Small Mouth Sounds

Performance Dates:

Friday, March 28th 7pm

Saturday, March 29th 2pm & 7pm

All actors auditioning for this production need to be at least 18 years old. Below is a short synopsis of the play as well as detailed character descriptions.

We are asking anyone who auditions to read Hamlet's monologue from Act III Scene 1.

Here is a link to view and download the monologue.

Memorization is not required, but come prepared to read the monologue for the director.

Complete the online Audition Registration by clicking here.

If you have any further questions or need any additional information, please email the Center Theatre at info@centertheatre.org or call (207)564-8943

Small Mouth Sounds Synopsis:

This play follows six characters as they attend a silent retreat, hoping to find relief from the anxieties and pain of their lives. The play largely takes place in silence, requiring actors to convey emotions and relationships through physicality and nonverbal communication.

Key Themes:

Suffering and the search for meaning: The play examines the universality of suffering and the ways people seek to cope, often through spirituality or self-help.
The limitations of language: The silence imposed on the characters highlights the limitations of words and the importance of nonverbal communication.
The human need for connection: Despite their struggles, the characters are drawn to one another, forming unlikely bonds in their shared experience.

Small Mouth Sounds Characters:

Note: Everyone in this play is in some kind of agony. In this way, they are not unlike the rest of us. They have come to this retreat in the hope of finding some kind of relief. This desire should feel very immediate and present throughout the action of the play.

The TEACHER is played by a disembodied, androgynous voice with a strange, slightly accented way of talking. The androgynous tone might be the result of some kind of sickness or might be just the way the teacher sounds. Either way, it sounds throaty and scratchy. The accent is somewhere between affected and foreign. The voice is amplified through a microphone. And. Pauses a lot at. Odd moments.

JOAN, late forties, wears a lot of clothes and jewelry from India. She is a therapist and sex educator in colleges, high schools, and in private practice with couples. She likes to focus on pleasure rather than on fear or “don’ts.” For example, she asks her teenagers, “Okay, I know you are having sex, now how can we make it more fun?” She meets with her private clients in a sunny office full of framed photos of her dog, Small Fry, and a small ceramic dish of Werther’s Originals on her coffee table. She really loves Werther’s Originals. She has a roll of them in her pocket right now. It’s about pleasure, people.

She is also incredibly, mind-bendingly, soul-crushingly angry and has been since about the age of six when her parents got divorced and her mother told her, “Daddy doesn’t love us enough.” She first discovered she was pretty in college and then promptly got raped by a frat boy. She became bulimic. Now, she meditates and does yoga.

At times, her rage still bubbles to the surface in little ways, in spite of her efforts to breathe through it. She might compliment you on a haircut when you know it’s terrible. She might say you look healthy and well-rested when you know you’ve gained weight. She might spend five minutes brushing her teeth. She might write a really mean anonymous comment on a blog. She might become obsessed with hating a stranger. She might leave, just when you need her the most.

JUDY, maybe fifty, is Joan’s partner. She works at O magazine as a top editor in the art department – a few times a year, she finds herself in the same room with Oprah. She’s the kind of person who inly needs four hours of sleep per night. She gets a lot of email. She wakes up and walks on the treadmill while watching Fox News. She finds that building up a healthy rage in the morning helps her greet the day.

She likes control. She likes to be in control of her image. Her wardrobe is all big silver jewelry and Eileen Fisher in jewel tones, although for this particular weekend she has brought new Lululemon. She makes a good living. She eats a lot of grilled fish. She’s direct. She grew up with three brothers. She always felt she had to prove herself equal to the boys. She has had a recent diagnosis of ovarian cancer and, as the doctor said, she “will not have a good outcome.” This is a serious problem for her sense of control.

Her soft spot is Joan. She and Joan met at a Buddhist lecture series in Manhattan. Judy had thought about exploring spirituality because she had an intermittent eye tic doctors told her could be stress related. It was embarrassing. People on the subway thought she was winking. She and Joan went out for green juice — she’d never had green juice before — and she never looked back. Now, she’s not really that into spirituality anymore, knows she should meditate, never has the time, but she’s here because, simply put, she loves Joan madly. She loves how Joan eats. She loves how Joan smells. She loves the heat Joan gives off when she sleeps. She is very afraid Joan will leave, just when she needs Joan the most.

ALICIA is around thirty-ish, strawberry-blonde (sometimes more strawberry, sometimes more blonde) from Southern California. She is the kind of person who manages to make a lot of noise even when she’s “in silence.” She has zippers on her clothes and bag. She has wrappers that must be unwrapped. She has bracelets that jangle. She sips loudly. She breathes loudly. She has shoes with heels that click. She shakes out her hair and scratches her head and adjusts her bra and it’s an entire three-act play. It’s because she likes being watched.

She was a child actor and beauty pageant star. Born in Arizona, her parents moved her to L.A. when she started getting commercials. She was on a few episodes of *Party of Five* as a friend of Lacey Chabert’s character. That was pretty much the high point. Most recently, she was in a commercial for a nationwide wireless company, where her role was to act really surprised and say, “Gotcha!” Sometimes people recognize her from that, which she both kind of hates and kind of loves. These days, Alicia gets her performance fix by doing karaoke alone. She belts out *Someone Like You* with an intensity that would rival Adele’s.

