Tag Archives: Erik Lochtefeld

SPAIN

Helen (Marin Ireland) and Joris (Andrew Burnap) share their ideas about Spain in world premiere at Tony Kiser Theater (photo by Matthew Murphy)

SPAIN
Second Stage Theater — Tony Kiser Theater
305 West 43rd St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 17, $46-$106
2st.com/shows

“Spain! What’s not to love about Spain?” Dutch documentary filmmaker Joris Ivens (Andrew Burnap) says in the opening monologue of Jen Silverman’s new play, Spain. While there’s lots to love about the Iberian country, there’s not enough to love about the show, running at Second Stage’s Tony Kiser Theater through December 17.

Spain is a fictionalized behind-the-scenes account of the development of Ivens’s 1937 film The Spanish Earth. Ivens, who had previously made such films as The Street, The Bridge, Rain, and Borinage, is hired by KGB agents — “They weren’t calling themselves that, obviously, it was the Office of the Branch of International Cultural Socialist Whatever Whatever but — the KGB,” he explains — to make a propaganda film about the Spanish Civil War to elicit the sympathy of the American public, and financial donations, in support of the common Russian. Reciting what his handler, Karl (Zachary James), has told him, Joris relates, “The War in Spain Is a War / Between the Rich and the Poor / The Noble Peasant Crushed by the Rich Fascist / See? / A Single-Sentence War / And Single-Sentence War Is a Perfect Opportunity for . . . / — and then he said: ART / but we both knew that wasn’t the word he meant.” Joris is also told to never reveal that the Russians are behind the movie.

Joris enlists the aid of his personal and professional partner, Helen (Marin Ireland), based on real-life editor Helen van Dongen. They decide to hire Chicago-born novelist John Dos Passos (Erik Lochtefeld), whose best friend is Spanish author and activist José Robles, to write the script, primarily to lure in Ernest Hemingway (Danny Wolohan), Dos’s competitive colleague. It also helps that both Dos and Hemingway have been to Spain, which is not true of Joris and Helen, who write words on a blackboard to show what they know about the country, including “tapas,” “bulls,” and “cerveza.”

Although Joris has been sworn to secrecy about the Russian involvement, Helen seems more casual about the relationship, mentioning by name a man named Ivor, who was more than just a handler, arousing jealousy in Joris. “So you don’t love him. You do love him? You did love him but you don’t anymore? You did and you still do but you love me more?” Joris burbles. They also argue about their careers and what constitutes art, understanding they are at the beck and call of the Russians, who want Joris to make a film about Italy next. “Are you sure this is worth it?” Helen asks Joris.

Soon the testosterone-charged, philandering Hemingway and the more straightlaced Dos are tossing about ideas for the screenplay and needling each other. “You like to make things complicated. I like to keep them simple,” Hemingway tells Dos, who responds, “You want people to feel like they don’t need to be any smarter or better. You just want them to love you.” To which Hemingway replies, “Maybe they’re smart enough. There’s a reason nobody wants to read your books.” At the time, Dos had just completed the third book in his U.S.A. trilogy, while Hemingway had already published such books as The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms.

As the prep work continues, relationships unravel and storylines tangle. “What’s started to scare me lately is this feeling that I can’t remember what was the cover story and what was the real story / what’s the art and what’s the plan / and what’s the back-up plan,” Helen says. She warns Joris of potential danger from the back-room dealings.

Helen (Marin Ireland) gets caught between propaganda and art in Spain (photo by Matthew Murphy)

Early on, Karl tells Joris to make the film about Spain as metaphor; the word metaphor appears six more times in the play, but Silverman (Collective Rage: A Play in 5 Betties, The Moors) and director Tyne Rafaeli (The Coast Starlight, Selling Kabul) can’t seem to decide if it’s a true story, a noir thriller, or a metaphor about politics and the creation of art.

Dane Laffrey’s dark set features such compelling touches as shadowy doorways where the Russians appear, threateningly, and a red phone lodged in a wall space, as well as an odd recording room where Hemingway expounds on life and art. The stage is dimly lit by Jen Schriever, with menacing music and sound by Daniel Kluger and costumes by Alejo Vietti, highlighted by Helen’s dramatic red blouse. Burnap (The Inheritance, Camelot) is bland and boring as Joris, Wolohan (Camelot, Assassins) is overly bombastic as Hemingway, James (The Addams Family, South Pacific) is mysterious as the hulking Karl, Lochtefeld (Stupid F***ing Bird, Small Mouth Sounds) is superb as Dos, and Ireland (Reasons to Be Pretty, Uncle Vanya) manages to overcome the inconsistencies written into her character.

