Peter Diseth, Caitlin Aase, Levi Shrader, Kate Mura, Gary Houston and Laurie Thomas

In complex and multilayered ways, the young British playwright Nina Raine toys with the incapacity of language and those who use it. In an emotionally climactic moment at the end of the play, a physical embrace says everything that two hours of linguistic wordplay by five highly creative characters has been unable to communicate.

At the easiest level, this is a play about deafness. Billy is born deaf and his girlfriend Sylvia (Caitlin Aase) has inherited a genetic flaw that is progressively shutting down her hearing until she finally becomes totally deaf. "I can't even hear myself," she mourns late in the play.

This couple does and does not communicate on several levels. Sylvie has learned sign language but Billy has not. Billy can read lips brilliantly but Sylvie struggles. At one point Billy decides to communicate with his parents and siblings only through sign language, which none of them understands. So as he signs, Sylvie translates, the words he signs are flashed on the wall above the actors' heads, and the rest of the family replies orally. The effect is as if four different languages are being spoken, communicating four different and contradictory messages.

The barriers to communication do not end there. During set changes and sometimes during the action, music plays at blasting volume, including opera, Janis Joplin songs, classical symphonic passages, and one electronic piece. The members of Billy's family have normal talking voices that are just a shade less than a full-throated scream, especially the father Christopher (Gary Houston). They are yelling not so that Billy can understand them (he can't) but so that they can drown each other out, for they almost never take the trouble to actually hear each other. Each lives his or her own life in a kind of one-person shell, which in turn is swaddled in this "unconventionally conventional family."

All are creative. The mother Beth (Laurie Thomas) is blocked writing a novel. The older son Daniel (Peter Diseth) is struggling to write a graduate thesis. Both are failing. The sister Ruth (Kate Mura) is a failed opera singer. Only the father manages to succeed. All four also play the piano, which sits unused in the middle of the set for most of the play. These writers who can't write and the singer who can't sing and the pianists who don't play are complemented by the speech difficulty of Daniel, who stutters.

The language of this play is biting, sophisticated, fast-paced and highly intellectual, with a constant stream of obscenities thrown in for good measure. But the language is more designed to hide than reveal feelings.

Depicting deafness poses special challenges, especially for director Jacqueline Reid. A physician in the audience, an ear, nose and throat specialist who has treated some deaf people, pointed out that a person born deaf never learns to speak with the same fluency as a hearing person, yet Billy speaks with great naturalness. The physician also questioned the accuracy of a family inheriting degenerative deafness. Third, Billy can only "hear" by lip reading, but in the second act, for example, his sister stands behind him making comments to which he replies.

In other ways, however, the complexities of this play are smoothly coordinated. The set is functional and attractive, the numerous scene changes are handled smoothly as music, sometimes harsh and sometimes achingly romantic, blasts the audience, and the words cast on the wall add a whole other dimension to the spoken words. It is obvious that this has not been an easy play to direct.

Tribes accurately reflects some of the debates of the deaf community, such as between raising a deaf youngster to sign versus lip read and whether to immerse a child in a deaf community or have him live and go to school with the hearing.

The acting is this production is magnificent and thoroughly convincing. While Houston, Thomas, Aase and Diseth are Fusion veterans, Mura is a newcomer from Portland, Oregon, who has had extensive experience in the Northwest and Australia as well as on television. The big surprise of the evening is Levi Shrader, a young man whose strength, both as actor and as the character Billy, gradually and impressively take over the stage.

The Fusion's home is the tiny Cell Theater at 700 First St. NW in downtown Albuquerque, but consistent with Fusion's executive director Dennis Gromelski's goal of seeking out a broader audience, it will also perform Tribes at the Lensic in Santa Fe and the Old County Courthouse in Taos as well as at the Wool Warehouse in Albuquerque. The play continues through May 11. For reservations and information go to fusionnm.org or call 505-766-9412.

Photo: Wes Naman

--Wally Gordon