the U.K.  Now there’s Wells’s message for this play.)

That leaves Joe—not a father figure despite being older than his mates, but more like the concerned uncle (he is Mom’s brother-in-law after all).  Glenn’s portrayal is a sad sack, as much in need of the team’s support as they might be in need of his.  His (lack of) facial expressions remind me some of Buster Keaton, “The Great Stone Face.”  Indeed, Glenn infuses Joe with some of Keaton’s warmth and sympathy.  Even though Joe’s the only straight member of the team and despite his total lack of athletic ability—less even perhaps than any of the rest (the scene in which Danny and Beardy try to teach Joe to be a goalie is priceless)—Glenn makes him an integral part of the group, a member in as good standing as Danny or Beardy, as welcome as newcomer Luke and leadership-usurper Viv.    

We don’t know what will become of Luke and Danny’s nascent relationship.  We never learn if Danny gets his job at the sports center.  We don’t know if Beardy even makes the audition, much less secures a spot on the program or gets the career boost he hopes for.  We’ll never hear if Barely Athletic ever beats the Lesbian Rovers (Viv turns over head-coaching to Danny at the end of Jumpers) or even wins another game.  But we can be sure that, as long as these five are together, they won’t ever walk alone.  And that’s what Tom Wells wants us to know.  I know some people who’ll see that as sappy.  That’s okay.  I’m a sap.

Now it’s time to see if any of the published critics agree with me or not and if, as I predicted, Tom Wells and Jumpers for Goalposts get their own career boosts on this side of the Atlantic.  So, starting with the Washington Post, Nelson Pressley, describing the play as “sweet and feather-light,” writes that “there’s a bashfulness to this tender play that makes you want to put your arm around it.”  “Wells’s script is decidedly offbeat,” Pressley continues: “You may be hard-pressed to name a recent play as ginger as this.”  The Postman sums up, “For a locker-room play, it’s astoundingly decent,” but he warns that all the characters’ lives are “gravely complicated” and the play “deepens” as it unfolds and that “the touching performances and graceful writing add up.”  (I cheated a bit: the Post published its notice on the morning before I wrote this part of the report.  I already knew that Pressley generally agrees with me.) 

In Metro Weekly, Washington’s LGBT magazine, Doug Rule also calls the play “touching” and “tender” (a trend, I think we’ll find) and “is as winsome as they come.”  Rule praises the quality of the cast Torney assembled to impart Wells’s “quietly powerful and eventually surprising tale.”  The Metro man, however, notes that Jumpers “tackles some big issues and aspects of modern-day life . . . in a remarkably realistic, restrained way.”  A “tart-but-tender romantic comedy” is how Chris Klimek characterizes Jumpers in Washington City Paper, but he quibbles that the play “would be even stronger if it ended 10 minutes earlier,” ultimately forgiving Wells because the acting is so good in the late scene he thinks we don’t need.

On DC Theatre Scene, Steven McKnight, noting that “Wells has the rare ability to find humor in ordinary people and here he mines the comedy in the real-life difficulties of his characters with wit and affection,” reports that Jumpers for Goalposts demonstrates “heartwarming humor and charm.”  McKnight does find that some of Jumpers’ “more serious turns feel a little forced or obvious” and that the plot “is wrapped up a bit too neatly,” but he adds that Torney’s direction “manages to minimize these difficulties.”  April Forrer dubs Studio’s staging of Jumpers for Goalposts “a hands-down terrific production of a charming script” on MD Theatre Guide, declaring, “Each character is completely lovable and layered in distinct ways, so getting to know each one is a joy.”  In the end, Forrer proclaims, “This play is a gem.”  Jumpers is “a sweet, side-splittingly funny, and subversive romantic comedy,” writes John Stoltenberg of DCMetroTheaterArts, in a production “that will knock your sweat socks off.”  Wells, says Stoltenberg, has “a wholly original angle of vision that, besides being laugh-out-loud hilarious, is heartwarming and liberating,” and dubs Jumpers “an incandescent comedy.” 

TheaterMania’s Barbara Mackay affirms that Wells has written such a “sensitive, intelligent” play that it manages “to reveal intense heartache and joy “ in Studio’s “excellent American premiere.”  The playwright “writes with a light touch,” says Mackay, “drawing his characters with a great deal of humor and an equal amount of serious emotion, without making them sound maudlin.”  While on Broadway World, Heather Nadolny describes Jumpers as “heartfelt, well balanced and does not try too hard,” and finds that in a theater where plays are overwritten and underdeveloped, “this one is a winner.”  Each of the familiar characters, Nadolny says, “connects with audience” and Wells’s “heartstring-tugging moments are balanced with hilarious jokes, quips and physical comedy.”  The Studio production, Nadolny reports, provides “romance, wit and empa[t]hy” and she emphatically advises, “See it, and enjoy.”

'Laugh' (Studio Theatre, Washington, D.C.)

I seem to be having a run of plays that have made me think the authors all came up with a gimmick or a plot idea first and then devised a theme or point as an excuse to use it.  Back in January, it was Tarell Alvin McCraney’s Choir Boy at the Studio Theatre in Washington, D.C. (gospel singing); early in March, it was New York’s Signature Theatre Company’s Big Love by Charles Mee (modernizing Aeschylus’ The Suppliant Women); and now it’s Beth Henley’s Laugh, a world première presentation also at Washington’s Studio.  (The ROT reports on Choir Boy and Big Love were posted on 24 January and 18 March, respectively.) 

On Sunday, 22 March, I drove into the District from suburban Maryland to see the matinee performance of Laugh at Studio’s Logan Circle base.  It’s Henley’s first outing since The Jacksonian in 2013; her previous script was 2006’s Ridiculous Fraud (about which ROT contributor Kirk Woodward posted on 20 November 2014).  Laugh started previews on the thrust stage of the Mead Theatre, Studio’s largest space at 218 seats, on 11 March, and opened on 15 March; the production’s scheduled to close on 19 April.  Though I suspect that Henley and director David Schweizer, the writer’s longtime friend, have their eyes on a New York transfer, no plans have been announced.

Henley, 63 this May, was born in Jackson, Mississippi, and graduated from Southern Methodist University in Dallas in 1974 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in acting.  A member of the university acting troupe (Henley’s mother, Elizabeth, was an actress), she also wrote her first play at SMU, a one-act called Am I Blue.  From 1975 to 1976, she taught playwriting at the University of Illinois in Urbana (now UI at Urbana-Champaign) and the Dallas Minority Repertory Theater.   In 1976, Henley moved to Los Angeles, where she currently lives, and now teaches playwriting at Loyola Marymount University in LA.  

The playwright has been identified as a “Southern” playwright all her career.  (This is partly what Kirk examines in “Beth Henley and Ridiculous Fraud.”)  Her first professionally produced play was Crimes of the Heart, which débuted as the winner of the Great American Play Contest at the Actors Theatre of Louisville in 1979.  It was produced Off-Broadway by the Manhattan Theatre Club the next year and won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1981.  (The production won or was nominated for several other awards, including a Tony nom for Best Play, and the playwright’s film adaptation in 1986 garnered Henley an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay.)  Henley has also worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood, adapting her own play for Miss Firecracker, 1989, and writing the scripts for True Stories and Nobody's Fool, both 1986.  Through the late ’70s and the ’80s, Henley wrote essentially naturalistic tragicomedies about the small-town South, among them The Miss Firecracker Contest (1979) and The Wake of Jamey Foster (1981), emphasizing the female characters, but in the later ’80s and the ’90s, the writer branched out and began experimenting, though somewhat under the public’s radar.  (Like Laugh at Studio, many of her premières have been in small rep companies outside New York City.)  As Studio artistic director David Muse says, “If you haven’t paid attention to her work lately, I have a surprise for you: Beth Henley is a genre-defying stylistic innovator.”  The Jacksonian, a play about the ’60s civil rights movement in her native city, Mississippi’s segregated capital, has been described as a noir play with a twisty and fragmented plot that depicts extreme violence; Ridiculous Fraud was dubbed a “crackpot comedy” by Charles Isherwood in the New York Times.