Narrated in separate versions by Hemingway, Orson Welles, and Jean Renoir (in French), the fifty-two-minute The Spanish Earth was released in July 1937, a year after the war started and nearly two years before it would end with the Nationalist victory and Francisco Franco’s seizure of power. The war inspired classic works by Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, Alexander Calder, George Orwell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Guillermo del Toro, and others; sadly, the obtuse Spain does not make the cut.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

CLASSIC STAGE COMPANY: MACBETH

Married couple Nadia Bowers and Corey Stoll star as a sexy married couple with devilish ambitions in Classic Stage adaptation of Macbeth (photo by Joan Marcus)

Classic Stage Company, Lynn F. Angelson Theater
136 East 13th St. between Third & Fourth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 15, $82-$127
classicstage.org/shows/macbethcsc

Manhattan native and NYU grad Corey Stoll has quickly become a go-to Shakespearean actor in the city, playing Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida in 2016, Brutus in Julius Caesar in 2017, and Iago in Othello in 2018, all for Shakespeare in the Park at the Delacorte. His easygoing manner brings a compelling humanity to his performances, which also include runs in Law & Order: LA, House of Cards, The Strain, and The Deuce. And that humanity is again evident as he stars as the title character in John Doyle’s streamlined adaptation of the Bard’s Macbeth, continuing at Classic Stage through December 15.

Doyle’s spare set is a rectangular platform with a large wooden throne at one end; above it is a balcony. The actors are always visible, either onstage or standing in the back, watching and waiting. They are dressed in Ann Hould-Ward’s dark Tartan costumes, although it is difficult to tell the individual clans apart or when an actor is playing a different role, as several have multiple parts without costume changes. (The witches are played by most of the company, not a trio of actors.) Lady Macbeth is played by Nadia Bowers (Describe the Night, Life Sucks.), Stoll’s real-life wife, lending a sweet intimacy to their scenes together even as they plot murder most foul. Their sexuality heats up the stage, even as some sly jokes might be a bit much; for example, when Lady Macbeth says, “Come you spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, / And fill me from the crown to the toe, top-full / Of direst cruelty. Make thick my blood, / Stop up th’access and passage to remorse,” Bowers, sitting on the floor, grabs her crotch in a rather un-Shakespearean manner.

Erik Lochtefeld plays a contemplative Banquo in John Doyle’s Shakespeare adaptation (photo by Joan Marcus)

Barzin Akhavan is a fine Macduff, Erik Lochtefeld a touching Banquo, Tony nominee Mary Beth Peil a quietly regal Duncan, and Raffi Barsoumian a solid Malcolm; the cast also features N’Jameh Camara as Lady Macduff, Barbara Walsh as Ross, and Antonio Michael Woodard as Fleance, but it’s harder for them to establish their characters, who get lost in the shuffle. Tony winner Doyle (Sweeney Todd, Company), the Scottish director who went to school near Cawdor Castle, where much of the play takes place, has trimmed the show to a muddled hundred minutes, sacrificing too much of its necessary building energy as evil ambition overwhelms Macbeth. Even such a flourish as a bowl of water where Macbeth and Lady Macbeth wash the blood off their hands remains onstage too long, going impossibly unseen in front of others.

There are various versions of the Scottish play one can experience now or soon, including the Roundabout’s musical adaptation, Scotland, PA, at the Laura Pels through December 8, the long-running Sleep No More at the McKittrick Hotel, a return engagement of Erica Schmidt’s Red Bull schoolgirl version by the Hunter Theater Project starting in January, and Primary Stages’ Peerless, set in the world of college admissions, next spring. But you won’t go wrong with Stoll, who rises above Doyle’s messy confusion, delivering a compelling and even cathartic Macbeth, who could be any of us, lured in by power. When he says, “Is this a dagger which I see before me, / The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee,” we all see it, and consider reaching for its glittering promise.

