Silence is Golden: Small Mouth Sounds at the Provincetown Theater

Since dialogue takes pride of place in most theatre productions, I was curious (and a little skeptical!) after hearing Artistic Director David Drake on my radio show, Arts Week, recount how the Provincetown Theater’s new production takes place in… silence. It’s an extraordinary concept and one the playwright, Bess Wohl, the director, Alison Greene, and the company carry off amazingly seamlessly.

Six individuals have signed on for a silent retreat in the woods under the guidance of someone only known as “Teacher” (William Mullin), an erratic, self-absorbed, and occasionally cranky voice directing—and sometimes dictating—how the participants are to experience the retreat.

Wohl is a keen observer of human nature. Participants enter individually with their folders and other accoutrements; Jan (Paul E. Halley) is first, dressed comfortably, waiting in silence. He is joined by Rodney (Kevin B. Aries), a clear yoga-and-retreat veteran; when he immediately removes his shoes, Jan, looking baffled, follows suit, as do the other participants as they arrive, no one knowing exactly why.

The audience is drawn immediately to Ned (Daniel Goldberg), wearing a knit hat and a flannel shirt, who when instructed to write finds his pen doesn’t work. Enjoined to silence, he’s unable to ask anyone else for help, and looks perfectly miserable.

Rounding out the group are the women: a lesbian couple, Joan (Kelly Christopher) and Judy (Janet Geist Moore), and a late arrival, Alicia (Kate Pentedemos), who’s brought enough with her for a six-month stay. She’s the first of the group to openly flout the rules (“no food in the cabins”), opening one of her pieces of luggage to reveal bags and bags of illicit snacks.

While the play will slowly reveal hidden traumas and serious issues, it begins with hilarity as participants settle in for the first night, two to a cabin (Ellen Rousseau’s scenic design is again brilliant in its clarity and simplicity), each creating their own tiny space marked with what individuality they can muster within the retreat’s confines … and interacting with their roommates.

Ned is paired with Rodney, the guru who’s done this a thousand times before, and Ned nervously tries to imitate him. Jan gets the snack-eating Alicia, who is indignant about sharing a room with a man and tries to get him to break his silence; he studiously follows the rules to a T. Joan and Judy have the fewest issues as the play begins: they push their beds together and cuddle in the darkness.

With no space for dialogue, the company’s ability to project whole conversations in silence is extraordinary—some of it slapstick, but much of it storytelling at its most naked. Each actor must physically embody frustration, joy, pain, anger, and wonder. Each steps out of a backstory that’s at best sketched out, and allows the audience to fill in the blanks. Each demonstrates the impact, however fleeting, that we each have on the people we meet, and how our assumptions about them can be wildly off-mark.

The retreat does what retreats do: we see the inner baggage that each character brings and how they transform that raw material into something higher, brighter, even if it’s one that doesn’t offer easy resolutions. And if it had been accomplished through clever dialogue, it would have been a good play. The fact that it’s done virtually in silence lifts this play into the stratosphere.

Sound and lighting generally go unnoticed in most plays, serving as background, but Stephen Petrelli’s lighting and especially Alison Greene’s extraordinary sound design—which gave the audience the auditory cues they don’t get from dialogue—are well worth applause on their own.

The issues these characters take on are deep: love and loss, illness and death, communication and misunderstanding… but it’s done with humor and a certain lightness that keep the play from falling into pathos. Another tour de force for the Provincetown Theater, and a production you won’t want to miss.

review by Jannette de Beauvoir

photos by Bob Tucker/Focalpoint Studios