Why Can't We Talk?
A Self-Help Mutual Aid Video from Speak Easy International Foundation Inc.

This 'Theatre piece on stuttering' written and directed by Robert Gathman and featuring Irving Burton and his 'Speak Easy Players' is a sharp and insightful, yet often vibrantly comic performance which exposes the ways in which stutterers 'manage to get through the day with our stuttering'. Despite the video's confrontation of the fear, frustration, helplessness and subsequent avoidance of speaking situations experienced by stammerers - and indeed the all singing, all dancing approach occasionally interrupted by stammering makes the stammer all the more intrusive and disturbing - the overall message offered to stammmerers is to seek therapy and above all to 'talk...talk...talk...talk. Keep talking'. The video's humorous presentation of, for instance, adopting a foreign accent, exposes the absurdity of avoiding speaking situations for fear of dysfluency.

Yet the performance also displays a valuably honest wariness of 'total cures' for dysfluency. Speech therapists would do well to heed the resistance to and difficulty using slow speech and DAF techniques outside a clinical or familial context (due to fears that 'people would think I was on drugs or crazy'). Yet the potential absurdity of completely untutored attempts at self-help is also memorably lampooned in the form of the 'Irving Burton raspberry technique', which however does enable expression of the raging frustration which all stammerers will recognise.

At one stage a character remarks 'why do you stutterers always run to the speech experts? You are the experts'. The expertise related by this film lies in its assertion of the positive results of confronting your stammer publicly.

The enactment of a job interview using the same actor to play both interviewer and interviewee achieves the unique insight that the fear of revealing one's stammer to an interlocutor is purely internal, and the importance of mutual rapport - empathy, encouragement, support - being developed is justly asserted throughout.

That such rapport is purely in terms of male bonding (for instance the 'we're tongue-tied brothers' song) is a limitation of the film and adds to its slightly artificial, stylised quality. Further, many stutterers will find it even odder that the 'Mr stutterer meets a girl' vignette is the only one in the whole sequence to result in success for 'Mr stutterer'. Yet his anguished 'But I am a stutterer' response to this girl's 'so what?' attitude again rightly emphasises the degree to which the stutterers' fears and problems are self-generated and can only be amplified when he (or she) is isolated.

Even the sparse set and props could be seen to promote the performance's in-your-face sense of urgency - an urgency also evoked by the repetition of the 'Why Can't We Talk' refrain which parallels the inspirational energy and fluency of Irving Burton himself. Despite and artificiality fortified by the Americanised brotherly backslaps, the full truth-to-life and weighty resonance of 'Why Can't We Talk'' often shines through, as when Mr Burton cuts in with, "This is ridiculous, isn't it. I'm an old man and I still can't talk". This video affords an enlivening demonstration of the strength and humour required to confront the inexplicable nature of stammering.

Reviewed by Rob Bond in the Spring 1995 issue of 'Speaking Out'.

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