The gimmick in Laugh is that it mimics the antics of old movies, especially the silents and the early talkies.  The leading characters are Mabel and Roscoe, named for silent-film legends Mabel Normand (1892-1930) and Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle  (1887-1933).  Other characters are composites or parodies of Hollywood figures in the stars’ lives and the early film industry.  After the work on The Jacksonian, a play the Washington Post’s Nelson Pressley describes as “a pitch-dark noir comedy with sex and drugs and a 1964 Mississippi murder,” Henley says, “I was exhausted to the extent I wasn’t sure I wanted to write another play.”  After living with The Jacksonian, which American Theatre senior editor Rob Weinert-Kendt calls “bottomlessly bleak,” the playwright thought, “I just want to laugh.”  (There was a seven-year gap following Ridiculous Fraud, the longest lay-off of Henley’s career, because the dramatist reportedly had to come to terms with her rage at the subject matter of The Jacksonian, based on her own experiences as a young girl in her hometown.)  Making people laugh, she adds, “is the most subversive thing to do,” and one thing that makes Henley laugh are old movies.  “I just love the world of film, silent film, and of vaudeville,” she confesses, so she began experimenting with “the world without any language.”  She was especially inspired by Normand and Arbuckle—Normand’s “rebellious spirit, her zest for life” and Arbuckle’s pratfalls (which are limned in Laugh by Roscoe as well as other characters).

Watching the silent comedies of Max Sennett and Hal Roach “just made me feel so good,” Henley asserts, and she became fascinated with a world that was just inventing itself.  She also wanted to “explore identity,” the way we reveal and disguise ourselves to others, especially the way actors take on alternative personas.  “So I imagined an ensemble of actors to tell this story,” Henley continues, “and I have two main characters who take on disguises themselves.”  Thus was Laugh—which follows the adventures of Mabel, recently orphaned and independently wealthy, as she moves in with her greedy aunt who requires her nephew, Roscoe, to woo Mabel to control her fortune—conceived, and Schweizer’s production at Studio includes multiple disguises (including a few quick changes), falls, pies in the face (a gag Arbuckle pioneered in film), and other staples of vaudeville, music hall, and old flicks.  Normand and Arbuckle, who made many film together, also both worked extensively with (and for) Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton.  The staging shows quite a few instances of one actor or another channeling Chaplin and, it seemed to me, Stan Laurel and Margaret Dumont.  As director Schweizer, whom Henley affirms she’s known and admired for many years and with whom she did a workshop in Palo Alto, California, observes, “It’s derived from a deep affection for silent movie and early talkie culture.”

As a tribute to old movies, the two-hour, episodic Laugh (which includes one intermission) is twice too long to sustain its internal humor.  Unless you’re an indefatigable fan of old flickers—and I’m not all that fond of the silents, myself—the conceit wears thin before the first hour ends.  But Henley purports to have other ideas on her mind.  In her interview with the Studio literary director, the playwright states that Laugh “is a play about love, and about understanding yourself.”  It’s also about greed and power—and who wields it (Normand was one of the first female movie stars to take control of her own career and start her own production company)—and the disparity between the illusion of Hollywood glamour and glitter and the gritty, sometimes nasty reality.  (The play includes a slo-mo orgy, certainly a reference to the scandalous party that derailed Arbuckle’s career, and a shooting much like the one that tarnished Normand’s reputation.)  The problem I had was that Henley’s purported themes seem secondary to the set-up and aren’t all that strongly delineated.  They’re also not really topics that aren’t often explored in other plays, stories, films, and even TV shows.  The result is that the theatrical framework, the homage to old movies and old Hollywood, overpowers the dramatic content.  To borrow a line I quoted in the report on my last theater experience, Charles Mee’s Big Love, if the movie parody is Henley “scaffolding” the way Greek tragedy was for Mee, and she “threw away the scaffolding” as he says he does, Laugh would simply collapse because there’s not enough substance left to keep it standing.  (Unless, as I said, you’re really queer for old flicks.)

None of this is the fault of the performances (unlike, say, the problem I had with the Studio production of McRaney’s Choir Boy).  Schweizer’s six actors do yeoman’s work and more as the director seems to have encouraged his talented company to reach for the rafters.  Not only do they execute the technical demands of Schweizer’s Laugh, the physical comedy, but they handle Henley’s overbaked lines, which she herself describes as “influenced by the written dialogue cards between the scenes in the silent films,” with conviction and grace—if that’s the word to describe what transpires in Henley and Schweizer’s slapstick universe.  I don’t know the work of any of this cast, so I can’t say if Laugh marks a stretch for any of them or if they are all accustomed to this kind of extreme acting, but in either instance, they all did magnificent jobs with their roles (and four of the actors play multiple roles over the span of the play). 

As Mabel, the ward of a prospector in the California Gold Rush who’s suddenly orphaned in a mining explosion that also leaves her wealthy, Helen Cespedes starts off as a crude, simple pumpkin, though one with native wiles that come in pretty handy soon enough, and ends up a Hollywood sophisticate who calls herself Masha Snow.  Throughout, however, she’s self-reliant, strong, oddly pure (even as she nearly gets roped into a “pornographic Valentine” scheme that she essentially turns to her own advantage), and true to herself.  Cespedes’s hillbilly miner comes off a little over-the-top, but since all the personas are caricatures and travesties anyway, this is a small cavil.  Opposite her is Creed Garnick’s Roscoe, the butterfly-chasing sissy ward of the brother-and-sister team of Uncle Oscar and Aunt Octobra Defoliant who’s about to be married off to a presumed heiress, the ludicrous and monumentally unattractive Miss Bee Sunshine (until Aunt Octobra discovers the fiancée doesn’t actually have any money!).  As Roscoe admits, he’s a devout coward but he’s devoted to movies and if some of Roscoe’s transformations seem inexplicable, Garnick, whose versatility seems boundless (he comes mighty close to Jefferson Mays’s turn as Montague Navarro in A Gentleman’s Guide To Love & Murder; see my report on 16 October 2014), executes them with panache and glee, papering over many a small defect in the writing. 

Mabel, too, is captivated by the movies and she and Roscoe spend all the ready cash she’s brought with her on them when she, too, becomes a ward of the Defoliants (to keep her around and happy, Aunt Octobra offers to subsidize her movie tickets).  The two cinephiles essentially learn about life by imitating the movie scenes they seem to channel.  But while Mabel transforms herself from rude bumpkin to Hollywood star, essentially taking on a new identity, it’s Garnick’s Roscoe who takes on the many disguises and temporary personas of, say, Chaplin in many of his films.  (Consider 1925’s Gold Rush, for instance, in which Chaplin played The Lone Prospector, who in turn played an explorer, waiter, valet, millionaire, dancer, and lover, among others.)  Some of Roscoe’s changes take place in view of us, so we get to witness his alteration.  (Mabel’s shift happens off stage, during the intermission.)  In performance, the main difference between the transformations is that Mabel’s is a change of character to a degree—Cespedes essentially plays two different ones, Mabel and Masha, even though her core remains unaltered—while Roscoe’s are merely disguises, so Garnick’s character remains visible throughout even as his role alters (however superficially—after all, this is a farce, not a tragicomedy!).  Both actors handle the demands flawlessly.

It’d be nearly impossible in a relatively short report to detail all the roles and characterizations handled by the four-actor ensemble, but I’ll spotlight a few, with the understanding that this selection is not a judgment of their quality.  Evan Zes starts off as Curley P. Curtis, Mabel’s uncle and the miner who dies discovering a rich strike in California that precipitates the events that follow.  Near the end of act one, Zes does a turn as a succession of women auditioning for that pornographic Valentine series.  (One reviewer affirms that this “is an actor having some serious fun with his roles.”)  He dons a series of outrageous costumes, revealing his masculine chest and muscular legs (think Corporal Klinger on MASH or the dancers of Les Ballets Trocadero de Monte Carlo), each more outré that the preceding one.  He’s also Masha’s mentor and director when she becomes a silent film star in act two and he’s as demanding as any fictional parody of von Stroheim while at the same time, (literally) madly in love with his creation.

Felicia Curry first shows up as Miss Bee Sunshine, Roscoe’s one-time fiancée, a grotesque with missing teeth, dressed in a preposterous yellow dress only a costume designer with a peculiar sense of humor could have devised.  She also embodies the pornographer’s rifle-slinging cowboy assistant (there must be something in the juxtaposition of a female actor in drag in the same scene as Zes’s female drag turn—but I can’t suss it out) with considerable swagger (all the more noticeable because Curry’s a small woman) and a panoply of other characters such as the film director’s angry wife.  (A quick note here: the supporting ensemble of Studio’s Laugh is the product of color-blind as well as gender-blind casting.  Just as women play men and vice versa, the roles aren’t assigned with any consciousness to race.  It’s simply irrelevant.)

