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 architecture identifiable with any particular regime.

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