The young woman may - or may not - be a murderer. She won't say yes or no. Indeed, she won't speak at all. Her refusal to talk is both unnerving and intriguing for the one person, a psychiatrist, who might be able to help her case. But first the therapist has to break down the wall of silence.
The challenge posed by silence is a key ingredient in "The Cutting," the US premiere of a play by British playwright Maureen O'Brien, which opens tonight at the Stoneham Theatre.
Producing this play also poses a challenge - how to capture an audience when one of the actors in the two-character drama has no lines for the first half-hour.
That is precisely what attracted the theater's producing artistic director, Weylin Symes, to the drama in the first place. It's also a challenge for actresses Eve Kagan and Rachel Harker.
Kagan plays the imprisoned Judith, who is accused of brutally murdering her mother. When the play begins, she has not spoken for five months. A child psychiatrist, Alex (Harker), has been called in as a last resort to unlock Judith's tongue and to make a psychiatric assessment.
To convey the fractured and fragile but potentially violent nature of Judith, Kagan said, she recalled the advice of one of her favorite acting teachers: "To be still and full." She added: "One of the important things about acting is listening. That's what I do."
In approaching Judith, who often stands with her back to the other actress without saying a word, Kagan had "to find the part of myself that relates to Judith."
The challenge for Harker turns out to be not only to carry the dialogue but how to convey the impact of those lines. "Thank God we have rehearsals," she said with a laugh.
Alex, the psychiatrist, "is more comfortable in the child's world than in the adults' world," Harker explained. The character is very conflicted; she doesn't want to treat the 33-year-old Judith; she prefers to work with children. The character complains, "All I figured out is that I can't stand the silence, but she can."
Indeed, the play explores "the honesty of silence - the silence that Alex is afraid of," Symes said.
"The Cutting" was first produced in London in 1992 and has been produced in Helsinki, Sicily, Rome, and Austria. It recently was optioned as an English-speaking feature film. For the Stoneham production, Symes changed the character of Alex from a man to a woman, an option offered by the playwright. Symes said he believes that a male-female potential romance and power dynamic worked against what he was trying to convey.
Still, Harker said, "there are a couple of lines and moments that really feel like a man's voice to me." So she had to find a way "to connect with that." Kagan, for her part, said she could not imagine her character opening up to a male therapist. "No way," she said, and Symes agreed. "It would be a different play," he said.
Symes did keep the play set in England, and the actresses have British accents that add an element of class dynamics. The play is set in two places - the prison and Alex's office. The Stoneham set design, however, resembles the pinnacle of a rocky bluff, an approximation of the lonely place where Judith lived with her mother.
The play's drama, Symes said, is centered on "intrigue and the mystery and wanting to understand what happens - what Judith's character did or did not do, the mystery of her life. It's not necessarily a whodunit, but a 'whydunit.' "
