The cast of Small Mouth Sounds. Photo by Ben Arons.
Small Mouth Sounds, currently playing at ArsNova, is, without qualification, a delight. In it, playwright Bess Wohl and director Rachel Chavkin create transcendence out of the tiny frailties of human interaction. It is a rarity for theater, typically the most loquacious of artistic media, to be so quiet and yet say so much.
This is not experimental theater, but a play in which the principals spend most of the proceedings in silence cannot quite be called traditional. Six people of varying ages and dispositions arrive at a five-day spiritual yoga retreat (also known as an ashram) outside the city, each carrying profound and private pains. Over the course of the next hundred minutes, the play explores these depths with great humor and pathos.
ArsNova has an unusual space, rectangular in shape with two seated rows on either side for the audience. The performers use the long space in the middle as well as a small raised stage at the front of the room. This lends itself to an intimate, almost interactive experience, much as it did with Ms. Chavkin’s previous directorial effort with ArsNova, the opulent Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812. (The reader may recall that The New Criterion’s correspondent had some difficulty reviewing said production. I am happy to report the audience was of a much more refined disposition at Small Mouth Sounds.)
We glean the stories of these six characters through small moments: a sharp glance, a heavy sigh, a sob in the middle of the night. One is an older man with a picture of a young child. One is a typical yoga practitioner, outwardly spiritual and om-ing for his life—but whose self-absorption prevents him, more than anyone, from connecting to something deeper. One is an officious twerp who insists on following the ashram’s rules in earnest. One is a spoiled blonde who shows up late with a bagful of illicit snacks. Two women form an odd couple, their initial bickering covering a more substantial anger.
The play is absurdly funny. It’s a testament to the subtlety of the show that it’s unclear just when the humor begins to take on more serious cadences and reveal the tragic undercurrents. A joke shared between two of the characters gives way, naturally, to a simple gesture that discloses a death in the past. One character’s attachment to his cap is later shown to be the result of a serious injury that has left terrible scars.
Ms. Wohl’s deft and subtle writing is such that her stage directions successfully take on the function of dialogue in the play. The six actors should also be commended for the utter readability of their expressions and physical cues, which keep the audience more apprised of the plot than many productions do with prolix monologue. They are all excellent, but Jessica Almasy in particular stands out as the blonde Alicia, doing an admirable job revealing the interiority of a character so initially easy to dismiss as merely comic relief. It must be an exceptionally challenging thing for actors to communicate this way, but also extremely rewarding.
Much of the minimal speech in the play is delivered by an unseen teacher (Jojo Gonzalez) over intercom. The effect is celestial, made ironic by the fact that this particular godlike figure is supremely uninterested in his subjects, and often stops to take a phone call in the middle of his gnomic discourses.
He does, however, impart a few key lessons. During his training, he practiced yoga in a charnel ground, a literal graveyard. The idea of creating and persevering amidst the natural decay of human life is one that underscores the play. The only other monologue in the production is delivered by the nebbish Ned (Brad Heberlee), who beautifully reveals his own attempts to remain hopeful in spite of his own charnel ground of sickness, infidelity, and loss.
My favorite piece of modern philosophy is David Foster Wallace’s famous Kenyon College commencement speech, entitled “This is Water.” In it, Mr. Wallace discusses how utterly difficult it is to perceive other human beings as complex and full of as many quirks and pains as we ourselves are, trapped in personal “skull-size kingdoms.” In many ways, Small Mouth Sounds is an exploration of that philosophy. It ends with the characters likely no more enlightened than when they arrived, but—as their teacher puts it—slightly less alone.