Chatting with Playwright Bess Wohl

With Tony-nominated playwright Bess Wohl

Summer Dawn Wallace, co-founder of the wonderful Urbanite Theatre, had a dream. Each season would include a festival featuring readings of plays by female playwrights that had not yet been produced. It's a lot of work for Summer and her team to read the submissions and select just three for inclusion in the festival. But each year has yielded both exciting works for the audience and an amazing opportunity for the playwrights to work with a director and professional actors. It's an event I look forward to every year. But there's more! 

Summer's vision included giving participating playwrights and their audience the opportunity to hear from an established female playwright. This year's playwright was Bess Wohl, whose work includes Grand Horizons. The play received a Tony nomination for Best Play in 2021. It also happened to be the only original play written by a woman that season. I was thrilled when Summer entrusted me with conducting the interview. It was great fun to chat with Wohl, who was open and funny and engaging. Read on for some of the highlights. 

Grand Horizons was produced at Asolo Rep in 2022, so it was a great entry point for the talk. The plot revolves around a very mature couple with grown children who decide to get divorced. Jane Alexander and James Cromwell played the roles on Broadway, with Alexander receiving a Tony nomination for Best Actress.  

Wohl got the idea for the play when the parents of a friend announced they were getting divorced. It threw him for a loop. The fact is that our parents are our parents no matter how old we are. Who doesn't revert to juvenile patterns when they find themselves sleeping in their childhood bed?  And if his parents' marriage has sustained its ups and downs for 40+ years, why not stick it out? Wohl channeled those discussions -- supplemented by visits to a senior living facility and her own imagination -- into a play that's both hilarious and thought-provoking. It would have been interesting to listen in to the conversations of long-married theatregoers on their way home from the show. 

In addition to exploring the family dynamic, Wohl embraced the chance to write a play in which an older woman takes charge of her happiness. I can get back behind that. The play also gave older actors the opportunity to take center stage. Given the demographics of theatregoers, that choice was particularly appreciated. For a great video in which Wohl, director Leigh Silverman and the cast talk about working on this female-centric play, click here. 

There's a scene at the end of Act I in Grand Horizons in which a U-Haul crashes through the kitchen wall. Wohl has said that "The harder you make everyone's job, the more exciting it is for everybody." And while executing the partial destruction of the set (and putting it back together during intermission) is a challenge, Wohl created something that might be even more difficult in Small Mouth Sounds. It's a show about a silent retreat, so there's minimal language in the 90 minute play. 

Cast of "Small Mouth Sounds" at Second Stage (photo by Ben Arons)

The idea for this show came from Wohl's own participation in a silent retreat. She and a friend loaded up with snacks and wine and headed off to what had been called a "spiritual" retreat. Wohl didn't realize until they got there that the intention was to maintain silence throughout the weekend. Wohl reports that they cheated -- a lot. How could you not? She also quickly realized that this experience had the makings of a play. She was conscious of wearing two hats during her time there -- as a participant and as a fly on the wall noting theater-worthy moments.

Creating the play was different from the start than her development of other works. With little language to define the participants' personalities, how would the actors develop their characters? The script contains detailed -- and quite entertaining -- backgrounds for each character. My favorite might be Judy, whose description includes the following: "She wakes up and walks on the treadmill in the morning and watches Fox News. She finds that building up a healthy rage in the morning helps her greet the day...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..." To read more of the descriptions, click here. 

Wohl has of course seen multiple productions of Small Mouth Sounds. Perhaps the most memorable was seeing the show in Sweden. Since she couldn't understand what language there was, it was a theatre experience based solely on the expressions and movement of the actors. As a former actor herself (who trained at Yale's School of Drama), she especially appreciated the way the actors rose to the occasion. For more about this daring show, click here. 

I'll leave you with a couple of words about one of Wohl's latest undertakings -- "Baby Ruby." The psychological horror movie, which Wohl both wrote and directed, premiered at the Toronto Film Festival. It starred Noemie Merlant ("Portrait of a Lady on Fire") as a woman suffering from an extreme case of postpartum depression. Her husband is played by Kit Harington ("Game of Thrones.") You'll get a sense of the film when I tell you that Wohl looked to "Rosemary's Baby" and "The Shining" as touchstones. Just watching the trailer for the movie freaked me out, and I'm not even a parent. In fact, even the poster for the show makes me uneasy. You can see the trailer for yourself by clicking here. 

If you've gotten the idea that I enjoyed talking with Wohl, you're right. I'm eager to see more of her work, which seems to always push the envelope in some way. Thanks to Summer and Urbanite for providing the Modern Works audience with a chance to hear from this talented woman.