As Real As It Gets: "Speaking Without Tongues"

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"The women and girls who live this story do not want to be seen. They tell their stories in dim light, in rooms with tightly closed doors; they glance at windows to be sure there is no opening. They do not want to remember. They do not want to speak. No matter. What is not spoken is still heard." -- Speaking Without Tongues"

Follow this link to see the slideshow at full size.

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Our Town.

That was my first thought as I eased into the front row of Reynolds Theater at Duke University on a rainy Tuesday evening and got my first look at the stage that would house Hidden Voices' production of Speaking Without Tongues. And the sparse staging does recall Thornton Wilder's landmark study in Americana, but that's about as far as the similarity goes. George and Emily do not live happily ever after here. Because in this town, George is a hideous memory that still haunts and terrifies Emily even after she has escaped him.

Weaving together the metaphorical Russian fairy tale of The Armless Maiden with the gritty, real-life stories of the players on stage Speaking Without Tongues isn't merely a play. It is a testimony. Told in snippets taken from each player's personal life, the pieces fall together so easily that it could all have been one tale. And in fact, it is one tale. One that is repeated every nine seconds in the US alone.

What was presented on the Reynolds stage was not a work of fiction. The stories told by the players were their own, told in their own words, their own voices, their own expressions and their own tears. Horror is heaped up on horror until even I was sure that they must be making it up. Then I realized that I only wished they were making it up. Because the stories played out in the dark of the stage are the same ones I read every week on Violence UnSilenced. But with the added component of being able to see the face and hear the voice that is telling the story. This? This is as real as it gets.

What has always confounded me personally is that however different the stories may be in the details, at their core they are all one story. The formula is as tested and true as any script, only the actors and the locations change. And I can't help but wonder if the pattern is so very predictable, why is this still a problem?

Maybe this is Our Town after all.

If you have the opportunity to see Speaking Without Tongues in the future, see it. If you've seen it already, see it again. It carries a message that cannot be told -- or heard -- often enough, even by those who know it already.

If you'd like more information on this and other Hidden Voices Projects, visit http://hiddenvoices.org/.

For details on Speaking Without Tongues in particular, visit http://hiddenvoices.org/pod/project/1.

And if you'd like to see additional photos by other people (who are actually associated with the project) from last year's production and behind the scenes, visit http://hiddenvoices.org/working/speaking-without-tongues-photos. (Note: At last check the link to the participants' portraits was broken, but because I'm so very clever I was able to figure out that it should be: http://hiddenvoices.org/projects/speaking-without-tongues/speaking-without-tongues-photos/participants/.)

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