Silence Speaking Volumes: Bess Wohl's Small Mouth Sounds

-
By Taylor Steinbeck

When Bess Wohl’s six characters arrive at the silent retreat in Small Mouth Sounds, they each are seeking relief from the “noisiness” of their lives. Looking for answers, they turn to the retreat’s offstage, omniscient-ish guru, but he guides them to look within themselves for answers. “Your brilliance, your juiciness, your spiciness, your grudges, your resentment, your enlightenment. It is all right here,” the Teacher says. “All you have to do is. Listen.” The silence of the retreat enables each of its participants to hear everything at an amplified volume: suffering, joy, frustration, desire. Small Mouth Sounds asks our noise-saturated society, what can we learn from silence?

Rodney (Edward Chin-Lyn) calms Alicia (Brenna Palughi)
with a breathing exercise. Photo by T. Charles Erickson.
In writing Small Mouth Sounds, Wohl’s use of silence was an experiment in mindful art-making. With a script almost entirely made up of stage directions, this play challenged her to dig deeper than dialogue to get to the core of her characters, and take on many of the same challenges that confronted her retreaters. “I thought, ‘O.K., can I just teach myself as a writer to stay, listen, be patient, not necessarily know where I’m going when I start out and just sort of stay with my feelings? That’s a huge part of what the characters are trying to learn in the play, but it was also what I was trying to teach myself.”

Without dialogue for most of its 100 minutes, Small Mouth Sounds is not just an exercise in mindfulness for the characters onstage, but also for those sitting in an unusually quiet Strand Theater. “In a world that constantly barrages us with everything from deafening booms to incessant beeps and pings, hearing nothing at all for long stretches of time feels quite radical,” says The Mercury News theater critic, Karen D’Souza. “[Small Mouth Sounds] exploits the subversive power of stillness in our age of manic multitasking.”

In Small Mouth Sounds, silence is prescribed to the retreaters as an antidote to their deafening stresses. If they can learn how to tune out the noise of whatever afflicts them, they will find peace. “This theatrical encounter with quiet does seem to heal these characters and maybe in a small way, even the audience,” notes D’Souza. “After a 100-minute detox from the din and clamor of reality, time often spent musing the absurdity of existence, we emerge back into the world, no longer all that anxious to power up our devices, feeling happily lost in our thoughts instead.” When it comes to listening, it is in silence that we hear most.

Small Mouth Sounds runs until December 10 at A.C.T.’s Strand Theater, 1127 Market Street. Click here to purchase tickets through our website. Want to learn more about the benefits of silence? Order a copy of Words on Plays, A.C.T.'s in-depth performance guide series.

Popular posts from this blog

“To Be or Not to Be”: The Iconic Speech’s Origins, Interpretations, and Impact

-
Image
By A.C.T. Publications Staff The opening line of Hamlet ’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy is theater’s most iconic, most referenced quote. What’s less known is the famous speech’s history, with Hamlet ’s earliest publications offering varying versions of its language. Also questioned is its meaning—is Hamlet contemplating suicide or is he weighing the consequences of murder? Though definitive answers are unlikely to arise, the questions “To be or not to be” asks have kept audiences, scholars, and actors engaged for centuries. Hamlet ’ s "To be or not to be" speech as it appears in the three original editions of the play. Photo by Georgelazenby. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons. The first edition, or First Quarto (Q1), of Hamlet was published in 1603. Because the text is much shorter than later editions and its language is less poetic, it is nicknamed the “Bad Quarto” by scholars. “To be or not to be” in Q1 reads as: To be, or not to be—ay, there’s the point. To die,
Read more

The American Sound: The Evolution of Jazz

-
Image
By Cecilia Padilla There is nothing so uniquely American as jazz music. In its simplest form, jazz embodies the essence of the American people: bold and inventive. The improvisation of the jazz ensemble can even be seen as a metaphor for the American democratic ideal: musicians playing solos have the liberty to express themselves as long as they adhere to the overall structure of the tune—individual freedom but with responsibility to the group. The evolution of jazz music also carries with it the social development of our nation from slavery to the swinging songs of World War II. Musically, jazz contributed immensely to the way contemporary musicians approach instrumentation, composition, and vocal arrangements. It is difficult to find a popular tune today that does not derive from such jazz icons as Joe Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Thelonious Monk. Jazz is the great equalizer; for more than a hundred years, it has been the common ground between blacks and whites, me
Read more

Purely Pinteresque: The Elements of Pinter's Language

-
Image
By Taylor Steinbeck Most artists take years to establish their voice and style. This wasn’t the case for playwright Harold Pinter. His first West End play, The Birthday Party, showcases the elements of Pinter’s aesthetic that would later be evident throughout his 29 plays and 23 screenplays: the rhythm of colloquial language punctuated by pauses and silences, mysterious characters who rarely say what they mean, and the unsettling, yet witty juxtaposition of comedy and terror. Suspenseful and comical, familiar and foreign, disturbing and alluring, The Birthday Party is quintessential Pinter. Graphite drawing of Harold Pinter. By A.C.T. Senior Graphic Designer Brad Amorosino. Pinter is a playwright who uses the back-and-forth of everyday conversation to create conflict and shape power dynamics between characters. “My characters tend to use words not to express what they think or feel,” said Pinter in a 1995 speech, “but to disguise what they think or feel, to mask their actual
Read more