As the Defoliants (named, I suppose, because their rapaciousness and greed operates at a scorched-earth level—but that’s just a guess), Jacob Ming-Trent and Emily Townley depict perhaps two of the most eccentric characters I’ve encountered on any stage in recent memory.  Ming-Trent, a portly man, never moves without an armchair attached to his butt (possibly a comment on “Fatty” Arbuckle who refused to perform roles in which his size—he, too, was a large man—was the source of humor, such as being stuck in a doorway or a chair).  Ming-Trent also appears as the pornographer, whom Mabel blackmails into becoming her butler in Hollywood, and later as a Hollywood dowager in the mold of Margaret Dumont.  (It’s he, not Townley, who seems to have channeled Groucho Marx’s foil.)  Townley’s Aunt Octobra  may be one of the nastiest villains on any current stage and the actress portrays her with a single-mindedness that suggests you don’t want to get in her sights.  She may be poisoning Uncle Oscar and she certainly intends to do away with the wealthy Mabel—after marrying her off to the now-eligible Roscoe.  Octobra’s demise comes when she starts scarfing down bon-bons, initially brought out for Roscoe to woo Mabel with, and accidentally swallows the diamond ring she gave her nephew to propose to Mabel with.  The look of realization on Townley’s face when she understands what’s happened—Roscoe, Mabel, and Oscar have all fled—is almost priceless.  Townley handles many other roles as well.

Schweizer keeps the proceedings moving apace, but they lack the sharp edges and split-second timing that this kind of slapstick parody needs to be really effective.  The director imparted the requisite style to his cast, and they seem to have gotten into the world of the play, but it's soft and mushy overall.  Schweizer, who’s directed both opera and performance art as well as theater for 40 years, should have the wherewithal to get this right, but he seems to have missed the bull’s-eye by several inches. 

In another nod to classic silent films, Henley includes a score of original piano music in her performance text for Laugh.  Composed and performed live on stage (albeit on the periphery of the action) by Wayne Barker (2012 Tony nomination and 2011 Drama Desk Award for his music for Peter and the Starcatcher), who also acts not so much as Narrator (as he’s credited in the program) than as a living title card announcing the time and settings or little labels for scenes, the music is so reminiscent of the accompaniment for the silents that I thought at first Barker was using existing music.  (According to the Washington Post, this gig came out of early readings of the play, presented last August at Vassar College’s New York Stage and Film’s Powerhouse Theater with Schweizer already in the director’s chair, and apparently stuck.  Assuming there are revivals of Laugh, I can’t imagine Barker himself will play them—except maybe a New York première.)  Barker’s playing and discontinuous patter helps keep Laugh flowing and smoothes over the gaps in the sometimes disjointed action.

Andromache Chalfant’s set, a changing but essentially unit environment that evokes the locales—the mine, the Defoliants’ rural home, the porn studio in the middle of nowhere, a train car, and so on—and still lets us imagine a silent-movie set, is open enough to permit plenty of movement, including pratfalls and a couple of stage fights (Joe Isenberg is the fight director and Elena Day is the movement consultant) on the Mead’s smallish stage.  (Set pieces are changed in view of the audience by stagehands who behave much like movie-set grips: noisily and unapologetically.)  Paired with Michael Lincoln’s lighting, the performance environment is effectively apt.  Add the often outrageous costumes of Frank Labovitz, of which Miss Bee Sunshine’s absurd yellow dress and Zes’s three crazy sex-worker outfits were standouts, and the look of Laugh is perhaps the best part of the whole show (with the possible exception of the acting). 

The press was decidedly mixed nearly across the board.  Nearly all the reviewers praised Henley’s invocation of the old movies and her revival of slapstick, but almost all of them also remarked that Laugh is episodic and disjointed, barely holding together as a play.  Headlines and subheads read “Equal parts funny and peculiar” (Washington Post) and “Though the laughs in Studio Theatre’s ‘Laugh’ may be strained at times, the quirky play is pleasant” (Washington Life Magazine).  The sentiment was just about universal.  The Post’s Pressley, for example, after reporting “zest in the wordplay and some brave over-the-top performances,” laments, “The absurdities don’t always cohere.”  Labeling the play “oddball,” Pressley adds, “The fussy throwback stagecraft feels as if it is jostling with Henley’s writing,”  and concludes, “It’s intriguing, and yes, there are real laughs.  But it all keeps hitting jarring potholes; it’s pretty peculiar.”

In the Washington City Paper, Chris Klimek, calling Laugh a “throwback” (a word Postman Pressley also used), describes the production as “a Muppety assemblage of outrageous zut alors! accents, awful fake beards, pendulous fake boobs, and cream-pies-in-faces.”  Schweizer’s Laugh is “staged and performed with a vigor and precision that frequently gels into a persuasive illusion of effortlessness,” continues Klimek in probably the area’s most positive notice, “and unless you’re an incurable sourpuss you’ll probably have a good time.”  (I guess that tells me, huh?)  The cast’s “energy never wanes, even when what seems like it would make a delightful 85-minute one-act stretches out to a mildly enervating two hours and 15 minutes.”   Chuck Conconi acknowledges in Washington Life Magazine that “without question, ‘Laugh’ is quirky, but in spite of all the pratfall antics, it is pleasant, but the laughs are often strained.”  Conconi concludes, “‘Laugh’ is disjointed, sometimes funny, sometimes strained” and that Schweizer’s “direction lacked the split-second timing necessary to take advantage of the play’s madcap demands.” 

On Examiner.com, Kyle Osborne labels Laugh “a love letter to pratfalls and props, to double-takes and dreams of Hollywood and striking it rich.  And pies in the face.”  Praising the performances and some of Schweizer’s and Henley’s bits, however, Osbourne reports, “But these bits of brilliance feel more like vignettes than a cohesive story, which makes it hard to get inside the proceedings.”  The cyber reviewer explains that the audience seemed more amused by “the meta tone” (by which I assume he’s referring to the recreation on a live stage of silent-movie scenes and business) and also observes (as did several other reporters) that pianist-composer-narrator Wayne Barker “may have gotten more laughs than anyone else onstage.”  Jayne Blanchard opens her review in DC Theatre Scene by stating that playwright Henley “slips on the banana peel trying to recreate the side-splitting in Laugh.”  Though she says, “It’s worthwhile to dodge the myriad potholes along P Street to take in Laugh,” the DCTS reviewer goes on to note that the “florid dialogue often sounds like it was composed with a calligraphy pen” and that the play “lurches along episodically” to the extent that it “doesn’t seem to know whether it wants to be a sendup or a stylistic experiment.”  Blanchard sums the experience up by asserting, “Aside from some daffy bits—and you don’t know whether to give credit to Henley or the cast’s demented inventiveness—Laugh is more strange than funny.”

MD Theatre Guide’s Roger Catlin warns that Studio’s première of Laugh is “not always a smooth road to laughter,” opining, “It almost feels like she’s trying anything that works after a while, and in comedy such perceived desperation can dry up the mirth.”  After a litany of ideas that don’t quite work, Catlin concludes, “Laugh is good for one or two, even if it strings things a bit too long.”  In the first paragraph of his DC Metro Theater Arts review, Robert Michael Oliver asserts that the play “elicits laughter, a good deal of it—nay, an excellent amount if the play were only 100 minutes long and tight as a pair of lips suppressing a laugh.”  Then he goes on, “Unfortunately, Henley’s new farce reaches 2 hours and has too much air, not enough invention, and way too many scene changes to gather any momentum.”  Oliver does back off slightly, though, to concede, “Now, none of this is to say that there isn’t a lot to like about Laugh,” naming the design team and the cast as high points, but then he comes back to complain, “What Laugh doesn’t have is the clarity and joy that a farce requires.”  The DCMTA review-writer finds that director Schweizer doesn’t pace the performance “quickly enough” but admits that “Laugh is a pleasant enough theatrical experience,” even though “you’ll find no humor-catharsis in” the production.