KING KONG

King Kong is none too happy with Broadway musical about him (photo by Matthew Murphy)

The Broadway Theatre
1681 Broadway at 53rd St.
Tuesday – Saturday through April 14, $69 – $175
kingkongbroadway.com

It isn’t beauty that kills the beast in the Broadway bust King Kong; it’s the music, lyrics, and story that lack the charm to soothe this savage breast, to paraphrase William Congreve. I don’t revel in taking yet more shots at the already brutally attacked musical, but I have little choice than to fire more artillery in the direction of the Broadway Theatre, where this travesty opened on November 8. King Kong himself, the eighth wonder of the world, is spectacular; designed by Sonny Tilders and Roger Kirk, lit by Peter Mumford, voiced by Jon Hoche, and operated by ten men and women, the one-ton, twenty-foot-high mechanical creature is just about everything you’d want from the beast. Unfortunately, the rest of the show is a hot mess. The songs by Marius de Vries and Eddie Perfect lack any kind of nuance (sample lyric: “Another arrow shoots Ann Darrow through the chest / But every ‘no’ only brings me closer to ‘yes’ / New York socked me with a body shot / But I’m not staying down / I’ll fight like hell / So ring that bell / Look who’s coming out swinging in the opening round.”) The direction and choreography by Drew McOnie is often head-scratchingly absurd, with several ensemble pieces seemingly there just to take up time and space. And Jack Thorne’s book puts too much of the focus on the Darrow character, resulting in yet another tired musical about a poor country girl desperate to make it big on the Great White Way.

Ann Darrow (Christiani Pitts), Carl Denham (Eric William Morris), and Lumpy (Erik Lochtefeld) are off on a cinematic adventure in King Kong (photo by Matthew Murphy)

Just as Darrow (Christiani Pitts) is about to give up on her dream, she is discovered by filmmaker Carl Denham (Eric William Morris), who whisks her off on an adventure on board the SS Wanderer, accompanied by his right-hand man, Lumpy (Erik Lochtefeld). Captain Englehorn (Rory Donovan) wants to know where they’re going, but Denham is not about to say — until Skull Island appears before them. There they encounter King Kong, who falls for Darrow before being captured and brought to New York City, where things don’t go too well for him, or for us. The beast itself is breathtaking, especially when Peter England’s projections make it look like Kong is running through the jungle or the streets of the city and when he makes his way to the front of the stage, carefully scanning the audience while asserting his strength and power. But the watered-down version of the story and too many stultifying scenes — you might just get seasick during a stormy voyage, and what’s with those green things climbing through green laser beams? — zap all the energy out of this classic tale. “What an ugly beast the ape, and how like us,” Roman statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero said in the first century BCE. In King Kong, virtually the only thing that isn’t ugly is the beast.

A WALK WITH MR. HEIFETZ

Mariella Haubs plays the violin as Yehuda Sharett (Yuval Boim) and Jascha Heifetz (Adam Green) talk about music in world premiere play (photo by James Leynse)

Cherry Lane Mainstage Theatre
38 Commerce St.
Wednesday/Thursday, Saturday/Sunday through March 4, $72-$102
212-989-2020
primarystages.org
www.cherrylanetheatre.org

In April 1926, Lithuania-born Russian violin virtuoso Jascha Heifetz gave a fundraising concert in a stone quarry by Ein Harod kibbutz in Mandatory Palestine, the future State of Israel. Afterward, it is believed that the Jewish musician took a stroll with composer and kibbutznik Yehuda Sharett, brother of Moshe Sharett, who would become the second prime minister of Israel nearly thirty years later. In A Walk with Mr. Heifetz, a Primary Stages world premiere continuing at the Cherry Lane through March 4, former Gramophone editor and Time magazine journalist James Inverne imagines what took place while the twenty-five-year-old Heifetz (Adam Green) and Yehuda (Yuval Boim) wandered around the quarry area. In the first act, the two men talk about music, Zionism, ego, walking, and responsibility as Itzhak Perlman protégée Mariella Haubs plays the violin in the background. In the second act of the hundred-minute play, Wilson Chin’s set turns from the quarry to Yehuda’s cluttered apartment in 1945, as he’s visited by his brother, Moshe (Erik Lochtefeld), who has taken on a critical role in the burgeoning government. They talk about music, Zionism, ego, coffee, and responsibility, Moshe somewhat hopeful about the future as he name-drops such Jewish leaders as Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion, Yehuda despondent as he can’t get over a family tragedy that upended his life.

