If that seems like a slightly world-weary shrug that the deaf community is having their story represented for them rather than by them, Volpe does recognize that there are signs of improvement in the air. The kind of recognition this play affords the deaf experience is worth that.” But, you know, there are some dramatic licences, and that’s fine. My voice is stable whether or not I have a hearing aid. If his speech therapy was anything like mine, then that wouldn’t happen. “OK, there’s a part where Billy is speaking and the script seems to suggest that the batteries of his hearing aid are dying and therefore his voice suffers, becomes less and less clear. When pressed, however, he does admit to sometimes feeling as though it’s “a little bit missing the mark.” Volpe says that he finds the play “extremely powerful” and is happy that Raine has put a deaf character front and centre rather than as a cameo. As a hearing person, she’s coming at the subject as an outsider, so I wonder whether she has got everything right. Raine wrote Tribes after seeing a television documentary about a deaf couple who wanted their baby to be deaf also. There are so many things that deaf people go through that are discriminatory, like finding employment - ‘oh, I’m sorry we can’t employ you, you can’t use the phone,’ and ‘you do funny things with your hands so we’re not gonna hire you.’ ” This world is very audist, and Christopher is in full denial about that. “It is true that Billy’s family is very audist. That kind of bias is sometimes described as “audism,” a word Christopher scoffs at but which is an unfortunate reality in Volpe’s world. So when it comes to Christopher and his attitude, it feels like it has echoes with that kind of bias.” But if they spent a little bit of time, they would see they have more in common than not. He thinks ‘well if you join them, you can’t be a part of us.’ But it’s similar to the way that, for example, heterosexual males sometimes see homosexual males: they don’t want to be part of that community. Does that mean it really is a cult? I don’t know if I’d use that word, but I understand where Christopher is coming from. “They support each other in almost every endeavour, and when someone experiences some negative situation, it’s easy to go into that cult thing because it is so supportive. “The deaf community is a very small minority,” says Volpe. It’s an attitude not unfamiliar to Volpe. At one point, fearing that Billy is drifting away from him, he dismisses the deaf community as some kind of cult. In Tribes, most of the opposition to Billy’s learning sign language comes from his father, Christopher, a brilliantly caustic comic creation who has some jaw-droppingly un-PC attitudes. It includes facial expressions and body language and body posture, and it’s equal in every sense to English or any other spoken language.” But it has its own grammatical rules, just different from English. There’s the misconception that it’s weak, that it’s broken English. Sign language is viewed as a sub-par language. “For Billy’s family,” says Volpe, “English spoken language is superior. In Tribes, Billy’s decision to learn sign language launches the kinds of prejudice that led to that suppression. Although he can speak, ASL is, as he puts it, “my first language.” Shocking to think, then, that this poetic and versatile means of communication - Volpe demonstrates as much by re-enacting a moment from the play where the word “flower” is represented - was suppressed in favour of speech therapy at the infamous Milan Conference of 1880, a decision that was formally overturned only in 1980. Volpe’s attachment to sign language is clear from the fact that he conducts our interview entirely in ASL. Everything focused on how you speak English properly in speech therapy, so my native language was lost to me.” “After the age of five,” he tells me through his interpreter, “I went to the Montreal Oral School for the Deaf and ceased to be exposed to sign language. Although (unlike Billy) he learned sign language from a very early age, this potentially much more expressive way of communicating with his family was closed off from him for much of his upbringing. Like Billy, he was born deaf and was brought up in a hearing family. When Volpe, who works with the community theatre company Seeing Voices Montreal, first read the script, he was struck by how close Billy’s experiences mirrored his own.
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