When playwright Bess Wohl was invited by a friend to an holistic retreat in upstate New York, she brought along snacks and wine and thought it would be a good time to catch up. Instead she was plunged into a world of silence and meditation that was at first unnerving and then liberating. “It was a relief not to have to keep performing my ‘personality’ in some way, I could just be,” she recalled. Wohl recreates some of that experience in “Small Mouth Sounds,” her acclaimed new comedy at the Signature Theatre in which six characters try to address their individuated pain and anxieties through quiet meditation and the often opaque counsel of an unseen guru. “The sound of silence onstage has rarely made such sweet music,” wrote Charles Isherwood of the New York Times, noting that Wohl’s ingenuity and wit and the “sympathetic” direction of Rachel Chavkin “allow us to read the bleeding hearts of the characters with a lucidity that no amount of dialogue could improve upon.”Those “bleeding hearts” belong to a disparate group, including an oversexed yoga teacher, a bickering lesbian couple, an obsessive young woman with a messy love life, a man burdened with almost Job-like tragedy, and an amiable and seemingly clueless nerd.In a recent chat with ARTINFO, the Brooklyn-born Wohl, who is an actress as well as a writer, spoke about how the audiences at “Small Mouth Sounds” collude, willingly or not, to complete the experience that her characters undergo, mostly in silence. And then leave the theater to go back into the world changed — or not.Do you feel that in this digital age we’re more intimidated by silence than we’ve ever been before? In my own lifetime, yes. If you went somewhere to meet someone and they’d not shown up yet, you sat and waited. Now, you check your phone and catch up on cat videos. [Laughs] We have this incredible amount of distraction available. I recently heard — and I hope this isn’t true — that one of the challenges of getting young people into the theater is that they’re not comfortable being in a place where they can’t check their phone for two hours. In the theater, you’re forced to sit and pay attention in a way we just don’t anymore.Were you worried that the audience would get antsy during the many silences in the play? I was worried. We’re asking a lot from an audience. We’re asking them to become reflective. We’re asking for a very intense amount of attention from them. But the nice thing that we’re seeing is the same metabolic shift in the audience that the characters onstage experience. All the sort of anxiety that you walk into the play with is dealt with and by the end of the play, hopefully, you’re breathing in unison with the characters.Which character do you feel is the audience’s gateway to that experience? There’s Judy, who’s been dragged along involuntarily to the retreat and she’s the most skeptical and she’s reacting to the ridiculousness and that allows a certain portion of the audience to have those [same] reactions. Actually the audience can pick any of the six characters to identify with and they do depending on age, gender, or point of view about retreats.Does the rule of silence cause the characters to regress to childhood? That’s funny because at times during the rehearsal, the actors would go a little far in gesticulating and I turned to the director and said, “Tell them we’re not playing charades.” I was really conscious of not wanting to lapse into too much slapstick.Have you found on your own retreats that time itself takes on a different meaning? In this digital age, the distractions of our own culture are so immediate. You write somebody an email and if they haven’t responded within a minute, you wonder, “Where are they?” I do think that time can expand and contract not just in retreats but also in theater. Audiences are always in a sort of retreat when they go to the theater. The normal markers of time are gone. You go through days in the course of 90 minutes. And 30 seconds can seem like an eternity onstage.Why?I think it’s the quality of focused attention. When you’re really paying attention, time slows down. That’s why, as we get older, time just seems to go faster because we’re not paying attention in the way that we do as children.When you’ve gone on retreats, have you come back transformed? That’s one of the points of the play: Do people change? I’ve always been conflicted about that. I’ll think I’m transformed and then I’ll be around my parents and acting the same way I did when I was 13. I think change is more incremental. It’s not, “I’ve seen the light and now I’m a different person.” You capture it for a moment and then it goes away and you capture it again. It’s very delicate and subtle. There’s no shattering of illusions in a dramatic way.One of the characters posits the question: In a world in which there is so much suffering and chaos, do we really have a right to be at peace? What’s your answer? When I started this play, I didn’t have an answer. I’ve thought, shouldn’t we be actively trying to help, registering people to vote, or volunteering to alleviate suffering? But, for me, the answer is that when you elevate your own consciousness to a level that you don’t operate from anger or anxiety, you actually elevate the world around you. So actually being at peace in a world at war is exactly what we need to do.To what extent did you want to satirize the world of retreats and gurus? It was important that the play not just be satire or parody. We wanted to create a world in which the comedy could breathe and be honest about what is funny about retreats but also acknowledge that the teacher was coming from a good place and had some good lessons to impart.Would you be upset if some audience members came away with the notion that the teacher was a charlatan? No. I would never want to prescribe what any person is supposed to think or come away with from one of my plays. I do believe that while the teacher is flawed, he is someone who has some profound things to say. When he says, “You’re not alone,” some people in the audience are weeping and others are rolling their eyes: “That doesn’t address my pain at all.” The guru is a Rorschach test. In some ways, this play is co-authored by the audience more than any other play I’ve written. You’re sitting together in a circle in silence and what you get from this play is what you bring to it and it reflects back to you something about who you are — which is true for the characters in the play.
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