August 2001

In 1989, Harold Pinter wrote a remarkably potent one-act play called Mountain Language which I had the pleasure of directing in its American premiere at CSC Repertory in New York in repertory with his earlier full-length play The Birthday Party. Mountain Language is a stark and aggressive piece of work set in a prison for political dissidents in an unnamed country at an unspecified time. In this hostile landscape, communication is forbidden, and language has become the tool of the oppressor, whose torrent of words infects the atmosphere. The owners of the language in this world use words to gain power over those who have threatened them by some form of dissent. Most frighteningly, the linguistic rules of these oppressors are totally arbitrary; indeed, it is their arbitrariness which makes them lethal. Early on in the play, the women are told that they are forbidden to speak their own language: "You are mountain people. You hear me? Your language is dead. It is forbidden." From this moment forth, only the language of the capital is to be spoken. Naturally most of them don’t know the language of the capital, and when they continue to speak their own language, the only language they know, they are beaten. Suddenly, in a moment of terrifying heartlessness, a Guard informs an elderly woman that she is permitted to speak her language again. Just like that. No explanations necessary. Tragically, by the time her own words are "restored" to her, they are useless. She is too traumatized to speak at all, and sits in silence as her son tries to communicate with her.

In his 1965 speech "Writing for the Theatre", Pinter famously commented, "There are two silences. One where no word is spoken. The other when perhaps a torrent of language is being employed. When true silence falls, we are still left with echo but are nearer nakedness." One of the rich discoveries of Mountain Language is that, if language is a tool of oppression, silence can be unspeakably intimate and ultimately hugely liberating. When I first read the play, the sections that startled me the most were the "speeches" that occurred in silence, indicated by the stage direction "Voices over". Pinter employs an innovative technique in Mountain Language to indicate a kind of telepathic communication between characters who cannot or will not speak aloud: as they face each other, their thoughts travel between them over the sound system via pre-recorded text, so that we are literally privy to their most private communication. What is arresting about these "voice-overs", in the context of the brutal environment of the play, is their beauty, grace and sense of hope. To my mind, they represent among the most lyrical writing of Pinter’s oeuvre, and the most deeply felt. For example, in Scene 3 ("A Voice in the Darkness"), a husband and wife are separated by prison guards; he is hooded and has been hurt. They face each other in the prison hall and between them travels a kind of telepathic language of infinite tenderness. In the silence, he "says" to her: "I watch you sleep. And then your eyes open. You look up at me above you and smile." And she replies: "You smile. When my eyes open, I see you above me and smile." In the privacy of their silence, the last refuge from their oppressors, two people find a language of love that momentarily lifts them out of the horror of their experience. Then the man collapses, the woman screams, and it is over.

These "telepathic" sections remind one of the lyrical memories of first love in Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, and as with Krapp, their potency is enhanced by the contrast between their hope-filled tenderness, and the desiccated loneliness of the current situation. "I lay down across her with my face in her breasts and my hand on her," Krapp’s younger self describes, as his older self is listens grimly, "We lay there without moving. But under us all moved, and moved us, gently, up and down, from side to side." We discovered that we could not record the Voice-overs of Mountain Language immediately after having rehearsed a scene, because the actors’ devastation came through in their voices. The tone of the Voice-overs had to rise above the horror, a momentary glimpse of joy and connection in a joyless, empty world.

When Mountain Language was first produced in London, Pinter had been engaged among other things in the struggle of the Kurdish people in Turkey, and the play was read as an expose of Turkish atrocities. Reading it now, ten years later, what strikes me is not its specificity but its aching universality. Pinter seems to have posed the question to himself: at times of extreme terror, what matters most? What allows an individual to go on? How do we endure? An oppressive government can take away everything: privacy, autonomy, dignity, food, health. What it cannot legislate are feelings. The imprisoned characters in this play have profound things to live for. There is a baby that the imprisoned man has never seen. There is a mother, deeply loved. There is a community, waiting for better times. The Old Woman looks at her son and says, in the silence, "When you come home there will be such a welcome for you. Everyone is waiting for you. They’re all waiting for you. They’re all waiting to see you." The Prisoner, in silence, says to his wife," We are out on a lake. .. I hold you. I warm you." These moments are like tiny flowers blooming in polluted soil, miraculous in their very existence. The Voice-overs hang in the air as the characters stand frozen; the prison guards hear nothing, sense nothing, and feel that they have conquered. Yet we know otherwise. The spirit of the "mountain people" has not been broken, even though they have been brutally robbed of language. It struck me, as we rehearsed the play in 1989, and again as I reread it in 2001, that despite the grim despair of this landscape, Mountain Language is also in some way a play of hope.

