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Interview: Playwright Bess Wohl and Director Rachel Chavkin Talk Small Mouth Sounds

We talked recently with Wohl and Chavkin about their collaboration on this unusual and compelling theater project.

Interview: Playwright Bess Wohl and Director Rachel Chavkin Talk Small Mouth Sounds
Photo: Ben Arons

The silence enforced on six participants of a healing retreat proves most eloquent in Bess Wohl’s Small Mouth Sounds. A small theatrical gem, where minimal dialogue is enhanced with acutely observed and honestly portrayed human behavior, the play made an acclaimed debuted at off-Broadway’s Ars Nova last year. Directed by Rachel Chavkin, the production, staged alley-style in an intimate setting, has made a welcome return and is now playing for a limited three-month commercial run at the Pershing Square Signature Theater. I talked recently with Wohl and Chavkin about their collaboration on this unusual and compelling theater project.

Did you ever attend a spiritual retreat like your characters in the play?

Bess Wohl: I was sort of dragged by one of my closest girlfriends to a retreat in upstate New York. I think I knew that it was going to be silent before we went, but I hadn’t fully focused on that. Within a day of being there, I thought, okay, this is definitely a play, and started immediately taking notes on everybody else who was there—Googling them, trying to figure out who they were. We had also brought wine and snacks; we just weren’t fully absorbing it in the way that we were supposed to. But I was really interested in how everyone comes to these retreats with this giant need for their life to be changed or healed in some way. Also, there’s this great obstacle in that you can’t talk. It just felt that it lent itself to a lot of drama. So then I started going back, taking more and more notes. I went to a couple with my mum, which was bizarre and hilarious. There was one [occasion] where we gave up and went to a bed and breakfast halfway through.

Did anyone realize you were a kind of spy?

BW: I was definitely taking notes, but I think I feel like a spy in all of my life—all the time, actually. So it didn’t feel like I was completely undercover. I should say that I do genuinely believe in a lot of this sort of Buddhist thought, and I do try to incorporate it in different ways in my life. So there was no cynicism in my approach. I was just really interested in exploring it.

Rachel Chavkin: And you feel that in the play. I think the central question of the play is should we seek peace or not, and if so, how? When life is sincerely hard on personal and political levels, macro and micro, there’s so much humor and pathos that comes out of just pursuing that question.

Bess, you have said in the past that as a writer you’re particularly attracted to language-driven plays. What was it like writing a play where the characters have to observe silence?

BW: I think part of the impulse to write this was that I was a little bit sick of the sound of my own voice. I just was tired of writing rapid-fire, quippy dialogue with laugh lines. So it was sort of a real detox for myself to try to get away from a certain style that I felt I was falling into. And I hate writing stage directions. I find them so boring. So it was also a bizarre, masochistic attempt to make myself write a ton of stage directions. I wouldn’t say the experience of writing this was pleasurable for me, but then the great thing was that once I got in the room with Rachel and the actors they were able to do so much problem-solving, because most of this play happens between the lines.

Rachel, what was your response when you were handed this script, of which more than half is without dialogue?

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RC: I don’t choose a project unless something about that world strikes a chord. This show presented a challenge unlike anything I have ever seen. But if it was just a play that essentially had this single clever idea of mostly happening in silence, I don’t think I would have responded to it. It was the fact that the play had this formal exploration, but did so in concert with a deep exploration of spirituality amid pain. That was very exciting to me. There was the honest question of will this work? In order for the production to be successful, the audience shouldn’t just feel like they have seen some people at a silent retreat, but that they leave feeling as if they have profoundly experienced that sense of silence themselves. We need to trust the silence enough, even when there are moments of slapstick and clumsy comedy that comes from being human. So, actually, the first time we really worked together we went to Martha’s Vineyard and we staged the show in a week, just to feel how that amount of silence felt. And it was beautiful.

Bess mentioned writing extensive stage directions. Did that seem at all like the playwright was encroaching on your job as the director?

RC [to Wohl]: I never knew that you hated writing stage directions! It’s funny, but for how many stage directions there are, they aren’t oppressive. Bess really articulated a series of actions without much point of view: “Joan looks at Judy.” That leaves a lot of room for us to figure stuff out. It has been a constant conversation between us, but also really with our performers. I think it’s pretty fair to say that, maybe more than most plays, this one lives and dies by its cast—and the actors’ willingness to be vulnerable, naked, and simple. Yet, at the same time, a dense amount of backstory and detail has gone into constructing their characters.

This is something the audience won’t know, but the script actually has detailed backstories for each of the characters. Did your own experience as an actor come in useful when you wrote the character descriptions in the text?

BW: Having been an actor informs my writing enormously because it’s just the same challenge of entering the experience of another person. I think I was writing an actor journal for each of the performers in the play. It was probably for myself to know who these people were, but also for the actors. It seems unfair to hand an actor a play and then say to them that they’re not going to talk in the play, unless you can also say to them, “I’ve also figured out everything about you and here’s a roadmap for your behavior.” What I hope is that I created a template where actors can come in and feel the freedom to play and explore. I think a lot of the fun of doing this play, hopefully, for actors is being able to find their path through it, but giving them enough to feel that they have some kind of sense of who they are.

