‘The Sentence Is Silence’ Gives Voice to Captive Writers’ Censored Words

The right of free speech is one of the cornerstones of a free society, yet there are too many areas of the world where that right is withheld. George Orwell’s “1984” was not a pipe dream. Orwell is one of the writers who speak out through the voices of actors in “The Sentence Is Silence,” opening Friday at Santa Monica’s Church in Ocean Park. Directed by Ian Murray, with dramaturgical support from Beth Caskie, the script, originally compiled by the writers group International PEN, also includes letters, essays, poems and adaptations from novels. The authors include Arthur Koestler, Russian poet Irina Ratushinskaya, Greek activist George Mangakis and Armando Vallardes, who spent 22 years in a Cuban prison for speaking his mind.

PEN, an organization of professional writers, was founded in 1921 by such luminaries as John Galsworthy, Joseph Conrad and George Bernard Shaw. The group supports freedom of expression wherever it is endangered. PEN helped many of the underground works of “The Sentence Is Silence” reach a wide audience, particularly in its original production in London.

Murray first staged the work in Chicago as a co-production of his own theatrical company, Probe, and Northwestern University. A grandson of comedian Jan Murray, he was raised in Malibu and attended Santa Monica High School. He went to Northwestern “to get out of the house,” and there met most of those involved in this production. Among other projects he directed in the Windy City are Ionesco’s “The Lesson” and David Mamet’s “Edmond.”

Fellow student Caskie planted the idea in Murray’s mind. While in England on an exchange program, she saw Dorothy Tutin--one of her teachers at the British American Dramatic Academy--in the London production of “Silence.” She fired up Murray with the message of the piece.

“When Beth approached me,” Murray says, “we decided to stage some of the material from the original English production through my company, and did it as a benefit for Amnesty International. After we moved out here, I continued working on it.”

With help from PEN, they have further refined the material, and its protest against censorship. The writers involved, Caskie says, “aren’t either left or right, they’re across-the-board anti-totalitarian. They all tend to be either PEN members or people that PEN sponsored to get out of jail.”

Caskie is still affected by the power of the writers’ words, and the drama of their creation: “When someone on stage is saying something that someone wrote secretly, under duress, in a prison, and then gives it to someone who risks his life to get it out.”

“Sometimes,” she says about some of the work of these authors, “you can’t quote the writer. It couldn’t even be said three years after he wrote it because they don’t know what his situation was and we don’t know how long the arms are. It’s also because the censorship here is getting so annoying. PEN thinks it’s on the rise in all countries.”

Murray agrees vehemently. “It’s important to express the fact that there are human rights violations, censorship and thought control in other countries, but also to bring in a little of what’s back home. It’s OK to believe it’s happening over there, but open up your eyes a little, it’s happening here, too. If we didn’t bring it back here, the audience could distance themselves from the material.”

One of the scenes that brings the censorship question “back home” concerns the abortion controversy.

Murray says: “If a 13-year-old minority girl, who’s impoverished and already has a child, goes into a clinic, they’re not allowed by government law to mention abortion as an option. They are gagged. They are censored.”

Caskie insists this production is not a “discussion sort of thing.”

Murray nods. “The text we’re trying to bring to light is powerful, but I don’t want anyone to get the wrong idea. This is a work of theater. We’re not just reading this literature. It is a play. Every piece is dramatic, and the show is very presentational in terms of its style. It also gives me opportunities as a director. There’s even a scene performed commedia dell’arte style.”

Production designer John Clemens, also from Northwestern and heavily involved in the technical side of film and television--he helped build the first commercial television station in Indonesia--is happy to be back working in theater. His set, lighting and sound design concentrates on “the presentation of the actors within the text, political slogans, a graffiti background. We’re not so concerned with creating realistic spaces, prisons and lock-ups and that kind of thing,” says Clemens, who does political work with Amnesty International. “In one aspect it’s a documentary, but we’re adding other elements to it.”

One of the elements is its production in the Church in Ocean Park. “We get involved,” Murray says. “We’ve been to protests at the Federal Building. But I feel my major involvement is through the art and the work. Hopefully, this will be just as effective. We’re hardly apathetic, but I don’t think we’re huge activists. But the Church in Ocean Park is very politically active, which is why they were interested in our script.”

Murray even likes the effect of the stained-glass windows. “I love that we’re doing it in a church,” Murray says. “It adds another level to the play. Originally I was looking at another space, a synagogue, and the rabbi said to me, ‘This is a great play, but you’re going to have to cut these two scenes, because the language is too severe.’ I said, ‘You can’t censor my play on censorship!’ I couldn’t believe that. But the Church in Ocean Park looked at the script and said, ‘Wonderful, yeah.’ ”

The location may be one of the things that prompts Caskie to muse, “There’s a sense of the ‘holy text,’ so hard to write, so hard to get out.”

Murray and his company, mostly in their middle to late 20s, want to show, he says, “the writers’ strength and their power, as well as their vulnerability and the conditions they’re in. And to show the positive things, how in the midst of all this these people still have a brain, and are still working.”

Caskie adds: “They all talk about that, the power of a person who is almost always a lot smarter than the jailer to begin with. Armando Vallardes was left naked for over a year, sitting on dirt. It’s amazing what a person can still do left to few devices.”