Red Orchid Theatre Presents SMALL MOUTH SOUNDS Review—Self-Help without Illusions

A Clash of Personalities

Bess Wohl’s 2015 drama, Small Mouth Sounds, now premiering in Chicago at A Red Orchid Theatre, is a play characterized by its heavy use of silence. The people at the retreat are discouraged from talking to each other, although they occasionally ignore the rule and try to communicate regardless. “Finding yourself” is a goal that’s open to a lot of interpretations, and it’s drawn a motley group of people who are identifiable by their most obvious quirk. The characters’ names are only mentioned in the program, but one (Lawrence Grimm) apparently tunes out other people and is relentlessly pursued by flies, one (Heather Chrisler) who is a painfully awkward, clueless woman who feels inspired by the most insipid of aphorisms, and a middle-aged lesbian couple (Jennifer Engstrom and Cynthia Hines) that entered bickering with only one half wanting to participate mostly gets worse from there. Travis A. Knight plays a yoga buff who is clearly an old hand at Eastern-inspired self-help and has a practice of his own, while semi-unwittingly triggering all of another man’s (Levi Holloway) fears of inadequacy.

Red Orchid Captures the Humor in Spiritual Yearning

Directed by Shade Murray, the cast has been given room to develop very specific ideas about their obscure-as-written characters. The look of betrayal on the yoga buff’s face when the guru’s cell phone goes off is hilarious, as are several other moments of all-too-human foibles. But there’s a deep sense of sadness there, too, since if the participants are changing, it’s not in the ways they’d come hoping they would. They get exasperated with each other’s breaking the anti-bear rules, participate in sharing food, get scared when they think they hear a bear, giggle at themselves, and then when the bear comes, they sink deeper into self-recrimination. It’s probably a familiar pattern for them and that’s just one example of how the dynamic repeats at the retreat, only with new dangers. Costume designer Myron Elliott-Cisneros has helped to communicate a lot about these characters through just a few symbols, although in the absence of speech, everything takes on out-sized importance. The world of the retreat mostly exists through the sound design of Jeffrey Levin, which implies a Walden’s Pond world that is removed from society, but not to the degree it’s cracked up to be.

Learning to Appreciate People

Tying the play together is the character of the teacher, voiced by Meighan Gerachis. The other characters sit silently against the back wall during her speeches, positioning her in the place of the audience. Her crisis gets continually worse and nobody knows what to do about it because most of the retreaters don’t even want to acknowledge that it’s happening. But Wohl takes her seriously. This isn’t a play about how self-improvement is impossible or that people seeking it are silly, only that part of it is confronting the magnitude of the difficulties each person faces. The guru warned early on that she had no plan and the students would be the teachers, but that’s a cliched platitude. The horror of the play comes from her and her students’ slow realization that it is true. Watching Small Mouth Sounds is itself a kind of meditative experience. An audience that is prepared to observe without judgement could learn a lot more about these people and appreciate them more than would have seemed possible.

Cast:

Jennifer Engstrom (Joan), Lawrence Grimm (Jan), Cynthia Hines (Judy), Heather Chrisler (Alicia), Meighan Gerachis (Teacher), Levi Holloway (Ned), Travis A. Knight (Rodney)

Creative:

Bess Wohl (Playwright), Shade Murray (Director), Kurtis Boetcher (Scenic), Myron Elliott-Cisneros (Costumes), Heather Gilbert (Lights), Jeffrey Levin (Sound), Jenny Pinson (Props), Samantha Rausch (Technical Director), Cortney Hurley (Production Manager), S.G. Heller (Stage Manager), Chloe Orlando (Assistant Director), Kate DeVore (Vocal Coach), Leean Kim Torske (Dramaturg)

Where:

A Red Orchid Theatre
1531 N. Wells Ave, Chicago

When:

Thursdays: 7:30 p.m.
Fridays:  7:30 p.m.
Saturdays: 3:00 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.
Sundays:  3:00 p.m.
Through December 9.

Tickets:

$30-$40 regular run.  ($30 Thurs, $35 Fri, Sat matinee, $40 Sat evening & Sun)

(312) 943-8722 or online at A Red Orchid Theatre.

Contains brief nudity.

All Photos by Mike Hari

Note: Picture This Post reviews are excerpted by Theatre in Chicago

About the Author: Jacob Davis

Jacob Davis has lived in Chicago since 2014 when he started writing articles about theatre, opera, and dance for a number of review websites. He is a graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Department of Theatre, where he specialized in the history of modernist dramatic literature and criticism. While there, he interned as a dramaturge for Dance Heginbotham developing concepts for new dance pieces. His professional work includes developing the original jazz performance piece The Blues Ain’t a Color with Denise LaGrassa, which played at Theater Wit. He has also written promotional materials for theatre companies including Silk Road Rising.

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