She didn’t used to do this kind of pathetic, embarrassing thing. Up ‘til a few months ago, she was with Fred. Fred was a hedge fund guy who liked Alicia because she seemed unmoored enough to bend to his will. She was, and things worked for a very long time. But then Fred got bored of being with somebody who would bend to his will. (Alicia believes that Fred had undiagnosed ADHD.) There was a situation with a hooker. Alicia still didn’t move out. This fact, among several others, still makes her burn with shame. Finally, Fred kicked her out. (She had started, out of unexpressed rage, brushing her hair and leaving the hairballs around the apartment, like a cat peeing on the walls.) The day she moved out, she gave Fred one last blow job upstairs while the U-Haul waited outside. (More shame.) She had to move in with her cousin who lives in Long Island City, where she discovered Fred had given her chlamydia. It was around then that a therapist she’d started seeing suggested she develop a spiritual practice. She doesn’t have a lot of experience with any of this. But she needs something, anything, actually, to take away the pain of living without Fred, whom she still loves desperately, achingly, utterly. (Shame.)

She still spends a lot of time online stalking Fred. Texting Fred. Texting with her friends about Fred. Checking Fred’s Instagram feed. Checking his Facebook page. Her heart is fucking destroyed over Fred. If what was happening on the inside was happening on the outside, instead of being a very attractive thirty-two-year-old (people think she’s twenty-eight), she’d be a fucking quadriplegic. She’s looking for something — or somebody — to make her feel okay again.

NED, somewhere in his forties, has had a severe run of bad luck worse than the worst country-western song. Here’s what happened. First, Ned, ever the outdoor enthusiast, went rock climbing to try to clear his head, and he ended up falling and cracking his skull in eight places. (You can still see the scars. It’s why he wears the hat.) He spent two years in and out of the hospital, during which time his identity was stolen, his house burned down due to electrical problems, and his wife, Dawn, got a tattoo. The tattoo was, in a way, the most upsetting part, because Dawn is not the tattoo type. She lost the baby weight. She got highlights in her hair. She started reading the newspaper and having opinions. Suffice it to say, this was all evidence of what should be blatantly obvious — Dawn had started messing around — specifically with Ned’s younger brother, Charlie.

Charlie, who was always the fuck-up. Charlie, a failed musician with a past heroin addiction who now sings in a band called Seedlings, with kiddie music classes and birthday parties. Pretty soon, Dawn and Charlie had fixed up the house, kicked Ned out of it, and were living together with the kids.

Then things got worse. Ned’s parents died. Then he started drinking. He tried to stop by joining AA. Then his sponsor, Elijah, went off his meds and walked into traffic on the Long Island Expressway. Soon after that, Ned’s dog was hit by a car too.

You know when things are just so unfair that you feel like you might just have to grab a pitcher of kerosene and burn down the house a second time in order to make things right again? That’s what Ned was feeling. So he bought a pitcher of kerosene and was about to burn down Charlie and Dawn's house, when something stopped him. A little voice inside. It told him there was another path. And led him to study a variety of meditation, self-help, new agey books, which helped him avoid committing homicide. And now, for the very first time, he has saved up enough money to go on a retreat — this particular retreat, with this particular teacher, whom he greatly admires. This year, Charlie and Dawn are expecting a kid. Ned is contemplating homicide again.

RODNEY, mid-thirties, ageless, fit, gorgeous, grew up in the Pacific Northwest, and teaches yoga in New York and the Hamptons (in the summer). He is married to a woman named Nadine who also teaches yoga. Rodney and Nadine have had articles about them in various local yoga magazines and are designing a line of vegan bags, wallets, and jewelry together, made of a substance that looks exactly like real leather. Rodney wears lots of man-jewelry but he is pulling it off.

Rodney met Nadine because she was his student. The truth is, Rodney has had sex with a bunch of his students over the years — both before and after being married to Nadine. (Eighteen. But who’s counting? Certainly not Rodney.) In fact, he started his own yoga practice after being kicked out of one in the Bay Area due to sexual harassment. He pursues these women in part because once he has something, he never wants it anymore. He thought Nadine was different because she was extra-gorgeous and had that rich-person inaccessible thing that really got under his skin. Also, she had a trust fund which financed his East Coast yoga studio. Now he and Nadine have not had sex in three years.

When they try to talk about it, Nadine just bursts into tears and runs out of the room. Rodney thinks Nadine probably has some history of abuse in her past, which he is totally not responsible for and which, according to his therapist and his inner north star, he cannot take on. He has convinced himself that the kindest thing is to stay with Nadine, who is fragile, and satisfy his sexual urges on the side.

The truth is, all of the sex with young nubile yogis is really about his panicky fear of aging and death. Nadine makes him feel trapped, and this reminds him he’s going to get old and die. His man jewelry does not include a wedding ring.

JAN, fifty-ish, is from a small town in Finland. He is pale and sweet, with a wide-eyed, continually curious air about him, like a little sprite or a woodland creature. He is a pastor at a small Lutheran church back in Finland, and his church has sent him on a one-year sabbatical to explore religious life around the world and figure out a way to appeal to more of the Finnish people, who have become increasingly secular. He always wears a small backpack, in which he carries a bottle of water, trail mix, sunblock, and other necessities. He does exercises in the morning for his health. Jan likes to be prepared.

He came to religion later in life, after a personal tragedy — a son who died after a prolonged and terrible illness at the age of six. Jan's wife then moved to South America to study the Argentinian tango. Jan, who had been working in advertising, went back to school to study religion and philosophy, hoping that it might help him understand why things happen the way they do. It didn’t explain much, but it did give him a new community. And a sense of purpose, to help others. Still, sometimes at night, when he starts to suspect he really can do nothing to help people, he wakes up seized with a sense of panic that freezes him like a solid wood board. He waits all night for the sun to come up, too scared to move a muscle. Then he takes a lot, lot, lot of pharmaceuticals and tries not to fall asleep in the middle of his sermon the next day.

He misses his son. He is hoping maybe this retreat will have an answer for him, where more traditional religious experiences have failed. He also greatly overestimated his familiarity with the English language.