RC: I’ve never had an experience where I’ve known less about what an audience is experiencing than with this show. There are little clues, as everyone’s behavior is very consistent with who they are. We worked very hard to make sure of that. But there are moments that are ambiguous. That’s the joy of the kind of detective work that the audience is forced to constantly do with this piece. We’ve talked about whether it would be interesting at the end of the show to give the audience the characters’ backstories, but it could almost, in a way, feel like a betrayal. Because if you’ve constructed who that person is by the end of the show, and hopefully you have, then who’re we to contradict the story that you’ve made up?

Bess, did you have specific ideas about how the production should look?

BW: I try not to over-prescribe how things are going to look visually, because I think part of the fun of being an actor or a director is being able to come as a primary artist and really have a creative experience, which is partly why I didn’t dictate every little breath in the stage directions. And physically, you know, I had perversely written something that felt impossible to stage. I put in challenges on purpose: They suddenly go swimming in a lake, and there’s all this action happening concurrently in different spaces. I left it up to the great creative minds that I was working with to translate that. So none of it looked like what I expected, but that’s part of the joy of writing the play. I think I had first imagined the play in a proscenium style, which we just literally couldn’t do at Ars Nova.

RC: Laura Jellinek, our set designer, and I talked about wanting to make a space where the audience leaves feeling like as if they’ve truly been in silence. And so Laura immediately said, “Well, I don’t want to see a shred of Ars Nova, let’s just build a box within the box,” and so much streamed from there. My first impulse was this idea of using video in a very unusual way; it was one of the big things that I wanted to get Bess’s permission for when I started working on the show. I began thinking about how you pay attention when you’re in silence, or when you’re in a heightened stage of awareness, how it feels like you’re looking at things either too closely or really far away in terms of perspective. And that’s essentially what Andrew Schneider has done with the video. It’s these long, very quiet shots mostly of nature, and we filmed it at one of the retreat centers that Bess went to. So through the combination of Andrew’s video work and Mike Inwood’s lighting, we’re very quietly telling the story of the space in this beautiful minimalist box.

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As the playwright, does it feel like the production blurs where the writing ends and where the staging and the actors’ choices take over?

BW: I think the collaboration is more in high relief, but with every play I write I really feel that the actors and the director are such essential elements of the storytelling. If I didn’t want that then I would write books. Part of the joy of this process has really been seeing what Rachel has brought, what the actors have brought, and what the designers have brought—letting us all be story tellers.

Did writing the play detox you the way you wanted?

BW: Yes, in a way it did. This is my own silent retreat, writing this play. It’s interesting now to go back to writing plays with more language. I feel the bar for the need that a character has before they open their mouth to speak is much higher. And that’s actually a really nice thing. I’m more comfortable with not have having characters keep chit-chatting all the time. Rachel starts this play with this prolonged moment of silence for one of the characters. She always says it is the moment of teaching the audience how to watch this play. As the playwright, I’m sitting there during that moment, my heart is beating, my skin is crawling. Why isn’t something happening? It’s taught me, just sitting through that moment, to relax and trust that things can unfold organically.

RC: I think the great actress Uta Hagen once said to never be on stage with a cat, because the cat will always win. I do feel this play is basically making cats of humans, trusting that the little amount of just being, if you’re truly living, is quite compelling. And then there’s a balance, obviously, between that and just no action whatsoever. That’s where I feel your writing hand: when we should move forward, even while trusting this overall conceit of yours.

BW: The play to me is so much about pain and how we deal with pain. Is it possible to lessen the pain of being alive, and is that a worthy goal? I had this weird idea of can you do a play in silence. I didn’t know I would be writing about agony, but it just emerged. And then, of course, the flip side of that is that it’s funny too.

Yes, indeed. You have audiences laughing out loud almost as soon as the play begins. Did you plan this?

RC: It was funny in rehearsals. I have never laughed so hard in rehearsing this show. It actually makes a difference as to whether someone sighs before or after they lower their head—whether their shoes are tied or whether they’re wearing flip-flops. It’s such small elements in the recipe of each moment. So we would just run moments, hundreds of times, in these incredibly minute variations. You also get the actors wanting to kill themselves at some point because they have to eat the 30th bag of chips to figure out whether three chips or one chip is funny or not. This production has all the physical choreography that would go into a production of Noises Off—only the scale of it is minute.

BW: There’s always an event in progress, always forward motion. What Rachel and the actors have been able to bring to this play, even though a lot of it happens in silence, is a very specific aural language. She really crafted this rhythm and this music, moment to moment to moment. To me, strangely, it’s a very noisy place.

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That’s probably a good note to end: What are “small mouth sounds”?

BW: I think was interested in the sounds we make when we’re not talking and the way that those are a form of communication. The retreat course is taught by this unseen guru in the play and this weird little perverse part of me was interested in the fact that he would have this microphone that would be way too close to his face and you would hear these slightly disgusting mouth sounds that he was making the whole time. In early drafts I way overdid it and had little disgusting sounds peppered throughout. We learned as we worked on it that a little goes a long way. But I was just interested in that feeling of too much intimacy with a person that you that can’t even see. And, yeah, there’s lot of sighing and grunting and ahhing and ohhing, and then, ultimately, the larger point that I was looking at was that, a lot of times, words are just small mouth sounds if they have no meaning. We just say them because they’re just sounds that our mouth is making. So, I think, ultimately, in my head that’s another way of saying words.

Gerard Raymond

Gerard Raymond is a travel and arts writer based in New York City. His writing has appeared in Broadway Direct, TDF Stages, The New York Times, The Village Voice, and other publications.

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