In the New York-based cyber press, Pamela Roberts writes on Broadway World that “Laugh, like a frontier tumbleweed, is a bit aimless, loosely formed and messy.”  Roberts expected “movement and pace to be at the forefront,” she explains, but found “the play is far more rooted in language.”  Describing the Studio production as “over-long” for something labeled “slapstick,” it “needs to be trimmed,” Roberts believes.  Nonetheless, given Henley’s talents for “heightened language and quirkiness,” the BWW reviewer acknowledges, “Laugh has some fine moments.”  On Talkin’ Broadway, Susan Berlin writes that Laugh “is a valentine to early cinema” that includes Henley’s “familiar way of finding humor in the outrageous” that Studio premières “with a sincere heart.”  Berlin expressly praised the “solidly entertaining and heartfelt performances,” especially of Cespedes and Garnick. 

I probably shouldn’t make predictions (I’m usually not good at them), but I’ll dare to say that if Laugh makes a move to New York off of this début, it won’t fare well.  One reason Henley (and others) sometimes première their new plays in small, out-of-the-limelight theaters (and that’s not a comment on their quality) is that it’s safer than a New York City preem (or even a Chicago, San Francisco, New Haven, or Cambridge opening) because, first, it’s less heavily scrutinized and, second, the press is kinder (that’s particularly true in comparison to New York City).  You can see that the Capital area reviewers weren’t well-disposed to Laugh; if you know the New York scene, you can imagine how our theater desks will cover the play.  (Personally, I can’t see why any major theater in New York would want to produce Laugh as it now stands.  My companions at Studio that Sunday afternoon asked the Big Question directly: why did David Muse, Studio’s artistic director, choose to put Laugh up at his troupe?  Did he read it and say, ‘I really have to do this play,’ they wondered.  Despite that response, however, he did, and some AD in the Big Apple might make the same decision—because it’s a Beth Henley script, a new play, an actors’ play, or any other nonce rationale.)  Should any theater present Henley’s play, without substantial rewrites and—sorry, Schweizer—a change of director, it’ll get lambasted in the reviews and disappoint audiences and subscribers in droves.  (It may be revealing that several Studio spectators left at intermission and I heard others contemplating that choice.)  The author said she needed to write the play essentially to decompress from her previous effort.  Well, now she has.  I hope it worked for her, because I don’t think it’ll have much of a stage life after its Washington run.  If I were a betting man . . . .

'Choir Boy' (Studio Theatre, Washington, D.C.)

Once again I made the trip downtown in Washington to see a show at the Studio Theatre here.  This was the matinee performance of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s Choir Boy on Sunday, 11 January 2015, presented in the Studio’s 225-seat Metheny Theatre at the company’s Northwest 14th Street home in the Logan Circle neighborhood. 

Directed at Studio by Kent Gash, the founding director of the New Studio on Broadway of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, the 100-minute Choir Boy was commissioned by New York City’s Manhattan Theatre Club.  It premièred at London’s Royal Court Theatre in the Jerwood Theatre Upstairs in September 2012 and then had its U.S. début at MTC in July 2013.  McCraney’s play went on to performances at the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta (September-October 2013), the Geffen Playhouse in L.A. (September-October 2014), and GableStage in Coral Gables, Florida, in January 2015; Choir Boy will be presented at Mill Valley, California’s Marin Theatre Company in June and the Guthrie Theater of Minneapolis in June and July.  The intermissionless one-act opened at Studio on 7 January and is scheduled to close on 22 February.  [The production was subsequently extended until 1 March 2015.]  

McCraney was born in 1980 in Miami, where he attended the New World School of the Arts High School.  He went on to the Theatre School at DePaul University in Chicago where he got a BFA in acting.  He graduated from the Yale School of Drama’s playwriting program in 2007 with the Cole Porter Playwriting Award.  He acted with the Steppenwolf Theater Ensemble in Chicago and the Northlight Theatre in Skokie, Illinois.  McCraney’s also worked with Peter Brook and Marie-Hélène Etienne of the Bouffes du Nord in Paris.  For his writing, the 34-year-old artist has received the first Paula Vogel Playwriting Award (2007), London’s Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Playwright (2008), the New York Times Outstanding Playwright Award for The Brothers Size (2009), the Steinberg Playwright Award (2009), the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize  (2013), and the MacArthur Fellowship (the “genius” grant; 2013), among other honors.  From 2009 to 2011, McCraney was the Royal Shakespeare Company’s International Playwright in Residence; he was the Hodder Fellow at the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University in 2009 and currently holds a seven-year residency at the New Dramatist Center in New York.

Among McCraney’s other plays are The Brother/Sister Plays trilogy: The Brothers Size (Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival, New York, 2006), In The Red and Brown Water (Young Vic Theatre, London, 2008), Marcus; Or the Secret of Sweet (Public Theater, 2009); The Breach (Southern Rep Theatre, New Orleans, 2007); Wig Out! (Vineyard Theater, New York, 2008); American Trade (Hampstead Theatre, London, 2011); Head of Passes (Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Chicago, 2013).  Studio artistic director David Muse characterizes the “beating heart of” McCraney’s work as “language,”  asserting of the playwright’s prose, “On the page, it looks like verse.  To the ear, it sounds like music,” and Lauren Halvorsen, Studio’s dramaturg, writes, “His work is characterized by rich emotional landscapes and lyrical, character-driven language.”  According to Muse, McCraney’s plays focus on “the recurring theme of fitting in.  Of brotherhood and its challenges,” and Halvorsen observes that Choir Boy explores the “friction between upholding tradition and speaking your truth.” 

A coming-of-age story about responding to human differences and to bullying by multidimensional characters who’re bonded by the Gospel music they sing together and the common humanity we all share, Choir Boy, set in the present, depicts a year in the lives of a group of African-American students at the fictional Charles R. Drew Preparatory School for Boys, a historically black boarding school somewhere in the South, as they struggle with questions of identity and sexuality.  Pharus Jonathan Young is a bright, devoted, and enthusiastic Drew student.  At the end of his junior year, his pride in singing the school anthem at the graduation ceremony on the eve of the school’s 50th anniversary is marred by the anti-gay slurs hissed at him from the auditorium by one of his schoolmates, causing the young student-singer to stop in mid-performance.

Pharus doesn’t speak of his sexuality—the school is essentially in denial that homosexuality might actually exist at Drew—but as the character’s portrayed somewhat effeminately, he’s not really hiding it, either.  (Concerned about the image set by the school’s choir “lead,” Headmaster Marrow warns Pharus about “your wrist.”  The student responds disingenuously that it’s just a wrist, “a joint on my arm!”)  The action begins when he refuses to divulge the name of the boy who taunted him, insisting on behaving “as a Drew man should.”  Even under threat of expulsion, Pharus maintains that this would be a breach of the student’s honor code.

But Pharus also knows that he can exact his own private revenge.  Gospel music at Drew is a tradition nearly as old as the school itself—the play, as its title intimates, is larded with gospel singing—and that tradition is embodied in its choir, where Pharus, as Drew’s best singer, can stand out and be different without fear.  And as lead of the choir his senior year, he has the authority to decide who can and cannot sing.  At the choir’s first meeting of the new school year, after a few pointed comments from the boy he believes humiliated him, Robert “Bobby” Marrow III, nephew of the headmaster, Pharus flares into righteous mode and kicks Bobby out of the gospel group.  “Choir Boy isn’t autobiographical,” David Muse observes, “but coming from an exceptionally talented gay writer who grew up in the South, it is clearly a deeply personal work.”

I haven’t really sorted Choir Boy out yet—maybe by the end of this report I’ll have some kind of handle on it—but my initial reaction left me unimpressed.   Studio has presented three other of McCraney’s plays, The Brother/Sister Plays in 2008, 2010, and 2011, and the dramatist has a slew of awards and prizes, but I’m underwhelmed by the dramaturgy I saw here, so I’m either missing something (always a possibility) or he’s not as good as his rep.

