About the Play:

Small Mouth Sounds has become a favourite of acting teachers for Male Monologues and Non-Verbal Scenes.

Small Mouth Sounds is a full-length comedy by Bess Wohl. Can silence bring inner peace? Small Mouth Sounds follows six city people in search of enlightenment who embark on a silent retreat in the woods. As these strangers confront internal demons both profound and absurd, their vows of silence collide with the achingly human need to connect.

Small Mouth Sounds is an ingenious physical comedy that looks at mindfulness and the wellness industry. How do you speak your mind when you can't say a word? Six troubled souls on a five-day silent retreat are led by the omnipresent guru through personal crisis and existential pain. While the unseen Deepak Chopra-esque guru delivers amusingly platitudinous wisdom via a microphone, his troubled clients – Joan, Judy, Jan, Ned, Rodney, and Alicia – are only permitted to communicate by non-verbal means and we learn all we know about these characters through facial expressions, gestures, and a few grunts. In the play's wordiest section, Ned, one of life's losers, lists all the disasters that have befallen him. It's a very funny monologue with a terrifying payoff. Through gesture, silence, and vulnerability, Bess Wohl's breakthrough play reveals how people on separate journeys can still collide, overlap, or quietly pass each other by. Filled with awkward and insightful humour, Small Mouth Sounds is a unique and compassionate play that explores how we we confront life's biggest questions when words are not an option and new ways of knowing and relating emerge.

Why you should read this play: There's so much actors can learn from reading the script – or, better yet, selecting a passage to work through with a fellow performer. Acting is as much about what goes unspoken as what does. With little dialogue, there's nowhere to hide; using body language to bring the stage directions of Small Mouth Sounds to life is an exercise in wordless expression.

Small Mouth Sounds premiered in 2015 to wide critical acclaim at the nonprofit Ars Nova Off-Broadway in New York City's Hell's Kitchen neighbourhood. After its sold-out engagement, it opened for a commercial Off-Broadway run in 2016 at the Pershing Square Signature Center and won the Outer Critics Circle John Gassner Award for a New American Play. It has become a favourite scene study vehicle in acting classes and workshops and is regularly performed in regional and college theatre productions.

Cast: 3 female, 3 male, 1 any gender (offstage)

What people say:

"A half-dozen troubled souls find that enforced silence doesn't necessarily bring inner peace in Small Mouth Sounds, an enchanting play by Bess Wohl. As funny as it is, uh, quietly moving, Ms. Wohl's play is also a model of ingenuity…With one exception – the (unseen) guru running this spiritual retreat – the characters hardly ever speak. Both the humor and the pathos spring mostly from wordless interaction, which is testimony to Ms. Wohl's intrepid writing…." — New York Times

"Disney has already grabbed her, and she's got history with Paramount, so playwright Bess Wohl isn't exactly a free agent. But with her theatrical know-how and offbeat imagination, recently on view in American Hero…this is a scribe worth fighting over. Her play Small Mouth Sounds feels like a holiday outing, a minimalist piece of experimental theater that casts the audience as voyeurs in an entertaining adventure that gradually darkens into tragedy." — Variety

"Though it employs very little dialogue, there's nothing quiet about Small Mouth Sounds. Bess Wohl's luminous play uses silence to dig into the core of human pain, which, like everything unendurable, can also be very funny…The play asks – and admirably never quite answers – deep questions about how we connect with other people, a feat that the characters achieve through channels both profound and silly. Wohl isn't afraid to let the ridiculous rub up against the sublime, and it makes Small Mouth Sounds as entertaining as it is transcendent." — Time Out (New York)

"Bess Wohl's wry and observant Small Mouth Sounds is long on emotions and short on words." — Daily News (New York)

"Exquisite...one of the funnier sad plays you're likely to see." — Evening Standard (London)

About the Playwright:

Bess Wohl is an American playwright, screenwriter, and actress. She began her career as an actress, earning an MFA from Yale, and has since become a writer, developing for the stage, motion pictures, and television.