In addition, looking back on it now, I am struck by the strength of the women in the play. Pinter has always been relatively unique among contemporary male playwrights in his ability to write richly imagined women, so perhaps this should have come as no surprise. But the landscape of survival in this play is decidedly female. It is the women who wait for ten hours at a stretch outside the prison to be allowed in to see their men. It is a Young Woman with no power who takes on the aggressive Sergeant and demands that he do something about the Old Woman’s bitten hand. It is the Old Woman who dares to come see her son and speak her own language, even though it has been forbidden and she is beaten for it. I will never forget Jean Stapleton’s face as she stared with infinite love at her son, played by Peter Reigert, and continued to try to comfort him even in total silence.

Despite their generic names (Young Woman, Old Woman, Sergeant, etc.), the characters in Mountain Language feel highly specific, their encounters are acutely real, and the violence they encounter is graphic. In conceiving the production for CSC Repertory, we worked hard to make the environment as stark and as real as possible so that those encounters would leap out. We had had extensive discussions with Harold about the specific setting for the piece, about how to make it visceral without evoking a specific country at a specific moment in history. Ultimately we chose to capitalize upon the gritty environment of our warehouse-like space, with its high brick wall and iron ceiling, creating a design in which the entire play could unfold without ever changing sets. The platform which housed The Birthday Party was covered with a huge grayish-white tarp that was bunched up where the tarp hit the upstage wall, in an abstract shape reminiscent of banks of snow. A single bare bulb hung over the central area, like a shroud. On the platform was a simple square metal table and two chairs. The design suggested the oppression of a military prison without making the uniforms or archtecture identifiable with any particular regime.

The production opened with a line of women against the black wall of the theater. The line existed as the audience entered the theatre; every few moments, another woman would join the line, very slowly and incrementally. Slowly the house lights went down, and there was a long pause before the play began. The impression was that the women had been standing there forever. The first scene happened along the back wall, where these women (wives and mothers of the imprisoned men) were taunted and harassed by prison guards. The second scene, between an Elderly Woman and the Prisoner, occurred on the platform under the bare bulb. During the third scene, the mother and son remained in silhouette silently in their chairs while behind them in a corridor of light, a Young Woman searched for her imprisoned husband. Finally we returned to the Prisoner and his mother under the bare bulb, as he fell to the floor trembling in rage and despair at the terror of his mother in the face of prison brutality. The effect of this staging was to allow the scenes to accrue so that the tension and despair mounted as the play progressed. With very little time between scenes, the audience was never offered a moment of relief until long after the final blackout.

In preparing for rehearsals, Pinter and I discussed whether it might not be more effective to speak the play in an American dialect for American audiences, and whether we might make certain textual emendations (e.g. "John Doe" for "Joseph Dokes", "guy" for "bloke") so that the piece would feel more immediate in America. In part this discussion arose out of Pinter’s concern that American audiences, in their smug security, would view the play as a parable about horrors that happened elsewhere rather than as something to be reckoned with about our own culture. As we worked, however, it quickly became obvious that transposing the piece to American was not only unnecessary, it was wrong. As is always the case with Pinter’s work, it is the quality and the sound of the language that makes the material so riveting. What interests Pinter is the English language and how that language, his own language, can be manipulated and distorted to inflict violence on another person. In trying to Americanize the play, we were weakening the potency of the language and literalizing the events and characters Pinter had created, which was not useful. Oddly enough, for us, because the language of the play is not literally recognizable as our own, it ultimately takes on a far greater universality. By maintaining the "Britishisms" of Pinter’s language, our audiences were never tempted to ask what Southern army base this was set in or what part of America the Young Woman came from. The scenes sprang into relief, against the stark, bare-bulb world of the scenery, like brutal snapshots that the audience could absorb and examine one frame at a time.