Brothers Moshe (Erik Lochtefeld) and Yehuda (Yuval Boim) Sharett discuss music and the future of Israel in A Walk with Mr. Heifetz (photo by James Leynse)

It’s a very talky, didactic play, each act involving two characters arguing over theoretical propositions in dry, matter-of-fact ways, more of a debate than a piece of theater, dueling essays on the formation of the State of Israel. There’s little palpable tension and no conflict; it’s just an excuse for first-time playwright Inverne to share his views — which can be intriguing — but he and director Andrew Leynse have left out any hint of drama. Boim (Two Thousand Years) speaks in a thick Israeli accent, Green (Venus) in a heavy Russian one, and Lochtefeld (Small Mouth Sounds) in a British lilt, to help differentiate among the three men, even though none of the accents are based on how they actually spoke. Haubs, however, speaks beautifully with her violin; unfortunately, there is not nearly enough of the Juilliard graduate, particularly in the second act. Eventually, by the time they get to “The Hatikva,” what would become the Israeli national anthem and which means “The Hope” in English, all hope has been lost.

NAPOLI, BROOKLYN

Three sisters (Lilli Kay, Elise Kibler, and Jordyn DiNatale face unexpected tragedy in Napoli, Brooklyn (photo by Joan Marcus)

Laura Pels Theatre
Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre
111 West 46th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through September 3, $99
212-719-1300
www.roundabouttheatre.org

Right before intermission in Meghan Kennedy’s Napoli, Brooklyn, director Gordon Edelstein stages a spectacular, shocking event, made all the more surprising because it’s based on a little-remembered occurrence that took place in Park Slope in 1960. What came before intermission is not nearly as exciting, and what comes after might not be as fascinating as it could have been, but the event itself and its revolutionary effect on the characters’ approach to life makes it worth a trip to the downstairs Laura Pels Theatre at the Roundabout, where the show is running through September 3. The Muscolino family is led by the emotionally and physically abusive Nic (Michael Rispoli) and his worried and frightened wife, Luda (Alyssa Bresnahan), who cuts up onions to induce the tears she can’t let flow: “Why does He not let me cry? He knows I need to,” she says about God as she chops away. One of their daughters, twenty-year-old Vita (Elise Kibler), has been sent to live in a convent. Another, sixteen-year-old Francesca (Jordyn DiNatale), wants to run away with her girlfriend, Connie Duffy (Juliet Brett). And the third, twenty-six-year-old Tina (Lilli Kay), works hard in a tile factory. “What’s it like, bein’ loved?” Tina asks one of her coworkers, Celia Williams (Shirine Babb). Meanwhile, Connie’s father, Albert (Erik Lochtefeld), can’t help but flirt with Luda whenever she comes into his butcher shop. As everyone except Nic considers some kind of change in their life, a tragedy befalls the neighborhood that has each person rethinking their future.

The Feast of the Seven Fishes turns into a brawl in new Meghan Kennedy play (photo by Joan Marcus)

Napoli, Brooklyn is, for the most part, a fairly standard family drama, with not enough twists and turns aside from the major one at the end of the first act. The relationship between Francesca and Connie doesn’t feel real, and Nic is too much of a caricature. Kennedy, whose Too Much, Too Much, Too Many ran at the Roundabout Underground in 2013, doesn’t give quite enough depth to the characters as they explore their lives and debate the existence of God in the second act when they come together for the Feast of the Seven Fishes. Long Wharf artistic director Edelstein (Satchmo at the Waldorf, My Name Is Asher Lev) makes good use of Eugene Lee’s functional set, in which nearly all the locations are always onstage. But the first-set closer is a doozy, so you’re likely to forgive the syrupy, message-laden narrative and leave the theater wanting to find out more about that real-life devastating catastrophe in Brooklyn that, before this play, wasn’t even a historical footnote to the vast majority of us.

