The Sound Of Silence

Just moments after a woman has screamed from the pain of childbirth, fists are flying. Limbs are lunging. On one end of the room, a grandmother emerges from her dreary shuffle to restrain the pregnant woman, one elbow cutting across her neck as the other swings back, ready to move into action. Just feet away, a father and son wrestle each other to the floor, alternating swings as they rotate around each other, grudging and violent planets in paternal orbit. Their bodies, seething with anger and distrust, fill the space.

Somehow, everything operates at a whisper. The whoosh of labored breath is the only guaranteed sound. They, these weary and wary fighters, know what we in the audience are still learning: If the woman screams again, it could cause an avalanche to come crashing down on their home, and their village.

This dogged quest for silence is the central conflict in Iranian playwright Jaber Ramezani’s The Slow Sound of Snow, on at the Yale Cabaret through Saturday night.

Translated and directed by third-year Yale MFA student Shadi Ghaheri, the work is a thoughtful, affecting feat, asking the viewer to consider things like rank self-preservation and neonaticide by neglect before posing the ultimate ethical question, and having the cast throw down their moral dice to answer it. This weekend marks its American premiere.

The Slow Sound of Snow unravels seamlessly, stakes mounting with a rumble in the distance at its outset. Somewhere deep in the mountains of Turkey, heavy snow falls each winter, threatening to bury whole villages. If that doesn’t get them, the constant threat of avalanches may. They’re brought on by the smallest vibrations: children’s laughter, the sing-song quality of a human voice, an echoing mandolin, and of course, the piercing cries of a newborn baby.

Enter the conflict: Yashar (Courtney Jamison) is very pregnant at the long, cold end of a snowy winter, and the grudging in-laws with whom she lives regard her and the tiny life she carries as a sort of ticking time bomb. As they enter a rigid, practiced wintertime regime of silence, she bears the weight of every concern, every misstep, every blame-worthy movement around the house, struggling with the day-to-day pains of growing another human being largely in silence. When she goes into labor before spring has sprung, chaos ensues. Sort of.

Every character is set in his or her ways, and every one of them has an almost steadfast prerogative. Of course, they’re also thinking and feeling human beings. In Ramezani’s careful hands, the narrative — quite similar in tone to Nuri Ceylan’s Winter Sleep of 2014 — blooms into something complex, maddening, and folkloric, with heavy mysticism and metaphor woven in. Long, silent sections, labored breath and hushed speech become the pauses in which our characters think about their circumstances, and how hard they would be to ever escape.

Mirroring the cast, audience members become acutely, magically aware of the most banal sounds: shoelaces that are tied and untied, blood dripping from a carcass into the metal pot below, the rustle of a human back to the floor, the grace of flesh on flesh, lips on lips. Any of these, if exacerbated, could spell the family’s downfall, and the question is if one of them will. 

No great surprise, then, that Yashar’s life becomes the root cause of distrust, and ultimate trolley problem; She with her fetus is a train barreling towards warm, helpless bodies, and there’s the chance to stop it. Her lover Talaz (James Udom), father in-law Eli Arkha (Seta Wainiqolo), and resentful grandmother-in-law Sayrash (Antoinette Crowe-Legacy) must just decide if they’re going to.

In one cold and snowy universe, they could do nothing, the baby would be born, and its cries would bring the avalanche crashing down. In another, they could flip the trolley switch, and bury her and the child alive, saving themselves from imminent danger. There is a middle space in which they hang, precariously, deciding if something in between is less morally brutal.

Wrestling with ethics, public morality, and utilitarian philosophy to its core, The Slow Sound of Snow never stops being a challenging play, and it draws tremendous strength from this. There are missteps: actress Stefani Kuo is exuberant but struggles with the nuance of the text. It’s unclear how much is lost in translation and regional specificity during a tangent on circumcision. But Ghaheri, who broke the linguistic mold in last year’s Satellite Festival of new work, continues to be fearless, and that’s on display throughout. Jamison, Udom, Crowe-Legacy, and Wainiqolo engage in some particularly balletic sequences, surprising the audience with how agile the tired, winter-worn body can be. 

Just don’t go if you’re married to happy endings. Or rather, don’t go if you think you know exactly what they are. 

The Soft Sound of Snow runs at 8 p.m. and 11 p.m. through Saturday night at the Yale Cabaret. For ticket information, click here.