Review: MOUTHPIECE at UCSB: Arts And Lectures At Campbell Hall

This past Wednesday night, an enrapt audience at UCSB's Campbell Hall experienced a performance of Mouthpiece, a recent Edinburgh Festival Fringe hit. The work depicts the fraught relationship of one woman, a writer named Cassandra, to her thoughts about her recently deceased mother. Her intense grief and lingering rage that her mother lived and died under a patriarchal code of conduct (she never ate a french fry because she was terrified of getting fat) are flummoxing her, keeping her from finding fit words for her mother's eulogy.

The piece begins with an existentially darkened theater. The sound of two human voices follows, as though exploring the space in the dark. The lights then illuminate a slipper bathtub with only a spare, black curtain behind it. Over the arc of the piece, the tub transforms from womb to funeral casket--put to use as both as tub and as a metaphor. At one point, the women sit in the tub so as to create a trompe l'oeil that elongates their body beyond any natural proportion. This image accurately encapsulates the tone of the piece: contemplative and abstract with a zest of wit.

Mouthpiece's creators, Amy Nostbakken and Norah Sadava, both perform the character of Cassandra at the same time. Perhaps the daughter is less of a "character" in the conventional sense of the term as it is an impression of being in Cassandra's head. Much of the performance relies on abstract movements and sounds to paint a picture of how it feels to chase a train of thought interrupted and even contaminated by societal scripts of how women are meant to think, speak, and present themselves. For example, as Cassandra considers what her mother faced placating expectations of beauty and femininity, her ideas fragment into curse-words, and sounds that sometimes re-form as musical polyphony, and, at other times, morph from assonance to silence. Cassandra cannot articulate all she thinks and feels in a unified voice, which is why both Nostbakken and Sadava portray her simultaneously. They relate to each other on-stage by moving and singing in harmony as well as by torquing their bodily angles to depict the character's internal divisions and conflicting thoughts. The most effective and moving parts of the performance are those in which the words yield just enough meaning that the movement and sound transcend them.

For those who may have missed this live performance, the Santa Barbara International Film Festival will be screening a film treatment of the piece on February 1st and 2nd.