Choir Boy’s set in the present, but contends with what I’d say is a retro issue, by now even in the black community: a gay student among the elite.  (My companions thought the play might have been set in an earlier decade to account for this attitude; the program doesn’t state the setting.)  Furthermore, I found the whole thing contrived, set up, and artificial, including, in a rare instance for Studio, the performances. There are two adults in the cast, and they’re damn near caricatures; the headmaster is almost a cartoon and I’m not sure if he’s written as one or if Marty Austin Lamar played him that way (under Kent Gash’s guidance, of course).  McCraney says of Choir Boy, “The play itself is asking us to see that all of these young men are complex, are full human beings, are, as a donor said the other night, ‘as complex as the 13.8 billion years of stardust that make us up.’”  His point, he explains, is that “the moment we look at any individual human as just simple plain what we think or have been told they are, we then stop allowing their humanity” and then Gash echoes this declaration: “There’s a line in the play: ‘We are fearfully and marvelously made.’  Well, that’s true.  And we are many things.  And the play is demanding that we reckon with that, and acknowledge it and embrace it.”  The problem I had, though, is that I didn’t actually see that on the stage. 

I also had the feeling that, first, McCraney’d written the play around the idea of using gospel music as a motif—there’s considerable singing, which doesn’t seem to have much to do with the plot or the themes—so that the music came first and the drama came second, and, further, that Gash had assembled the cast on the basis of their singing voices over their acting abilities—singers who could act, not actors who could sing.  

Now, I should confess that I’m not a fan of gospel music.  I can appreciate the vocal harmonies, but the songs themselves don’t move me.  One reason may be, of course, that they’re Christian religious songs, so I just don’t connect with them.  As little as I feel the music contributes to the drama, there’s a lot of it in Choir Boy, so I was at a distinct disadvantage from the get-go.  I’ll have to work out what any of this—the music in the play and my response or lack of response to it—means in terms of my assessment.  Again, maybe that’ll develop as I write.

The Studio’s production of Choir Boy is staged in what for all intents and purposes is an amphitheater, giving it the kind of atmosphere of an operating theater or an old-time lecture hall.  Jason Sherwood’s set is composed of a circular floor of multi-hued parquet, half-encircled by a dark-paneled wall with five open doorframes.  (In a couple of scenes, the doorways serve as shower stalls, with working spray heads in what one of my grad school teachers would call “Gee-Whizz Realism.”)  Above the doorways is a row of picture frames, but the images in them shift as the scenes change from one school space to another, and some of the wall décor changes as well.  (The pictures in the frames help establish the time as the present: I’m pretty sure, my questionable eyesight notwithstanding, that in several scenes Barak Obama is depicted.  Another set of photos seems to be a display of civil rights heroes, including Martin Luther King, Jr., and Ralph Abernathy.)  Otherwise, the only scenery that’s shifted are set pieces rolled or carried on by the actors—the beds of Pharus and his roommate’s dorm room, the benches of the choir’s practice room; many of the scenes have no other scenery than the constructed unit, as on an Elizabethan stage.  All in all, it was a perfectly serviceable set which evoked a general sense of a traditional prep school trying to hark back to the Eatons and Harrows of legend (and I went to one of those kinds of schools in this country, too) while allowing the spectators enough leeway to add our own details and specifics to make McCraney and Gash’s Drew Prep an “Everyschool” (well, okay—an “Every Prep School”).  Of course, when the boys get to singing, the little circular stage works excellently as a performance space, even if the scene is supposed to be a rehearsal or a class.  (The boys also sing in the showers at one point, putting them each in an alcove up stage, arrayed in a semi-circle like a peculiar kind of choral group.)

Dawn Chiang’s lighting and Kathleen Geldard’s costumes both add to the atmosphere of a tradition-bound institution.  The play’s dress requirements are, needless to say, restricted by the Drew uniform, a blue blazer (the group’s star ball-player wears a Drew letter jacket), chinos, white dress shirt, and orange-and-gold striped tie.  The boys’ shoes and hairdos are the only individualized aspects of their appearances, while the adults might as well be wearing uniforms, too, since they both had on suits—Headmaster Marrow’s was a three-piece, of course.  Like their behavior, individuality and non-conformity in dress is not encouraged among the boys at Drew—though Pharus is the only student whose shoes aren’t black.  He alone wears tan bucks—not showy, but they do stand out.  (Bobby wears black running shoes with blue soles—his self-assertion, I suppose.)

I still don’t know if the complaints I have with the production style are the fault of McCraney’s script or Gash’s direction, but I’ve already said I found Studio’s Choir Boy contrived and artificial.  The formality of the setting may also have encouraged the kind of brittle, almost presentational performance style the cast employed, and since I don’t know either McCraney’s other plays or the previous productions of Choir Boy, I don’t really know if that’s common to the writer’s work or this play, or if it’s a construct of this director and this cast.  Lamar’s headmaster was so bombastic and officious that I hardly believed he was a real person.  He over-enunciated his words as if the vocabulary was all new to him, a man out of his rhetorical depth even though he’d been in his post for at least three years.  Marrow’s described in the Studio casting notice as “Shrewd operator when it comes to school politics.  Man with heart who leads with tough love,” but that’s not the figure I saw Lamar project. 

The other grown-up is Mr. Pendleton, a former history master at Drew who comes out of retirement to teach a special course and oversee the choir.  Pendleton, played by Alan Wade, is white and 60 or 70 years old, but he’s supposed to be a fervent teacher with a surprising passion about the ’60s civil rights movement (he marched with King, Marrow tells the boys) which leads to one shining moment of genuine anger when the boys start tossing the label “Nigger” at one another.  But Wade’s portrayal (and/or McCraney’s writing) makes him a doddering, slightly addled old white man among the young African Americans, trying too hard and failing.  What passes for wisdom and a Socratic attempt to encourage critical, out-of-the-box thinking only sounds like pedagogical pap.  I don’t know Wade’s work (or Lamar’s, either), so I don’t know if this is his usual kind of performance, or if he’s been miscast or misdirected, but if not for that single stand-out moment, I’d have said the character was meant to be a bad comic stereotype.

McCraney was successful, at least, in differentiating the five young students, and the actors did carve out distinct characters for them.  What I can’t say, though, is that the boys were unique or exceptional figures, more than the students in any prep school drama on screen or stage.  The fact that they’re all gospel singers comes off more as an artificial distinction, like the writers and artists at the school in the movie Words and Pictures (about which I wrote on ROT on 25 July and 16 September 2014), though in that case the writing and drawing were central to the plot.  The singing in Choir Boy seems like an add-on—and a justification for the play’s title.  Given that the students were written with so little beyond stock character traits, the actors weren’t especially motivated to rise above clichéd performances.  Even Pharus’s supposed intelligence comes off in Jelani Alladin’s portrayal as adolescent pedantry rather than real smarts.  He’s no Holden Caulfield and the other students—Eric Lockley’s Junior Davis (the naïve sidekick), Jaysen Wright’s Anthony Justin “AJ” James (the open-hearted jock), Keith Antone’s Robert “Bobby” Marrow III (the angry and privileged—and homophobic—alpha male), and Jonathan Burke’s David Heard (the sensitive would-be pastor—and closeted homosexual)—fare no better.  They don’t give dishonest performances by any means, but they never rise above the expected and stereotypical.  Even the big “surprise” at the end isn’t such a surprise—one of my companions said afterwards that she saw it coming early on in the play.  If they weren’t black and gospel singers, they could be the kids in Dead Poets Society or Tea and Sympathy (how’s that for a retro reference!), and the performances don’t rise above the familiar roles McCraney seems to have written. 

The a cappella singing is superb—which is why I feel the actors were cast for their singing talent over their acting talent—even if I never saw the thematic or dramatic purpose in the gospel music.  That shower scene, which Chiang’s lighting makes looks like it’s set in a chapel, is technically marvelous: a lot of people sing in the shower, but these guys do it in five-part harmony!  (The song is “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” and the musical direction for Choir Boy is by Darius Smith.)  But what’s its point?  If gospel music is supposed to have been a thematic underpinning to whatever McCraney wants to say with Choir Boy, it didn’t communicate to me.  Granted, I’m ignorant about this musical tradition, but if the lyrics are supposed to enhance the play’s ideas and points, I didn’t hear it.  There’s a whole scene devoted to a discussion of the Negro spiritual which told me a few factoids of which I wasn’t aware, but it’s part of what I described above as Pharus’s pedantry; it didn’t reveal anything about the boys, the school, or the issues with which they’re dealing.  The cast—even Headmaster Marrow takes a turn vocalizing—executed the gospel singing well, but it never elucidated the stuff of the play for me. 

