Silent retreat communicates a lot
It’s hard to argue with a concept as vague and as insipid as “wellness,” even as it’s metastasized into a whole industry preying on consumer anxieties with its meditation apps and raw juices. But perhaps its biggest vulnerability is a simple one: that we don’t deserve to be well.
Or as Ned (Ben Beckley) puts it in “Small Mouth Sounds,” in a world riven by “fires and mass starvation and dislocation,” and especially climate change and war, “maybe we shouldn’t be at peace.”
The touring Ars Nova production of Bess Wohl’s play, which opened Thursday, Oct. 26, at ACT’s Strand Theater, is about a silent meditation retreat — so Ned’s spiel in a question-and-answer session with an unseen guru (Orville
Mendoza supplies his vacant, eerily inflected disembodied voice) is among the script’s longest passages of text. It’s also among its most profound. Is self-care not just indulgent and narcissistic, but immoral?
Trouble is, Wohl’s six characters are also of little use to the world when they’re in their natural state of all-encompassing unease. They’re the crowd you might expect at a retreat: multigenerational and multiracial, all flowy sweaters, convertible pants or skinny jeans, copious beads, fleece vests. (Tilly Grimes did the costumes.) Each can barely stumble into the secluded meditation room in the woods on the retreat’s first day without committing some crippling faux pas. Without the aid of words, the cast, under the direction of Rachel Chavkin, make their snarky or petrified thoughts abundantly clear: Were we supposed to take off our shoes? Why did this guy sit millimeters away from me in an otherwise empty room? Why is my neighbor taking notes? Should I be taking notes? Where does my own partner get off acting like she’s a professional meditator?
As the teacher’s voice prattles on, it’s a delight to watch expressions morph — often with little more than a relaxing or tensing of the brow — from eye socket-boring terror to feigned comprehension to sassy skepticism to earnest need, each actor silently inflecting his or her character’s own bottomless dread with a whole unique biography of hurts and regrets. Wohl doles out that backstory through single judiciously chosen moments. All you might get is a rueful shake of the head, a noiseless scream, a back doubled over in pain, yet from that motion alone you instantly construct the detailed life story that has led each lost soul to seek such extreme help.
But as the retreat soldiers on, and actors return to their same deerin-the-headlights expressions in scene after scene, the humor starts to wear off. Throughout the play, characters seem to feel exactly the same about the retreat as they did at the beginning, even as their relationships with one another evolve or devolve (some more credibly than others). Part of Chavkin’s point is that it’s really hard for any sort of selfhelp or self-care to actually change you, no matter how desperately you want healing. But even if the retreat is fleeting, evanescent, the play chronicling it ought not to feel that way, too, if it’s to fully satisfy.
One idea that “Small Mouth Sounds” hints at but doesn’t fully develop is that even as fear brought these six schlemiels and schlimazels to the retreat, so did bravery. It takes guts to heave yourself into the unknown, to commit to days and days of silence, to expose your vulnerabilities to strangers. At a time when we might not deserve to be well and at peace, we certainly need courage, and Wohl’s characters, in their own benighted, hapless ways, are trying to summon it.
Lily Janiak is The San Francisco Chronicle’s theater critic. Email: ljaniak@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @LilyJaniak