"Tribes" by Nina Raine

"Nina Raine explained in a 2010 interview that the idea of writing the play came to her after she saw a documentary about a deaf couple who were expecting a child, and they said that they hoped their child would be deaf. She said that it occurred to her that a family was a tribe, whose members wanted to pass on values, beliefs and language to their children. She began to see that there were "tribes everywhere," in groups including individual families and religious communities, with their own rituals and hierarchies that are hard to understand by "outsiders."

The play focuses on a comically dysfunctional Jewish British family, made up of the parents Beth and Christopher and three grown children living at home, Daniel, Ruth and Billy, the last of whom is deaf, raised to read lips and speak but without knowledge of sign language. When Billy meets Sylvia, a hearing woman born to deaf parents who is now slowly going deaf herself, his interaction with her (including her teaching him sign language) reveals some of the languages, beliefs, and hierarchies of the family and the "extended family" of the deaf community"