Small Mouth Sounds

Or: Depth of Expression

A play that lives in silence. In Bess Wohl’s Small Mouth Sounds, the words that so often define, control, or misdirect our experience of story has been simmered away to leave only silence, training the audience to cast their attention with a fly fishing expertness, in many places but with equal intensity. Set in a five day Buddhist retreat in upstate New York, we sit in the woods and the great hall with Joan and Judy (Jodeen Revere and Leta Neustaedter) a couple weathering trials, Jan (Mark Zimmer) a traveler on a spiritual journey, Rodney (Dakotah Brown) a charming scoundrel, Alicia (Haley Ganatos) loud, shiny, and troubled), and Ned (Mike Cronen) whose life is more and more resembling a bad country western song. Each has come for their own reasons to sit at the feet of the unseen Teacher (M.A. Taylor), in hopes of achieving enlightenment. Mishap ensues.

The brilliance, and difficulty, of Wohl’s writing, is that she gives so much to her performers and so little to her audience. A good 70% of the play is performed in silence, with the actors alone to intimate her (wonderfully written, very precise) stage directions into livable actions. Slightly assisted in staged reading format, Boise Contemporary Theater’s 5x5, gives us the tickles of Wohl’s prose while still leaving space for the unseen and unheard to flourish. We get to mark the many welts and indignities of Ned’s hilarious shame spiral, or track the ripples of Jan’s private epiphany that arches and crowns and breaks at the play's end, or share in the tiny moments of shared history and love as Judy and Joan trade meaningful looks, suppressed storms of giggles, and anguished, wordless declarations. Revere and Neusaedter particularly excel at this unvoiced expression, but everyone brings enough to the table: managing their ticks, anguishes, and grand gestures with just enough highlight to be seen but not distract.

Taylor, heard but not seen, also does well in traveling down his own path using only his lessons, and his … occasional pauses to show a touching derailment and absurd tangents as the whole retreat goes pear-shaped. But even in the midst of comedy, the audience finds that the journey we have undertaken with the characters carries some weight to it, some holiness. You leave feeling light and uplifted but also as thought your own roots have touched upon some new well, that you, yourself, have been found.