DIRECTOR’S NOTE

“There was only one way I could avoid a state of despair and a breakdown: to be silent. And to reach behind the silence for clarity."


The storyline of Silence began with the question: what if we all stopped communicating?  Imagining a world where words ceased to exist was profoundly stimulating to me.  Communication is a term used too loosely.  We live in a world where we perceive sending text messages, e-mails and tweets as communicating with each other.  Communication is about something deeper.  It’s about what is never said.  Silence is the subtext of our lives and we fear it.  We fear what people are thinking about us in those long pauses.  We fear that we’ve done something wrong if someone won’t talk to us.  What if we chose not to speak?  What if we decided that it would be better to cut off contact with a world that doesn’t matter to us?  What would the repercussions be?  From this, came Silence.

Silence is about survival.  For Cassandra, her silence is a blessing.  She embraces it and chooses to survive in a world that she creates.  In the process, her family suffers.  While exploring Silence in the workshop phase, I found that the personalities represented in the play are aspects I both love and loathe about myself.  We all dream of being the hero, dream of being the optimist, dream of falling in love and dream of living in a world of our own creation.  In the end, everything came down to Cassandra’s isolation.  On the one hand, sometimes there is nothing greater than the silence of being with our own thoughts and shutting the world out.  On the other hand, there is nothing worse than the silence of being with our own thoughts and shutting the world out.  Cassandra’s action, though some may deem extreme, comes from a place of being fed up with the world that has let her down.

There were a numerous amount of questions posed during the development of the play.  The main one, of course, being the reason for Cassandra’s silence.  What caused her to make this choice?  Was it something passed down from her mother?  Was it the belief that she had no other option?  Cassandra knows.  That’s all that’s important.  The play has evolved to a point that it is no longer about why Cassandra retreated into silence but rather what the effects of her silence has had on her family and ultimately herself.

What does the play mean?  I don’t know.  What does life mean?  Should it be that easy to define?  What if, instead, we just observed and pondered and put ourselves in the mind of this family, the mind of this girl?  To me, Cassandra’s silence is deafening.  She is screaming.  Does it matter if it’s internal or external?  What if we just listened to the silence instead of trying to constantly fill it out of fear of what isn’t being said?  What if we just listened?

Anthony Laura
November 2011