I chose actors for this production who had power and musicality, actors who would honor the precise cadences of the language and fill the silence and stillness with rich humanity. Much of Mountain Language is about watching, listening, longing, and occasionally, daring to make a stand. We used the same company of actors for both The Birthday Party and Mountain Language, and deliberately cast each actor in radically contrasting roles, so that the audience was privy to startling transformations as the victimized Stanley (David Strathairn) became the brutalizing Officer, the wide-eyed Lulu (Wendy Makkena) became the tough and compassionate Young Woman, and the aggressive Goldberg (Peter Reigert) became the tortured Prisoner. Perhaps the greatest contrast was for Jean Stapleton, who journeyed from the irrepressible and loquacious Meg to the silent, wide-eyed Elderly Women, terrified but determined to help her desperate son in any way she possibly could. For the entire cast, the experience was an extraordinary theatrical work-out.

Pinter seemed extremely moved by the production we did at CSC, in part because it was by necessity so raw and so intimate, in our small downtown space in the East Village. In pairing Mountain Language with The Birthday Party (Pinter’s idea), it became immediately clear that, for all their surface differences, both pieces wrestled with a concern that has been paramount in Pinter’s work from the beginning: the struggle of the individual to survive the depredations and aggressions of society. "Stan!, Petey yells out at the end of The Birthday Party as Goldberg and McCann drag him off, "Don’t let them tell you what to do!" How can one avoid letting "them" tell you what to do, when "they" have all the power? When "they" can brutalize, when they can withhold food and comfort, when they can even take one’s language away, how is the individual to resist? What is left to hold on to?

This is an ancient and unanswerable question. I remember clearly that when I studied classical Greek, one of the first things I learned was the origin of the word "barbarian." To the Greeks, a barbarian was anyone who did not speak Greek, who made a sound that to Greek ears was simply "bar bar bar." At first I found this xenophobia slightly horrifying on the part of the supposedly democratic fifth century Athenians. But I came to understand that for the Greeks, whose language was as deeply precious and hugely wondrous as English was to the Elizabethans, to be robbed of one’s language was to undergo a kind of psychic death. If language is associated with breath and breath with life, then to forbid someone to speak is to forbid them to live in some deep sense. The revelation in Mountain Language, which perhaps Pinter learned from his great mentor Samuel Beckett, is that there are many kinds of language. If the language of words is forbidden, the language of the body becomes critical. If the language of the body is restricted, the language of the eyes becomes potent. As long as there is a passion to communicate, a desire to connect, human beings will struggle to find a language. Pinter has scripted Mountain Language so that the simplest declarative statement ("I have bread") becomes deep connective tissue when a mother sees her son in prison and he looks back at her, understanding everything.

Indeed, the rehearsal process for Mountain Language revealed the theme of parents and absent children in potent ways. Pinter has addressed the subject of children in various ways over the course of his career: in Betrayal they become connected with images of adultery when a woman and her lover remember tossing one of their children up into the air in one of their kitchens early on in the affair. In his newest play Celebration, references to absent children highlight the desiccation of the two marriages we see, as during an anniversary celebration Julie says to Prue, "It’s funny our children aren’t here. When they were young we spent so much time with them, the little things, looking after them… playing with them… being their mothers." In Moonlight, a dying father is tormented by his two sons’ deliberate refusal to visit him on his deathbed. But perhaps nowhere is the ache for the missing child more potent than in Mountain Language. To me personally, this became vividly clear because two weeks before we began rehearsals, I gave birth to my first child. In the chaos of organizing rehearsals, raising funds, casting and designing the production and learning what it meant to be a mother at the same time, I had failed to make adequate childcare arrangements and so the tiny Lexie came to rehearsals every day in her carry cot and gazed with silent round eyes at the proceedings.

Nothing is ever abstract when there is a child or an animal in rehearsal. Everything suddenly becomes visceral, specific and real. When Jean Stapleton sat across from Peter Reigert and her Voice-over said "The baby is waiting for you", everyone in the room understood how deeply this man was longing for the baby he has never seen, and how little his mother had to say to him to trigger his feelings for his child. For Peter Riegert, accustomed to playing the "bully" Goldberg in The Birthday Party, the presence of a real baby opened his heart in a simple and immediate way; no "acting" was required.

With remarkable economy and simplicity, Mountain Language asks enormous questions: What kind of world is it in which parents are taken from their children, in which the most basic family relations are ruptured? And in a world in which this routinely happens, how do those ruptures ever get repaired? Perhaps because the play refuses to answer those questions in any comfortable way, it has remained a vivid and potent work ten years after its creation.