I may be a minority of one in my opinion about Choir Boy.  In the Washington Post, for instance, Celia Wren declares that “‘Choir Boy’ sings a stirring tune” with gospel songs that “open further windows onto the tangled sweep of American history and civics.”  She calls the Studio production “sturdy and often powerful” that “deals with themes of major social import.”  “Gash and his team have given the work a handsome realization,” asserts Wren.  “From start to finish, this play will have you anticipating what’s next while wondering, ‘Who’s the b[a]d guy?’” asserts Washington Informer’s D. Kevin McNeir.  “If one exists at all.”

“[T]he real power of” Choir Boy, writes Doug Rule in MetroWeekly, “is in McCraney’s subtle, graceful and evocative style of storytelling” for which Gash “has corralled a strong group of young singing actors.”  Thus the play reveals “a few tear-inducing moments” as well as “plenty of gentle laughs, through clever wordplay and a few choice cultural critiques.”  “Choir Boy looks like a big hit, and it deserves to be,” declares Washington City Paper’s Chris Klimek.  In Washington Life Magazine, Chuck Conconi reports, “Kent Gash’s smooth and understated direction allows the intensity and poignancy of McCraney’s complex script” that demonstrates “the pessimistic truth that . . . tradition can uplift, but it can also constrain.”

On MD Theatre Guide, Tina Ghandchilar recommends, “If you’re in the mood to see a play filled with some hearty gospel soulful a cappella music, Choir Boy is the show to see.”  “Director Kent Gash builds a fascinating world dense with thorny intersections of race, class, and sexuality that are sometimes funny, sometimes uncomfortable,” writes Michael Poandl of DCMetroTheaterArts, staging a play that’s “about forgiveness, and to this end there are moments that are extremely moving.”  The DCMTA reviewer found the Studio production “a thought-provoking, entertaining, and cathartic experience.”  On DC Theatre Scene, Jennifer Clements insists that “if you see one show at Studio Theatre in 2015, let it be Choir Boy.”  Having been less than satisfied by McCraney’s earlier offerings at Studio, Clements, the most enthusiastic reviewer among the local web writers, pronounces that “this powerhouse of a show is the type of journey that reverberates long after you leave the theatre,” describing the play as “nothing short of kaleidoscopic” and “a reminder of the intrinsic potency of theatre.”  She declares in the end, “It parts our lips into smiles, it shatters our hearts to dust, and begs us to look more closely at our fellow man.  This daring play should be required theatregoing for anyone who believes in the transformative power of the stage.”

In the New York-based cyber press, Jennifer Perry of Broadway World finds that “a strong ensemble cast brings [Choir Boy] to life . . . in an excellent way,” writing that “McCraney's powerful, plot-driven play is engaging to say the least.^”  Perry characterizes McCraney’s dialogue as “like poetry ‘with a purpose,’” emphasizing that the playwright’s use of language “sets the play apart from other popular offerings that deal with similar subject matter,” though she complains that “Choir Boy treads . . . into after-school special, predictable territory.”  Of the acting, the BWW reviewer says that the cast “uses McCraney’s powerful language to establish an emotional arch worthy of attention no matter whether one identifies with the characters’ plights or not.”  On Talkin’ Broadway, Susan Berlin calls McCraney’s play with music “riveting,” even though she observes that it’s “less a propulsive story than a series of vignettes.”  In the performances, Berlin adds that director Gash “has created an ensemble of performers who work as a unit while each actor manages to maintain his individuality.”  A “taut, well-written play,” writes Barbara Mackay of TheaterMania, which “unfolds through a series of short scenes,” and in which the “most interesting thing about these five men is the way they come together when singing.”  “McCraney's writing,” observes Mackay, “is colorful and often poetic” and “Kent Gash keeps the action flowing quickly and smoothly.”  The TM review-writer concludes, “McCraney is a young playwright to watch.”

'Visible Language': Signing (and Singing) a Musical

[Two schools of thought in teaching the deaf arose in the 19th century in Washington, D.C., symbolized by the leaders of those two intellectual streams: Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922) and Edward Miner Gallaudet (1837-1917). Bell, the inventor of the telephone, first became known for trying to find ways for the deaf to communicate and Gallaudet took the idea further, believing that the deaf, like people with hearing, could manage advanced education.  Gallaudet was named the first principal of the Columbia Institution for the Deaf and Dumb and the Blind, later renamed first Gallaudet College and now Gallaudet University, the nation’s, and probably the world’s, premiere higher-education institution for the hearing-impaired.  The conflict drew in the First Lady of the United States, Caroline Harrison (1832-92; wife of 23rd President, Benjamin Harrison), who’d been a music teacher, as well as the most famous of all the deaf students, Helen Keller (1880-1968).  

[This historical tale is the subject of an unusual play, Visible Language with book and lyrics by Mary Resing and music by Andy Welchel, told musically in both spoken English and American Sign Language.  WSC Avant Bard, a 24-year-old troupe (formerly known as the Washington Shakespeare Company) specializing in classic theater, and Gallaudet University’s Theatre and Dance Program co-produced Visible Language and WSC Avant Bard artistic director Tom Prewitt directed.  All performances of the musical, performed at Gallaudet from 21 October to 16 November, were in ASL and spoken English, and all were captioned.]

“A D.C. FEUD ON HOW TO TEACH THE DEAF TAKES CENTER STAGE”

by Celia Wren 

[This article appeared in the “Arts & Style” section of the Washington Post on 26 October 2014.]

Sometimes, a historical showdown begets memorable theater — think of the political struggles recalled in Shakespeare’s history plays, or the courtroom clash that inspired “Inherit the Wind.”

Now a new work is joining the canon of dramatized historical conflict. “Visible Language,” a world premiere musical in American Sign Language and English, evokes a famous 1890s blowup between Edward Miner Gallaudet and Alexander Graham Bell over methods for teaching the deaf. With a book and lyrics by Mary Resing, music by Andy Welchel and a cast of deaf as well as hearing actors performing in ASL and English, the musical runs through Nov. 16. 

“Visible Language” tells a D.C. story: Edward Miner Gallaudet was the first president of the college that became Gallaudet University. Bell, better known as the inventor of the telephone, also worked as an educator of the deaf; he lived in Washington for part of his life. The disagreement between the two hearing men laid out in Washington’s political circles: Gallaudet advocated for the use of sign language in --deaf education and communication, while Bell believed it was critical to teach the deaf to speak and read lips.

The heart of “Visible Language” is “this ideological battle over the future of deaf education. And we see that play out between two strong-willed men in Washington, D.C.,” at a time when the city was coming into its own as a locus of power, says Ethan Sinnott, director of Gallaudet’s theater and dance program.

It’s an inherently dramatic story, but Resing says she stumbled across it only after Open Circle Theatre asked her to pen a musical that featured both speech and ASL. It wasn’t terra incognita for Open Circle, which focused on including people with disabilities in professional theater and which mounted a 2007 version of Jason Robert Brown’s “Songs for a New World” that made use of ASL. 

Resing has a passion for dramatizing local stories, an interest she pursued as artistic director (until 2013) of Maryland’s Active Cultures Theatre. So to find a topic for her new project, she canvassed the local deaf community, asking “What is the story that deaf audiences think needs to be on the stage?”

“Unanimously, the response was the story of Alexander Graham Bell and Edward Miner Gallaudet and the fight over speech versus signs,” she remembers.

Resing came to realize that the quarrel between the men reflected their different backgrounds as well as their educational outlooks.

Gallaudet’s father, Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, had been a pioneer of education for the deaf in the United States and a proponent of signing. (He is Gallaudet University’s namesake.) Bell’s father, on the other hand, had been a teacher of elocution who developed Visible Speech, a system that broke speech down into elementary sounds and that proved useful in teaching the deaf to vocalize.

Bell and Gallaudet both believed that they had the best interests of the deaf community at heart, Resing says.

“Gallaudet advocated for sign language because it was very easy to teach” and thus cost-effective, making it possible to educate “as many people as possible,” she says.

By contrast, teaching a deaf person to speak can be labor- and time-intensive. But, Resing says, Bell thought the practice was necessary: He feared that reliance on signing would leave deaf people isolated from mainstream society and economically disadvantaged.

