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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.
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