Mountain Language - Theatre on Fire

Pictured: Jenny Gutbezahl and Srin Chakravorty

Mountain Language – Theatre on Fire

Review by James Wilkinson

Mountain Language is presented by Theatre on Fire. Written by Harold Pinter. Directed by Darren Evans. Scenic and Sound Designer: Darren Evans. Costume Design: Erica Desautels. Lighting Design: Emily Bearce.

I am occasionally accused of going on a bit too long when reviewing shows. Given that Theatre on Fire’s new production of Harold Pinter’s Mountain Language runs a brisk twenty-five minutes, start to finish, this seems like a good opportunity to try and practice exorcising some limits.

The show is excellent and I think you should go see it.

…Alright, now let’s see if we can work a bit more nuance into that statement…

I’m predisposed to liking this show. Harold Pinter has been my favorite playwright since I first came across his work in college. I realize that his style isn’t for everyone (and I’ll happily acknowledge that poorly done Pinter is a special kind of theater hellscape), but something about his peculiar mix of mystery and dread, of danger and the uncanny thrown into every day circumstances clicks for me. When it works, the theater turns mythic and spark of electricity is in the air.

I don’t think that Mountain Language is Pinter’s best play (not by far). It comes from late in his career as a playwright when, following in the footsteps of his friend Samuel Beckett, he sought to shrink the literal boundaries of his work (like the run time) to maximize its impact. The script is only a few pages long, only a few scenes, featuring very little physical action and yet somehow feels all the more brutal for it, coming at you with the subtlety of a sledgehammer to the face. This is Pinter at his most (obviously) political and the most angry (it was written in the late 80s and although I had only just been born, it seems like at the time you all were working through some stuff).

That brevity is a double-edged sword. While it concentrates Pinter’s themes, I think that if the play were given a ‘traditional’ staging, utilizing a proscenium format, the play would feel half-formed and lacking. This is where Theatre on Fire’s production picks up the baton and runs with it. Director Darren Evans manages to blow out the edges of the play, to have it explode in such a way that we’re enveloped in the mushroom cloud. The play isn’t up there on pedestal to look at. We’re in it. We’re waist-deep into the shit and trying to crawl our way back. Theatre on Fire’s production takes what, on paper, reads as fable and breathes it into a living nightmare.

I’m loathe to call any production topical or timely (the words are overused tools for the marketing people). You can form your own damn opinion about how it connects to our current world (and I think many of us can make one or two). The play depicts several scenes in and around a prison camp where an authoritarian police state is holding a number of people. The Mountain Language of the title refers to a local language that the government has forbidden its citizen from speaking. Across the play’s run time, we watch a handful of these mountain people attempt to enter the camp and reach imprisoned loved ones while the thumb of authoritarian rule crushes them into dust.

In Theatre on Fire’s production, you’re pulled into the world of Mountain Language. I mean that quite literally. Director Evans stages the play as a roving production, herding the audience around Charlestown Working Theater, letting each scene play in a new environment. There was a moment in the beginning when the audience was standing outside the building, the sound of light traffic in the background, when I thought this approach would backfire. That the gimmick of moving and the presence of the wider world would prevent us from clicking into the play. Lo and behold, the opposite turns out to be true. We sink into it with a frightening clarity. There’s an image from this opening burned into my brain of the audience huddled together, clutching our coats and bags for warmth, half-illuminated by the eerie glow of the flashlights the guards held. As we trudged up the path to our next location, the audience became a mass of the play’s mountain people. In that moment, the play is all around you and just as for the characters, a flicker of terror hits you in the gut.

An enormous amount of care has gone into crafting the environments that we’ll be walking through. The oppression hangs in the air around us. When we’re in the building, a low mechanical rumble drones on, underscoring each of the tableaus. It’s as if the wheels of this nightmare bureaucracy are grinding away in the walls around us. The lighting design by Emily Bearce is easily the most effective I’ve seen this year. A single, naked lightbulb swinging over the actors manages to have more emotional impact than a theater full of instruments. The glow of light around a scene feels like it’s always on the edge of cutting out, leaving you lost in the void.

That brings us to the actors, the people living in this landscape. There’s some beautiful subtle work being done by the team. The collection of guards at the prison camp (Chris Wagner, Lucas Commons-Miller, Sara Kerr and Michael J. Blunt) all dig into the threat of violence inherent in their characters, occasionally making you wince with only the sound of their voices. Pinter’s work has always been about the hidden pockets of emotion that can be found in silences and you get a wallop of that in Jenny Gutbezahl’s performance as Older Woman. The character barely has any lines but Gutbezahl becomes a presence you can’t take your eyes off of. She manages to make the sound of her shuddered breathing emotionally devastating.

The flaw in the production is its brevity (or, rather, not the production’s fault, but the play’s). While it would be an unsustainable nightmare to live in this world for an hour and a half, you also kind of wish that it reached for the hour mark. Just as it feels that the play is warming up and could go a few levels deeper, it’s over. But overall, the play has a visceral impact that I wish I got more of in Boston theater, so I’m happy to set that complaint to the side. Here, the form and content merge together into something full-bodied and immensely satisfying.

It appears that I’ve lost the battle to keep this thing short (not that I really tried anyway), so if you’ll indulge me, I have one last note to end on. Artistic Director Darren Evans has announced that Mountain Language will be the final production for Theatre on Fire. After fifteen years of productions, the company will close up shop, leaving a sizable hole in the Boston theater scene. In the two years that I’ve been reviewing shows, I’ve covered four of theirs and they’ve all been among my favorite productions in recent memory. Significant for never sacrificing intelligence for entertainment (perhaps its best, then, that they’re getting out before they can disappoint me). It’s been an endless source of frustration that those shows played to smaller audiences than I felt they deserved but so it goes. At least I got to see them. The company had an eagerness for shows that other companies would never think of producing and I can only hope that some of the younger companies out there that I have my eye on aim for that same sense of adventurous. We’re a little poorer without it.

Ah well, nothing lasts forever, (or so they tell me). On to the next show. I’m saddened for the loss of Theatre on Fire, but I’m thrilled beyond words that I’m able to offer them a salute as they go out. 

Mountain Language is presented by Theatre on Fire at Charlestown Working Theater October 4-19, 2019.

For tickets and more information visit their website: www.theatreonfire.org

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