Small Mouth Sounds takes place on a silent retreat, which makes for quite an unusual setup: six of the characters barely say a word, while the seventh says quite a lot yet is never seen. This has posed new challenges for the ‘silent’ actors in particular.

“It’s been very challenging to figure out cues,” says Hosanna Megumi, and Stephanie Carlson agrees that the hardest thing has been “the difficulty of hearing cues that are nonverbal!”

It can be difficult enough when the actors are in visual range of each other, but even harder when they’re off stage. Normally, actors will wait out of sight in the wings and listen for their cue to come on – and you can't really have them poking their faces through the back curtain every five minutes to see what's happening!

It can also be difficult for the audience.

“There are six of us on stage, and without lines, it's hard for the audience to know where to look and when,” says Hosanna.

To counter this, the actors need to ‘build up’ to important moments, to make sure that the focus moves to the right place or person at the right time. And the characters who are not involved need to allow that to happen. That is, it's all about maintaining awareness and working together to give and take space as required.

For Mikael Kivimäki, the hardest thing has been having to learn how to mime his character's intentions. Hosanna has also noted that she has had to emote more strongly and make bigger gestures that she would normally do with the support of dialogue. And the difficult part is not necessarily the miming itself, but ensuring that the miming remains natural and doesn’t descend into farce.

Stephanie, Mira and Salvador play out a silent scene.

However, the actors have also found working with such an unusual play to be an interesting and rewarding experience. 

“My favourite thing about it has been the fact that I've never, ever had the chance to do anything this ‘experimental’ on stage before,” says Mikael.

Not having dialogue to focus on – or indeed fall back on – has made the actors more aware of all the other things that make up the overall experience. Acting without words has made Stephanie “super-conscious of the soundscape of the play” and Hosanna has found that she’s been much more aware of every movement and facial expression she makes. For Mikael, “feeling the emotions without the shield of dialogue has been extremely gratifying and intense.” Stephanie has also “realized that there's a different pace to acting without words – if actions or emotional moments happen too quickly, they are lost.” 

Actors will often learn about their character through dialogue, but in this play, they've had to do that learning through actions, reactions and feelings. Mikael thinks that this has made him a better actor, and he has “loved every second of it, even when the director has made us unroll our sleeping bags approximately twenty-five times a day to get the beginning of the scene just right.”

What is Salomon (centre) silently saying to Mikael (right), and what does Hosanna (left) think about it?

And what about the director? Has it been difficult to direct a play like this? Adrian Goldman had been considering the play for some time, but says he didn’t know what it would be like to direct, and therefore decided to put it on hold and do a number of other things first.  Although Adrian was initially unsure how to approach the play, he found that he simply had to trust the playwright. He says that it’s a really well-written play, and if you listen to what Bess Wohl is suggesting, “then it just starts working”.

When it comes to the practicalities of directing, one of the major challenges has been to help the actors realise that, without words, their actions have to be slightly larger than they would normally be – because the audience doesn’t know where to look until the actors start moving. 

“My approach,” says Adrian, “was to ask people to focus on their own actions and not worry too much about the stage picture – which is much less obvious to them than it is in a normal play. I also used a new technique that I came across a few years ago called free blocking, which means that you don’t have to focus all your attention on telling people what to do, but you let them discover it for themselves.”

Adrian says that it helps to have a cast that is willing to experiment, explore, and try and try again.

“On the other hand, the stakes in most of the scenes are quite high and so it’s easy – or relatively easy – for the actors to commit to those relevant actions,” he says.

All in all, it seems that everyone has learnt new things and techniques that they can apply to enrichen future projects – even when they have gotten their voices back.

Photos: Anni Taponen
Text: Zach Chamberlaine

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