STUPID FUCKING BIRD

The Pearl Theatre tackles Aaron Posner’s “sort-of” adaptation of Chekhov’s THE SEAGULL, STUPID FUCKING BIRD (photo by Russ Rowland)

The Pearl Theatre
555 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through May 8, $60-$80
212-563-9261
www.pearltheatre.org

If the title of the current production at the Pearl didn’t already prepare you for something unusual at the theater that houses “New York’s only classical resident company,” then perhaps the flimsy wall of doors onstage painted with huge letters spelling out the name as well as a Warholesque-posterized photograph of Anton Chekhov would give you a hint. And if you’re still not sure, you’ll probably catch on once a young man comes out, looks at the audience, and says, “The play will begin when someone says: ‘Start the fucking play.’” As he’s hit with a barrage of shouts of “Start the fucking play” from a suddenly roused crowd, the play does indeed start. And the audience-actor barrages continue to fly for the next two hours, a raucous romp through the world created by Chekhov in his 1896 tragicomic favorite, The Seagull. Aaron Posner, a former actor and longtime Shakespeare director who has written reverent adaptations of Chaim Potok’s The Chosen and My Name Is Asher Lev and Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion, is now in the midst of a quartet of irreverent Chekhov adaptations, or, as he warns, “sort of adapted.” Stupid Fucking Bird furiously breaks down the barriers between actor, character, and audience, between truth, reality, and fiction, as it investigates unrequited love, lust, and the value of art. Conrad Arkadina (Christopher Sears), known as Con, is putting on a show featuring his girlfriend, Nina (Marianna McClellan), in the lakefront backyard belonging to his mother, superstar actress Emma Arkadina (Bianca Amato). Emma is joined by her lover, famous writer Doyle Trigorin (Erik Lochtefeld), and her relatively plainspoken brother, Dr. Eugene Sorn (Dan Daily). Also on hand for the “site-specific performance event” are Con’s best friend, the well-meaning, very odd Dev (Joe Paulik), and the dark, brooding Mash (Joey Parsons). Dev loves Mash, Mash loves Con, Con loves Nina, his muse, but Nina is instantly attracted to Trigorin, setting in motion some fab relationship confrontations alternating between sad and pathetic and sexy and funny. The conceit is that not only is this a play-within-a-play, it’s a play-within-a-play by actors who understand that they are performing a play for an audience, as made clear when it all begins. “This is a play. There is simply more than one reality going on at a time,” Posner explains in a “Meta-Theatrics” stage note.

Nina (Marianna McClellan) stars in her boyfriend’s play-within-a-play in STUPID FUCKING BIRD (photo by Russ Rowland)

Con’s supposedly cutting-edge performance piece with Nina is a pretentious piece of claptrap, even if Emma never gives it a fair chance, and Stupid Fucking Bird has every possibility of being a piece of pretentious claptrap as well. But it skillfully avoids such a fate over and over again through its clever dialogue, superb acting, and fearless direction by Davis McCallum (The Whale, Water by the Spoonful), a Shakespeare veteran who has recently helmed such rediscovered old treasures as Fashions for Men and London Wall at the Mint. Sears (London Wall, Third) is an aggressive whirlwind as Con, overcome with an endless supply of energy and rage that he can’t rein in. Paulik (A Feminine Ending, P.S. Jones and the Frozen City) is a hoot as Dev, a simple, soft-spoken young man who tries to find the good in life even though he is poor and unloved. Pearl veteran Parsons (The Rivals, The Misanthrope) is wonderfully gloomy as the dour goth Mash, who dresses in black and occasionally breaks out her ukulele and sings a sad song (“Life is a muddle / Life is a chore / Life is a burden / Life is a bore”). Daily (The Dining Room, Sin: A Cardinal Deposed) is downright amiable as the friendly Sorn, a combination of Sorin and Dorn from Chekhov’s original, while Lochtefeld (Small Mouth Sounds, February House) and McClellan (#liberated, Cherry Smoke) make a fine pair of potential cheating lovers. And Amato (Arcadia, The Coast of Utopia) does a grand star turn as the self-obsessed diva determined to maintain her career success — and her sexuality.

