Small Mouth Sounds

Small Mouth Sounds is a play by Bess Wohl about six people who sign up for a retreat in the woods of upstate New York and promise to stay silent while they are there. Because the guests have agreed not to talk, the play gets by on very little dialogue. Most of what you learn about them comes from how they move and react, and the only steady speaker is a teacher who is heard but never seen. The Broadway production bills it as a comedy, and the script pairs its laughs with real hurt: nobody on this retreat is there just to relax.

The story is Wohl's own invention rather than an adaptation of a book or film. The idea came from a silent spiritual retreat she attended upstate herself. The play opened Off-Broadway at Ars Nova in 2015, returned for a second New York run in 2016 and then went on a national tour in 2017 and 2018.

This is the play's first Broadway production, a new staging by Joe Mantello at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre. Writer and director both arrive with major wins from 2026: Wohl's Liberation received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony Award for Best Play, and Mantello won the Tony for Best Direction of a Play for Death of a Salesman. As of October 2026, the six guests are to be played by Julia Roberts, Paul Rudd, Sarah Paulson, Martin Freeman, Greta Lee and Isaac Powell.

The action takes place in the present day. Six strangers leave their crowded city routines behind for a retreat center deep in the woods, where the house rule is silence. Cut off from conversation, the guests have to find other ways of reaching one another, and the chatter inside their own heads does not go quiet just because their mouths have. Each of them has turned up carrying some private trouble and some hope that the retreat will ease it. The calm they came for proves hard to find.

The script describes each of the six guests in detail, though the audience is never told most of it directly. Joan, in her late 40s, sees clients as a therapist and also teaches sex education. Judy, roughly 50, is her partner, holds a senior job in a magazine's art department, sleeps very little and fields a steady flood of email. Alicia, about 30, is a former child actor from Southern California with a knack for making noise during the silence. Ned, a man in his 40s, has been through one setback after another and is no fan of the great outdoors.

Rodney, in his mid-30s, is a fit yoga instructor originally from the Pacific Northwest; he teaches in the Hamptons as well as in New York, and his wife teaches yoga too. Jan, around 50, is a pastor from a small Finnish town who misses his son. He has come looking for something his faith has not given him, and his English is not quite as good as he thinks.

Since the guests barely talk, these backstories mostly stay hidden. You can follow the main threads of the story from what happens on stage, but who these people are and why they came is left for you to piece together, and your first guesses may not hold.

Wohl built the play around a hard limit: its main characters hardly speak. Apart from a few extended talks by the unseen Teacher, the evening plays out with almost no spoken text, so the actors have to tell the story through behavior, timing and the small noises people make when they are trying to be quiet.

The play is hard to file under one genre. The licensing listing classes it as an experimental full-length drama, yet it has an absurd streak, and its humor keeps close company with its pain. The question running underneath is simple to state: what passes between people, and what happens to the things that hurt, once they have agreed to stop talking?

There are seven roles: three women, three men and the Teacher, a voice part that can go to an actor of any gender. Concord Theatricals licenses the script for other productions.

The Broadway version is a fresh staging, not a transfer of the production seen Off-Broadway and on tour. In a play this short on dialogue, much of the storytelling falls to what you see and hear, which gives the set, the lighting, the sound, Shaw's music and the movement work more weight than usual.

As of October 2026, Julia Roberts is cast as Joan and Sarah Paulson as Judy, her partner. Paul Rudd is cast as Ned, Martin Freeman as Jan, Greta Lee as Alicia and Isaac Powell as Rodney. No performer for the voice of the Teacher has been announced.

Freeman is the only one of the six making his Broadway debut. Roberts, an Academy Award winner, first appeared on Broadway in 2006 as Nan in Three Days of Rain, opposite Bradley Cooper and Rudd, in a production also directed by Mantello. That was the last time Roberts and Rudd shared a Broadway stage before this one. Rudd's other Broadway credits include The Last Night of Ballyhoo in 1997 and Grace in 2012.

Paulson is a 2024 Tony winner for Appropriate; she is reported to have made her Broadway debut in 1994, at this same theater, as a replacement understudy in The Sisters Rosensweig. Lee's first Broadway role came in 2007, as part of the company of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, and Powell's Broadway work includes Once on This Island and West Side Story.

Ars Nova developed the play and gave it its world premiere Off-Broadway, with opening night on March 23, 2015. Rachel Chavkin directed, and the original company was Jessica Almasy, Marcia DeBonis, Jojo Gonzalez, Brad Heberlee, Sakina Jaffrey, Erik Lochtefeld and Babak Tafti. The run was scheduled to end on April 11, 2015, but it sold out and was extended twice. Chavkin staged it in traverse, with the audience on two sides, and the sound design filled the room with the noises of the woods, as if the audience were fellow guests at the retreat. In Chavkin's productions, the evening began with the sound of a very loud rainstorm.

A second New York engagement followed at the Pershing Square Signature Center, in its Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre, from July 3 to September 25, 2016, with the official opening on July 13, 2016. Chavkin returned as director, and many of the original cast came back with her. Eva Price, Stacey Mindich, Betsy Bernstein and Ars Nova were among the presenters, and the designers were Laura Jellinek (sets), Tilly Grimes (costumes), Mike Inwood (lighting), Stowe Nelson (sound), Andrew Schneider (projections) and Noah Mease (props).

The national tour, again directed by Chavkin and with Price among its producers, began on August 29, 2017, on Stage II of Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven. For the road, the team reworked the show for a proscenium stage. After New Haven it went to the A.C.T. Strand Theater in San Francisco and the Broad Stage in Santa Monica, then to the Wyly Theatre in Dallas, the Carnival Theater at the Arsht Center in Miami and finally Philadelphia Theatre Company, where it closed on April 1, 2018. Chavkin later won the Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical for Hadestown.

A separate Chicago production opened at A Red Orchid Theatre on October 18, 2018, directed by Shade Murray.

The Broadway production, with its cast and creative team, was announced on September 8, 2026. The announcement set the first preview for February 18, 2027, and opening night for March 18, 2027. As of October 2026, the length of the Broadway run had not been announced.