Resing strove to reflect these issues in her book and lyrics for the musical. Suzanne Richard, Open Circle’s artistic director, was for a time attached to the project as co-director with Tom Prewitt.

Part-way through the musical’s development, Open Circle went on hiatus. Prewitt was not willing to let the musical lapse, too. 

After he assumed the artistic director post at WSC Avant Bard in 2013, that company signed on as co-producer with Gallaudet.

Speaking in ASL in an interview at Gallaudet, with an interpreter translating, Sinnott says he felt the project was a good one because “Bell and [Edward Miner] Gallaudet are two iconic figures within the deaf community, and, irrespective of whether history has a deaf or hearing lens, there is always a tendency to mythologize and romanticize the titans of an era.” 

For instance, he says, many deaf people view Bell as “the bad guy — the Darth Vader of this story,” because Bell was interested in eugenics and how eugenic measures might lessen the incidence of deafness in the general population. That line of inquiry can seem horrifying today.

At the same time, Gallaudet is “easily framed as a champion,” which is simplistic in a different way, Sinnott observes.

“Part of the importance of this show and production is that it challenges people to take a look at what actually happened rather than subscribing to just the flat, non-nuanced” and “larger-than-life” versions of the characters, Sinnott says. In general, he says, theater should push people outside their comfort zones.

“Visible Language” may do just that with its approach to bilingualism. The musical tells its story in both ASL and English without recourse to role-doubling or translators who stand outside the world of the story. Instead, Resing wrote scenes and songs in which deaf and hearing characters converse in both languages. For instance, a scene chronicling a chat between Bell and Gallaudet becomes bilingual because a deaf character, Ennals Adams Jr., is present, and for his benefit, Bell and Gallaudet sign as they speak.

But because there is no constant source of simultaneous translation, the musical’s voiced and signed dialogue tracks sometimes diverge. Occasionally, a deaf character will sign a witticism that a non-ASL-conversant theatergoer may not understand, for instance. Deaf and hearing audiences who are not fluent in the other form of expression “won’t have exactly the same experience — but they will have parallel experiences,” says Prewitt.

The potential resonance of the strategy — and the related logistical challenges — were evident at a rehearsal in early October. Aaron Kubey, director of artistic sign language, and assistant director Tyler Herman were polishing a duet that featured the characters of Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan, Keller’s teacher. In the scene, the deaf and blind Keller (played by Gallaudet graduate Miranda Medugno, who is deaf) and Sullivan (played by hearing actress Sarah Anne Sillers) arrive in Washington. The two characters express their excitement and anxiety in a duet: Keller signs, and Sullivan sings words that are close to Keller’s but not identical.

During the rehearsal, Herman tried to sync the signing and singing with the music. Meanwhile, Kubey urged Medugno to be more expressive when conveying Keller’s bewildered reactions to the vibrations and smells of a Washington train station.

In offering these suggestions, Herman spoke and Kubey signed, and an interpreter translated each remark into the other language so everyone could be on the same page. (Prewitt says two ASL-English interpreters were scheduled for each rehearsal — standard procedure to accommodate simultaneous conversations and interpreters’ need for breaks, he said.)

Kubey, as one of the key deaf artists involved in a production whose writer, composer and director are hearing, was also keeping an eye on a macrocosmic goal. As he put it in an interview, speaking through an interpreter, he has worked with assistant director Charlie Ainsworth (who is deaf) “to make sure that the deaf perspective is recognized, valued, and accurately incorporated” in the musical.

Kubey’s additional duties include making sure that the actors sign in a way that is consistent with their characters. An older, high-status character would likely use a more formal signing style, whereas a young student character might sign in a more casual way. The style of expression needs to be as consistent as it would be in a speaking role. After all, “sign is our voice,” Kubey says.

It’s all in service of the play’s broader theme, which, in Resing’s words, is that “everybody wants to be heard, everyone has something to say” despite “all the ways communication can go awry.”

“Communication is never simple,” Resing says. “It just isn’t.”

[Visible Language ran from 21 October to 16 November at the Gilbert C. Eastman Studio Theatre, Gallaudet University, 800 Florida Ave. NE.  Visit www.wscavantbard.org or gallaudet.ticketleap.com.]

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“COMMUNICATING WELL THROUGH SIGN AND SONG”

by Nelson Pressley

[This review was originally published on 30 October 2014 in the “Style” section of the Washington Post.]

“I want to communicate,” goes an early chorus of the musical “Visible Language,” and that fundamental message is delivered in song, American Sign Language and supertitles projected above the small stage at Gallaudet University.

That range of expression is the real drama of this fascinating show, which hinges on the 1890s debate between telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell and Edward Miner Gallaudet, the university’s founder and its president for decades. Bell, who also worked as an educator of ­hearing-impaired people, believed that they should be taught to speak, and the less dogmatic Gallaudet favored sign language. By mixing hearing and deaf actors in a production that communicates in so many ways all at once, “Visible Language” makes the debate engagingly immediate.

To be clear, this collaboration between Gallaudet’s theater program and the 25-year-old WSC Avant Bard is far from the most polished show in town. The acting is highly variable, the scenes move in blunt strokes and the production makes a disappointingly dull villain of Bell, whose wife, deaf from age 5, was taught lip reading and continued to speak.

Still, Mary Resing’s script and Andy Welchel’s bright, jaunty songs (with lyrics by Resing) make plain how deep and personal the issue is. A black student named Ennals, appealingly played by Aarron Loggins and based on a real student at Kendall Green (as Gallaudet was known at the time), is full of potential. Will signing — not speaking — limit the options of students like him? Helen Keller, played by the wonderfully expressive Miranda Medugno, arrives with Anne Sullivan (a nicely tart Sarah Anne Sillers), and they finger-spell and sign, with Keller even taking speech lessons from Bell.

Perhaps Bell — the subject of a one-man dramatic bio by PBS newsman Jim Lehrer last year — can’t help but come off as imperiously smug here as he insists on audible speech, and actor Harv Lester doesn’t really come up with more than one note for the role. In the teaching scenes with Keller that include a quick sardonic chorus, Bell’s method is so time-intensive and expensive (and unsuccessful, as dramatized) that it comes across as elitist. The pupils, played by Gallaudet students, understandably resist.

If the drama sometimes flattens out, director Tom Prewitt’s surprisingly big production is consistently multilayered. A four-piece band (piano, bass, drums and reeds) is positioned above the small stage, and 16 actors play the historical figures and composites. By creating such a densely populated village, Prewitt and Resing boldly explore the conflicts while celebrating the variety of ways to get one’s message across. (Aaron Kubey is credited as director of artistic sign language, which apparently draws from older and current versions of ASL.) Everyone wants to be understood, and “Visible Language” makes you want to lean in and understand.

[Visible Language: Book and lyrics by Mary Resing, music by Andy Welchel. Directed by Tom Prewitt; music director, Elisa Rosman; choreography, Tyler Herman; choreography for “I Want to Communicate,” Kriston Pumphrey; scenic design, Ethan Sinnott; lighting, Annie Wiegand; costumes, Elizabeth Ennis; sound design, Neil McFadden. Visit wscavantbard.org or gallaudet.ticketleap.com.] 

*  *  *  *

[A related theater event took place earlier this year at Washington’s Studio Theatre.  I think it’s appropriate to look at this somewhat different instance of deaf actors and acting, this time in a non-musical, and how hearing actors and directors work together with hearing-impaired performers on the professional stage.  The following article was originally published in the “Arts” section of the Washington Post on 5 January 2014.]

“SENSE & SENSITIVITY”

by Peter Marks

A hearing cast and crew working with a deaf actor in Studio’s ‘Tribes’ is an eye-opener for everyone.

On the first days of rehearsal, when everyone tends to be a little formal, anyway, Michael Tolaydo was conscious of dealing even more gingerly with a castmate, Joey Caverly, because he is deaf.

“I think it’s part of my nature, but at the very beginning I felt that I needed to treat or talk or ask questions a bit too carefully,” the longtime Washington actor said of the settling-in period for “Tribes,” Nina Raine’s comedy-drama of iconoclastic parents and drifting offspring, at Studio Theatre. And why mightn’t he? Working with a deaf actor was, despite his many years of service on the stage, new to Tolaydo, and it took a small amount of contact to understand that interpersonally speaking, he didn’t have to adjust much at all.

