Reviews 2016
Reviews 2016
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by Adam Pottle, directed by Marjorie Chan
Cahoots Theatre Company & Theatre Passe Muraille, Theatre Passe Muraille Mainspace, Toronto
May 3-15, 2016
“I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries” (Shakespeare, Sonnet 29)
Cahoots Theatre and Theatre Passe Muraille are presenting the first play by Saskatoon-based deaf writer Adam Pottle. In Ultrasound, Pottle has many points he wishes to make about the struggles of deaf people and the differences between Deaf and hearing cultures. Unfortunately, Pottle lets the concepts he wants to highlight guide the action of the play rather than creating believable characters. While it is important for a play to bring up topics related to Deaf culture, to succeed the play also has to be good drama.
Pottle introduces us to married couple Alphonse (Chris Dodd) and Miranda (Elizabeth Morris). He is a deaf accountant and she is an actor in the process of losing her hearing and her voice. It is Miranda’s 29th birthday, a fact that brings home to her the urgency of having a child before, according to statistics, fertility rates start to decline and chromosomal abnormalities increase. Alphonse wants to have genetic tests done to see if a potential child is likely to be deaf or hearing. In order to conceive as soon as possible, Miranda lies to Alphonse about the wait times for a test and for receiving the results.
After Miranda is pregnant, Alphonse, under the influence of his best friend Nick (never seen) who is also a Deaf activist, begins to feel that he could never love a hearing child. His conviction becomes so strong that he eventually demands that Miranda have an abortion just in case the child is hearing.
Alphonse’s demand may seem shocking to those unfamiliar with issues in Deaf culture, but it has been a question in studies of Deaf parents for at least the past twenty years. In one study in 1997, two out of 87 Deaf people surveyed said that they would consider aborting a fetus if it could hear.* Thus, while Alphonse’s reaction is one that a small minority of Deaf people said they might consider, it is far from the usual response.
The problem with Pottle’s play has nothing to do with Deafness at all but with the believability of the characters. Would a Jewish man who marries a female Gentile not discuss whether their future children will be raised Jewish or not? Similarly, it is hard to believe that a Deaf man and a hard-of-hearing woman would not have discussed scenarios of raising a planned child before the woman was pregnant. Pottle wants us to think that his couple haven’t discussed the subject because Miranda’s 29th birthday rushes them into conception. But that hardly explains why the couple has never had such an important discussion before then.
Pottle makes it very difficult for us to understand Alphonse’s motivations. Alphonse states that he “hates” hearing people and this he attributes to the harm done to Alphonse as a child by a hearing uncle to constantly taunted him as weak and useless. Yet, now that he is an adult, Alphonse does appear weak because all his notions of Deafness seem to derive from his best friend Nick, whom he appears to consult more about his life than he does his own wife. Miranda even says this. Thus, we really do not know whether Alphonse’s ideas are his own rational decision or whether they are based on old fears or new prejudices.
As for Miranda, it is unlikely that in the highly competitive world of the theatre that she would be chosen for major Shakespearean roles like Miranda in The Tempest or Lavinia in Titus Andronicus. It looks more like Pottle has made her an actor in order to bring in Shakespearean allusions. Her character is believable enough until Alphonse makes his demand. What she does after that is not. Her actions at the end of the play would more likely have occurred when Alphonse refuses to back down on his demand, given all he has shown us of Miranda before.
The great benefit of the play is that it will provide many people a glimpse into what relations between a deaf and a hearing person might be like. Alphonse signs all his lines which are translated in projected titles in the back of the stage while Miranda both speaks and signs, although she confesses that her signing is not as good as Alphonse’s. Pottle is keen to show that their pre-pregnancy life is as banal as possible with most of the dialogue devoted to “What’s for dinner?“ and “How was work?”
Though we come to feel alienated from his character, Chris Dodd give a very intense performance of Alphonse. The beauty of his signing itself is the best argument for the culture of Deafness that he wishes to preserve. The highpoint of his performance comes early when he signs Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29 “When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes” where his entire body communicates the poem with incredible fluidity of movement.
Elizabeth Morris plays Miranda as a sensible, funny, slightly randy independent woman, which is why it is so hard to believe how Pottle has her respond at last to Alphonse’s demand. Morris successfully conveys Miranda’s wide dramatic arc from happiness to profound depression.
Pottle has likely chosen an extreme example of preserving Deaf culture in order to provoke discussion and it certainly will, but he has done this by manipulating his characters like puppets in order to create the plot development he wants. Given that 90% of deaf people are born to hearing parents and that 90% of deaf parents have hearing children, one wonders whether it might have been more useful for Pottle to investigate Alphonse’s claim that a deaf parent cannot bond with hearing children and vice versa. Is the difference in means of communication so great that the parents in either case feel alienated and unloved? It would be good to know this in order to judge Alphonse’s (or Nick’s) point of view more clearly. And, is the alienation between parent and child any greater than that between deaf parents and their deaf children or hearing parents and their hearing children?
Many of these questions were already asked in Nina Raine’s 2010 play Tribes, seen here in 2014. But there is certainly room for more plays about the subject, especially ones less ramshackle than Raine’s. Pottle’s play will be an eye-opener for many hearing people who have thought little about Deaf culture and for people who have never seen hearing and deaf people integrated in the same play. With the advances in genetics, its topic of eugenics, whether hearing or deafness is the desired attribute, is more relevant than ever. Let’s hope that in his next play, Pottle creates more fully rounded characters and has them interact according to their natures rather than according to his agenda.
©Christopher Hoile
*Carina Dennis, “Genetics: Deaf by Design”, Nature, October 20, 2004 (www.geneticsandsociety.org/article.php?id=1516).
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Elizabeth Morris and Chris Dodd; Elizabeth Morris and Chris Dodd. ©2016 Michael Cooper.
For tickets, visit http://passemuraille.ca.
2016-05-04
Ultrasound