The actors go in and out of character as they explore love and death, art and sex in irreverent Chekhov adaptation (photo by Russ Rowland)

Stupid Fucking Bird is very much about making connections, among the actors, the characters, and the audience; at several points, members of the audience are asked to participate, although at other times the questions posed apparently to them are actually rhetorical. The physical space is broken down too; the first act takes place in front of the wall of doors, a space recognized as the front of the stage, but the second and third acts are set in the kitchen of the lake house as actions occur somewhat more conventionally from a theatrical perspective, although you should still expect the unexpected, particularly when the actors venture into the audience. (The stage design is by Derek Dickinson.) You don’t have to know anything about The Seagull to thoroughly enjoy this passionate, free-wheeling marvel of a production, chock-full of self-referential commentary on itself and the theater in general, with tongue in cheek as well as sticking out at everyone and everything with humor, cynicism, and sarcasm while staying true to the spirit of Chekhov’s original. (Posner’s second Chekov “irreverent variation” is Life Sucks, or the Present Ridiculous, based on Uncle Vanya.) “Life is disappointing,” Mash sings early on. “You try you die so why begin / It’s all a game you’ll never win.” When life includes such deliriously chaotic yet controlled rave-ups like Stupid Fucking Bird, there’s nothing disappointing about it at all.

SMALL MOUTH SOUNDS

Six characters seek enlightenment at a silent retreat in SMALL MOUTH SOUNDS (photo by Ben Arons)

Ars Nova
511 West 54th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Monday – Saturday through April 11, $35, 7:00 or 8:00
212-352-3101
arsnovanyc.com

Silence turns out to indeed be golden in Bess Wohl’s charming, inventive Small Mouth Sounds, having its world premiere at Ars Nova. The hundred-minute play takes place at a silent meditation retreat, where six people have come seeking enlightenment, or at least a respite from the pain life has brought them. Jan (Erik Lochtefeld) is a doe-eyed middle-aged man with a soft, kind heart, carrying around with him a picture of a child. Rodney (Babak Tafti) is a yoga practitioner and meditator who knows all the right moves and poses. Alicia (Jessica Almasy) is a chaotic, emotional young woman, perpetually late and overly dramatic. Ned (Brad Heberlee) is a troubled, hapless soul who has experienced more than his fair share of suffering. And Joan (Marcia DeBonis) and Judy (Sakina Jaffrey) are a couple dealing with illness as their love is tested. The six people have come to an unnamed location — the show was inspired by a silent spiritual retreat Wohl attended at the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck — for five days of vegan eating, inward searching, and no talking, led by a teacher (Jojo Gonzalez) who turns out to have some problems of his own. “Think of this retreat as a vacation from your habits. Your routines. Yourself,” the unseen teacher says in a slow, choppy disembodied voice heard through a speaker. “It is the best kind. Of vacation. Because after this. You don’t ever have to go back. To who you were.” Over the course of the five days, they all find out a little more about who they are, and they don’t always like what they see.

Silent retreaters discover new ways to look at the world in superb Ars Nova production (photo by Ben Arons)

Set designer Laura Jellinek (The Nether) has transformed Ars Nova into a long, narrow space, with two rows of seats on either side of the stage. At one end are six chairs for the characters, who sit there when listening to the teacher, whose voice comes from the opposite end, echoing through the room. The center, horizontal area serves primarily as the retreaters’ sleeping quarters, with Ned paired with Rodney, Joan with Judy, and Alicia mistakenly situated with Jan, which doesn’t make her happy, although he is serenely unperturbed by it. Director Rachel Chavkin, who delighted audiences with the smash hit Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812, which played at Ars Nova in 2012, keeps things much simpler this time around, showing that action speaks louder than words, incorporating silent-movie tropes and clever, recognizable gestures to reveal the characters’ traits, from their failings to their hopes and dreams, from needing a pencil to fighting off bears and mosquitoes. Video projections of nature by Andrew Schneider surround the upper panels of the room, placing everyone in the great outdoors, enhanced by Stowe Nelson’s terrific sound design, from the pitter-patter of rain to the teacher’s not-quite-godlike voice. Lighting designer Mike Inwood rarely lets it get too dark, so the audience is well aware of themselves, almost as if they are also on the retreat and observing such rules as silence and no eating, since any whisper or unwrapping of candy would be seen and heard by everyone. There might not be a lot of dialogue — although there is some, as numerous rules are broken by the students and the teacher — but Wohl (Pretty Filthy) has plenty to say about impermanence, communication, connection, intention, and interdependence as relationships unfold at a calm, dare we say meditative, pace. The title refers to those guttural sounds — grunts, moans, sighs, chuckles — we all make when words won’t suffice, or aren’t allowed. In Small Mouth Sounds, Wohl, Chavkin, and the splendid cast prove that silence can speak volumes.