“What’s also been interesting is that I don’t in any way see Joey as someone who’s ‘special,’” Tolaydo said, a few weeks into the rehearsal period. “I see him as special as an actor. I don’t see him as special because he doesn’t hear.”

It is noteworthy that in an art form so receptive to experiments with language – and in a city housing the nation’s flagship college for deaf students, Gallaudet University – the opportunities for hearing and non-hearing actors to coexist onstage remain incredibly rare. Some troupes with a heavy emphasis on the physical have made inroads in and around the city: Faction of Fools, a commedia dell’arte company, is now based at Gallaudet and offers some roles to deaf students, and the movement-based Synetic Theater in Crystal City has cast actors who are deaf, principally in its wordless reinterpretations of classics.

Limiting employment possibilities further is the reality that few deaf characters find their way into mainstream plays, “Children of a Lesser God” and “The Miracle Worker” notwithstanding. And even when they do – as in the case of the recent Pulitzer Prize-winning “Clybourne Park” – the role of a deaf person often goes to a hearing actor.

That is one reason that “Tribes,” a play that explores family miscommunication in many forms – including in the way it treats a deaf son – can be such an extraordinary crossover vehicle. The pivotal role of Billy, the deaf young Englishman in love with a woman who is the child of deaf parents and gradually losing her own hearing, has been going to deaf actors since its world premiere at London’s Royal Court Theatre in 2010; a subsequent, highly regarded off-Broadway production, which ran for nearly a year, featured Gallaudet alumnus Russell Harvard as Billy.

In the Studio production that begins performances Wednesday, director David Muse has followed that practice, casting Caverly, a 2011 Gallaudet graduate who played Billy last year in a production in Boston. And in so doing, Muse not only is, like Tolaydo, collaborating with a deaf actor for the first time, he’s also taking a crash course in how to make deaf artists and audiences full partners in a theatrical venture. 

For the 24-year-old Caverly, a native of Royal Oak, Mich., “Tribes” is that actor’s dream role, a meaty dramatic part in a rip-roaring play for an influential company. To boot, the family dynamic Raine conjures struck very close to home. He, too, is the son of hearing parents. “As a deaf person, reading that play, it reminded me of my own growing up,” Caverly said, sitting in a Studio lobby with an American Sign Language interpreter and some other members of the production. “I mean, it gave me chills.”

Muse said he never seriously considered casting anyone but a deaf actor as Billy. But fully integrating the performance of an actor whose presence calls for additional pairs of ears and eyes in the rehearsal room requires some stretching by a theater company. “It was a lot of work, even more than I anticipated,” Muse said. “Much of it I’ve figured out as we’ve stumbled forward.”

‘Living in the deaf world’ 

“Tribes” takes place in the London household of Tolaydo’s Christopher and his wife, Beth (Nancy Robinette). He’s an academic, she’s a writer, and both have raised their three children in a home of free-thinking, progressive ideals. They’re such laissez-faire guides that they’ve never bothered to learn – or to teach their deaf son – to sign, and in their determination to treat Billy exactly as they do their hearing children (played by Richard Gallagher and Annie Funke), we get a sense of the shortcomings of their choices. It’s far from the only issue in the play, but in its examination of the relationship between Billy and girlfriend Sylvia (Helen Cespedes), and theirs to the rest of his family, Raine explores the emotional fault lines in what Ben Brantley in the New York Times called a play “that asks us to hear how we hear, in silence as well as speech.”

To help him with the play’s treatment of deafness, Muse turned to Ethan Sinnott, chairman of the theater department at Gallaudet, who in bringing Faction of Fools to the university campus was acting on his ambition of finding more post-academic possibility for his students. Muse said he’d learned that for rehearsals alone, he needed the services of not one but two sign-language interpreters, so that they could spell each other and the deaf participants in the show would not be left out of conversation at, say, rehearsal breaks.

Katrina Clark, a hearing Washington actress fluent in ASL, was hired as lead interpreter, with the responsibility of coordinating the other interpreters; half a dozen would be required, both for the rehearsal period and for deaf or hard-of-hearing audiences. During the run, 11 performances will be signed or captioned, and one will be described via audio. 

And interpreters weren’t the end. “Ethan said right away, ‘Well, you need to have another member on the production, and you may not even know it,’” Muse explained, recalling how Sinnott introduced the idea of recruiting a director of artistic sign language, “as a bridge between communities – a dramaturge of signing.”

The consulting position went to Tyrone Giordano, an actor and yet another Gallaudet graduate who’s performed with companies such as Los Angeles-based Deaf West Theatre, which among other achievements staged a highly successful version of the musical “Big River,” with both hearing and deaf actors. It falls to Giordano not only to make sure that the signing is accurate and fluidly handled, but also to ensure that the experience of deafness is accurately portrayed.

He’s a sort of ambassador of deafness. “Basically, I have to make everything look authentic,” he said, through one of the interpreters. “It’s the whole embodiment of living in the deaf world.”

His job was especially relevant for Cespedes, a hearing actress who had never signed before being cast as Sylvia. “Tribes” presents peculiar challenges to hearing and deaf actors alike. While Caverly has to create the illusion that Billy knows only rudimentary sign language, Cespedes has the opposite task: playing the daughter of deaf people, she must look as if she has been signing all her life.

Studio enrolled the actress in a month of ASL classes in her home city of New York and had her work with a private tutor, and then brought her to Washington to spend a week at Gallaudet. A lover of languages, Cespedes embraced the immersion, and her interactions with students helped her develop a grasp of some of the nuances of a system of communication wholly foreign to her.

“I would say that really, as a novice, what I’ve learned is how it’s really in the face,” she said, of the act of seeming fluent. “How the signer uses their face and doesn’t use their face is an instant giveaway.” (Members of the production cited the debacle at Nelson Mandela’s funeral, and the immobile face of the impostor at President Obama’s side, as an example of exactly how not to look as if you know how to sign.) Giordano has been Cespedes’s guide, using a video camera and other tools to help her refine her technique. 

“He’s been an incredible resource and teacher and helper for me, and he’s made a lot of those choices about how we’re going to express something,” she said.

Of her assignment in her scenes with Caverly, and being the one who is supposed to be the authority on ASL, Cespedes laughed as she recalled something the actor confided to her: “It’s my job to be bad,” he said, “to make you look good.”

The give-and-take 

At a recent afternoon rehearsal onstage in Studio’s Mead Theatre, the cross-talk had an extra dimension. Muse sat in the front row, presiding over a stop-and-go run of the opening scene, as Clark signed for Caverly, seated at a long kitchen table with the rest of his dramatic family. Giordano sat a few rows back, occasionally signing with someone on the other side of the room.

“It’s ultimately about figuring out what the family’s like and what Billy’s role is in it,” Muse said to the actors, before suggesting that Caverly rise from the table, to separate himself and begin to give an audience some sense of his isolation. “Feel free to take a little bit of focus, if you know what I mean,” Muse said, as Caverly gazed at both him and Clark. “Take a minute to establish yourself.”

Caverly, who explained in a subsequent e-mail that “due to the emotional turmoil that the play has, it can be taxing on me,” was not feeling this particular suggestion from his director.

“I don’t think I get up,” he said, through Clark. “I think I settle down here.”

Muse dropped the idea and moved on. Reflecting on the exchange afterwards, the director said Caverly “remains one of the most open actors to attacking scenes in different ways,” but in this case seemed to think the notion was stage-y. In the give-and-take, it was another learning moment for Muse.

“I’ve found that in terms of adjustments I’ve had to make, it really doesn’t have to do with the communication piece,” he said. “It has to do with my paying attention to things I never had to before. For instance: Is the shirt a signer is wearing patterned or solid? If you have too much pattern, it can distract a deaf audience member. Or if there’s a big sequence of signing, am I staging it in a way that it’s open to everyone in the audience?”

The practical concerns even apply to the seating at the kitchen table. “Joey or Ty would say, ‘That’s not where he would sit.’ It all has to do with the reality of a deaf character in that place,” Muse said. “And when they say it, I think, ‘Of course!’” 

[Tribes by Nina Raine was directed by David Muse, Studio’s artistic director.  It ran in the Studio’s Mead Theatre at the Logan Circle home of the troupe from 8 January-23 February 2014.]