"Small Mouth Sounds" was inspired by the playwright's experience at a three-day silent retreat; the bro-centric Spike TV channel is re-branded as The Paramount Network; composer Gabriel Kahane took a cross-country train trip and the result was a song cycle about Trump-era America.
Composer Gabriel Kahane rides the rails and captures Trump's America in song
If your goal is to cross the United States in a hurry, Amtrak is not the ideal option — it takes about four days to cross the country by rail.
But if you’re looking to meet strangers from all walks of life, it’s a perfect choice. That's precisely what Brooklyn-based composer Gabriel Kahane aimed to do, back in November, 2016. Just after the Presidential election, he left his cell phone and the daily news cycle behind and boarded a train.
Thirteen days, 31 states and dozens of dining-car meals later, Kahane returned to New York with a full diary and the inspiration to write a song cycle of character sketches and personal reflections.
The completed piece is called "8980: Book of Travelers" and he’ll perform its West Coast premiere on Jan. 20 at the Theater at Ace Hotel, accompanying himself on piano.
John Horn spoke with Kahane earlier this week. And they started by talking about the particulars of rail travel.
Interview Highlights:
On turning his train car interactions and reflections into songs:
I guess I had enough distance from the trip and enough distance from the initial shock of being in this new political paradigm. Wordsworth has this thing — he says, Poetry is the act of — and I'm paraphrasing badly— recalling tempestuous emotion in tranquility. I had kept a pretty detailed diary along the trip, so I had a lot of notes about all the people that I met. But there was a certain degree of trying to put myself back in that space in order to write these songs.
On meeting a majority of passengers in the dining car:
As a solo passenger, I was always the third or fourth wheel — sometimes to a couple, sometimes to three single people. It was extraordinary how forthcoming people were. I think one of the great revelations of the trip was having to interrogate my own sense of what diversity means as a progressive, and realizing that as a white dude from Brooklyn, it was much easier for me to go up to a person of color on the train than it was for someone who I read as being a rural, white, potential Trump voter.
On finding common ground with the diverse group of passengers:
As much as a Hallmark cliché as it seems, we do have more in common than we're led to believe. And that idealogical difference is something that's leveraged by people in power to consolidate power. If we were able to look at system more than symptom — the systems that are in place that lead to people being vulnerable to racial animus — and were able to look at the folks on high who are leveraging that difference to prevent solidarity, we might be in a slightly better place. So in a sense, this piece is very non-idealogical. It's a lot of people telling stories about family.
On meeting the woman who inspired the song, "Monica":
I met a very wealthy black woman from Chicago, but she was on the train because her sons had basically forbidden her from driving to Mississippi overnight. She was going to a family funeral. And that complex identity of, on the one hand, great economic privilege. And yet, on the other hand, skin color preventing her from driving to this funeral. And she was pissed about it. She was like, I don't want to be on this train. I want to drive and yet here I am. The complexity of identity, that feels also like it can get hollowed out, are things that I wish we could slow down and think about a little more carefully.
Gabriel Kahane performs "8980: Book of Travelers" Jan. 20 at CAP UCLA at The Theatre at Ace Hotel. An album version is set for a 2018 release.
Bess Wohl's near-silent play speaks volumes
Playwright Bess Wohl once signed up for a three-day retreat, but she missed the memo about the whole no-talking aspect. Assuming her time in the woods would be fun-filled, she was taken aback when the retreat leader concluded his opening speech with, "And now we will observe silence." Wohl's play, "Small Mouth Sounds," was born from this experience.
Unlike the vast majority of theater, speaking takes a back seat in "Small Mouth Sounds." Actors convey narrative through stage direction and nuanced body language. Brought together by the common thread of suffering, the characters use their brief talking moments to articulate their pain.
The play manages to both satirize the world of spiritual retreats and elicit profound feeling from the audience. Wohl swings the pendulum between laughter and tears in a way that sharply mirrors life outside the theater. John Horn spoke with Wohl her about writing, character development, and her own retreat experience that eventually led to "Small Mouth Sounds."
Interview Highlights
On the desire to challenge her characters not to speak:
It's different for me with every play, but with this one the environment came first. I've learned that I work that way a lot. I think of an environment or a situation and the characters sort of sprang from that. So I started this [by] saying, I want to do something at a silent retreat. I knew that at the bottom of the first page of the play I wanted somebody to say, Now we will observe silence. Once I knew that was interesting to me, I started thinking about how I would populate this play — who is at the retreat, what kind of people do I want to see here and how do I have an interesting enough mix of people that it will give rise to interesting, dramatic situations.
On the decision to not disclose each character's full backstory to the audience:
There's a lot of information in the play that the audience never gets at all, actually. The play begins with these character descriptions and goes into a lot of detail about the backstory of each character. And a lot of that is never known by the audience. It's a little secret between me and the actors. And there was some sort of perverse way in which I really enjoyed having this secret with the actors that was just between us and never shared. I was really interested in this idea of creating a world and then only revealing part of it to the audience and seeing what that would feel like.
On the importance of each character having an emotional struggle:
It was important to me on several different levels. I really wanted to communicate to the actors that this play, while on the one hand it has many comedic elements — hopefully it makes people laugh, there's a lot of natural humor in these kind of worlds — I didn't want it to only be a comedy or a satire about this world. I wanted to signal early on that there was a depth and a pain to this world. And that a lot of the humor came out of that pain. We were really exploring the suffering of the human condition. And if that makes you laugh, great, and if that makes you cry that's fine too. I was really interested in the need that everyone has when they come to these retreats to find some kind of reprieve from the difficulty of day-to-day life.
On writing the retreat teacher's character:
He says at one point in the play: "You think you've come here to learn from me, but really you've come here to meet yourself." And to me that is one of the biggest things that I learned going on these retreats, and also a breakthrough moment for me in the writing of the play. Because I really didn't know what my relationship to the teacher was as a playwright. I always knew that I had been one of the retreat participants, but I never knew how to write the teacher because that character felt so removed from me. But as I thought about who the teacher is — trying to guide these retreat participants through this experience and asking them to be silent, and asking them to change potentially, or asking them to think about their lives and their behaviors — I realized that that's so similar to the role of the playwright. You're saying, Please observe silence, and please meet yourself in some way through my work.
"Small Mouth Sounds" is at The Broad Stage in Santa Monica through Jan. 28.