The Brooklyn Rail

A rising glow illuminates five characters glitching through their own sitcom arcs. Propelled by a warm, synth-heavy sound score by Ryan Gamblin, Jo Warren’s All Mouth turns off the subtitles as we watch images of the archetypal suburban American family crack, distort, and rebuild.

Presented as part of Out-FRONT! Festival’s 2026 programming, All Mouth centers a cast dressed in nineties-style scrunchies, stretchy skirts, and button-downs. The group repeats a sharp chorus of grimaces and grasps, traveling slowly toward a raised platform at the back of Judson Church, where they cohere into a tableau that evokes both the Pietà and a Full House cast poster. Awkward smiles and straight spines clash with torsos draped across laps and pained expressions. As they shift between cradling, choking, and silently cursing at each other, Warren’s performers seem to play out a familiar TV show or bible story, muted, in half-speed.

Their roles continue to morph. Alternately embodying mother, enemy, and lover in quick succession, the dancers pass the slippery force of power between their bodies. Who is responsible for whose hurt? Who taught us to uphold our most deeply-held morals? What does it mean to be good to each other? The drama continues to unravel with no definitive answers in sight.

Warren is not afraid of lingering, favoring repetition in their choreography as a method of revealing the weak points of our visual assumptions. They loop pedestrian waves and shoulder shrugs for minutes at a time, interjecting a few moments of somersaults and parkour-style athleticism.

As the piece progresses, Gamblin’s soundscape begins to cloud like static. Bursts of the performers’ voices pierce through, as though they are trying to escape the haze. They yell, blurt out hanging insults, and then go silent again. At times, these now-familiar characters seem lost within the storm. Meg Herzfeld paces back and forth in their solo, arms adamant and cutting as they sidestep close to the audience. They repeatedly shove away attempts from other performers to soothe and support, caught in the thrall of steps that no longer appear to be of their own accord. It can be easy to forget our own agency. Herzfeld’s isolation onstage drives home the risks of this amnesia.

Over time, we witness subtle shifts to the performers’ vocabulary. A brow unfurrows, eyes finally meet ours with recognition. These small changes add up. Just as we come to assume we understand the pattern, it breaks. The family tableau drips off the raised platform. A duet that once appeared steady fizzles and separates. Our organizing structures, Warren reminds us, are no more fixed than our emotions. The church, the family, and the countless other mythologies that structure American life are shared constructions.

In All Mouth, Warren seems less interested in parsing fiction from fact than in exploring what the repetition of our most familiar cultural stories could tell us about our own unrecognized desires. When we repeat limiting narratives of what constitutes righteous living, (which, certainly in the United States, still center the white Christian nuclear family) we encourage a static approach to our relationships. Put simply, we get bored of our own lives in pursuit of goals that may never have been ours in the first place. Within that cloudiness, we obscure our own drive and potential for emotional freedom.

I’m struck by Warren’s invitation for us to look closer at our own experiences of boredom, in line with how Nuar Alsadir distinguishes the feeling as a potentially productive one. In a 2024 essay for Granta, she calls boredom “an internal muting” as our brains squirm to find and name what feels missing. As Warren’s characters in All Mouth spiral around their repeated movement phrases, they’re caught in their own muted channels. In the audience, I find myself empathizing with their stuckness, aware of my own restlessness but hesitant to name the deeper impulses that the sensation veils.

Rather than submit to the overwhelm of their mutedness, though, the characters in Warren’s suburban dreamscape muddle through on their own terms. Their small ruptures and attempts to break through the status quo take them into risky embraces, tender partnering, and vulnerable solos that echo through the cavernous performance space. Their moments of presence begin to extend beyond our view, past the edges of the stage. The characters glitch, evolve, and grow, unseen by the audience. We can only imagine their choices. Do we trust them? To whom do we look for moralizing guidance when our favorite show goes off the air? Or when the stability of our institutions is called into question?

Near the end of All Mouth, Warren makes the choice to place a few performers at the edges of our sightline, poised as saintly statues or spiritual icons barely in view. The sacred rests on the same plane as our ordinary human drama. We repeat and remodel our lives. The lights go black, and the sitcom continues through the dark.