SIGN OF THE TIMES Tannebaum, left, makes a romantic gesture.
Photo: Liz Lauren
The seemingly clunky title is explained early in Kapil’s lovely, surprising romance. Ram (Bose), a socially awkward scholar pursued by a clingy mess of a woman called Vic (Graeff), asks Vic’s deaf, lesbian sister, Free (Tannebaum), what she calls her relationship with Maggie (Malinowski). “Lovers,” Maggie says, translating for Free; she explains that, in American Sign Language, the construction is the verb followed by the sign for person: love person. “You are what you do,” Maggie says.
This kind of playfully reverent consideration for words permeates Kapil’s script, a sort of contemporary twist on Cyrano de Bergerac. Free’s e-mail telling off Ram for not returning her sister’s call sparks an unlikely correspondence; it also sparks Ram’s renewed interest in Vic, whom he doesn’t realize isn’t his electronic pen pal.
With a keen attention to language, the playwright explores the inadequacy of translation: Ram, a student of Sanskrit poetry, apologizes constantly for his English, while Free resents Maggie’s speaking English to hearing people—it makes her signing sloppy. Yet the written word is as dazzling here as the spoken; long scenes go by in near silence, as Free signs with Maggie or IMs with Ram. Their conversations, like much of the play’s spoken dialogue, are rendered in gorgeous, cleverly designed projections by the prolific Mike Tutaj, who keeps outdoing himself. Finely tuned performances by Tannebaum and Bose, meanwhile, need no translation.
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