Round House Theatre: "Small Mouth Sounds"

Another theatre season begins!  This year's inaugural production was at Round House Theatre in Bethesda, Maryland.  The play is Bess Wohl's "Small Mouth Sounds".  The play takes place over a weekend retreat were six adults come together in search of enlightenment.  It is a silent retreat where only the teacher gets to speak--and only the teacher is never seen on stage.  It's the sort of depth of cleverness that the play plumbs.  It's intended to be a funny play with a few biting moments of seriousness.  You know, laughing one moment and then zing.  The audience was particularly generous in its reaction to the work on stage.

I have come to expect excellent productions at Round House Theatre.  I was excited by this cast.  I had seen Beth Hylton in the role of Blanche DuBois in Everyman Theatre's production of "A Streetcar Named Desire".  Maboud Ebrahimzadeh was wonderful in Round House's production of "The Book of Will" and Folger Theatre's "Timon of Athens" and "Julius Caesar".  And Michael Glenn was excellent in their production of "Sense & Sensibility" and Theatre J's "Brighton Beach Memoirs".  The actors have the chops--yet this production was hard on the digestive tract.

While the premise of the play is deceptively simple, the key is in the chemistry of the ensemble, coupled with the guidance of the teacher's godlike voice from above.  The structure of the play demanded tremendous nuance in expression and physicality (given the absence of words on stage), but too often the choices that the actor's used to convey their character's meaning and reactions lacked commitment and authenticity.  They never managed to hook me.  But if I had to pinpoint the greatest flaw in the production it would be the voiced character of the Teacher by Timothy Douglas.   His presentation was painfully lugubrious.  The attempt to sound new agey by slowing. . . down . . . his . . . words . . . too . . . a  ridiculous crawl was banal.  He sounded more like an imbecile than even a bad guru.  And given what I know of the other actor's abilities it clearly threw them off their games by forcing them to pantomime feigned interest beyond the level of cruel.  The worst thing a play designed to tell a story through actions can be is boring.  Most of the audience laughter during these interludes had a nervous edge to it--people who really want it to be better then they know it is.  I know a play is bad when the most impressive aspect of it was Mr. Ebrahimzadeh's naked romp about 45 minutes into it.  The man's got a truly impressive attribute.

When a play has the talent, but the talent isn't able to gel, the buck stops at the feet of the director,  Ryan Rilette.  However, I've seen other plays directed by Mr. Rilette and enjoyed them quite well including the aforementioned "Book of Will".  Why he didn't see the correctable flaws in this production is a mystery to me.

The sound and the sets and the lighting were all well done and certainly helped to bolster the overall production values; however, the final words to my DMV friends are: don't bother.

The only images available were rehearsal candids.  These few capture the images of the onstage cast.

Maboud Ebrahimzadeh (Rodney) and Michael Glenn (Ned)

James Whalen (Jan) and Katie DeBuys (Alicia)

Beth Hylton (Joan) and Andrea Harris Smith (Judy)

THE CHARACTERS (My descriptions from what I gleaned at the play)

RODNEY: Pretentious Yoga Teacher there to commit adultery while his wife thinks he's deepening his spiritual gifts.

JAN: A mystery to the end, but a nice if hapless guy nursing a personal grief.

JUDY: A woman struggling with an unidentified presumably terminal illness.

JOAN: Judy's partner who is not coping with her lover's illness very well.

NED: A man who's lost everything in his life including his short-term memory after suffering a life-threatening fall.

ALICIA: A woman who comes with all of her earthly possessions after walking out on her boyfriend.