When someone is speechless, it's usually understood as a reaction of astonishment or confusion. But wordlessness also touches on our elemental fear of losing the ability to talk back to the world. The medical condition is called aphasia, often the result of stroke, brain tumor, or neurological impairment. A new documentary about the disease, "After Words," premiered on June 1, 2003 at Boston's Wang Center, to benefit the Aphasia Community Group of Boston. It is a moving film, filled with portraits of people suffering with aphasia, including actresses Julie Harris and Patricia Neal, and mezzo-soprano Jan Curtis, whose careers have been curtailed by the onset of aphasia. All three performers were at the benefit.

Aphasia imprisons the sufferer, which is one explanation for why it is not a well-known disease. "I felt as if I was dead," recalls a man in the film. It also creates discomfort in others. Patricia Neal has recovered her speech and talks eloquently about the disgust and ridicule that surrounded her. For most of the afflicted, the loss of speech signals an end to their livelihoods. Harris says she was once "the master of language." Now, unable to memorize, her speech disjointed and slow, she can no longer act on stage. Mezzo-soprano Curtis has performed with aphasia and continues to practice singing every day. One of the film's revelations is that writing or drawing pictures is not enough when it comes to communication -- aphasia sufferers never stop trying to improve their speech. The struggle against despair, to remain active, to contribute to society, inspires admiration.

A parade of talking heads, "After Words" also features doctors who reel off facts and figures. Aphasia takes a number of different forms, from slight gaps in conversations to the inability to form a single understandable word. Sometimes patients produce sounds that make no sense. It is estimated that 80,000 new cases of aphasia are diagnosed each year. The number is growing, perhaps because of increased knowledge of the disease. Our health care system is woefully inadequate, since each individual case demands a particular treatment, in many cases expensive and long-term.

Understandably, the struggle against near impossible odds to communicate has long fascinated writers, particularly playwrights influenced by the Theater of the Absurd. Eugene Ionesco, Harold Pinter, Sam Shepard, and David Lindsay-Abaire have all created characters with aphasia. In his comedy "Fuddy Meers," Lindsay-Abaire was accused by some critics of milking the condition for laughs. After watching "After Words," it is hard not to charge all these dramatists with exploiting aphasia as a metaphor for alienation rather than using it to explore the struggle to live without the ability to speak. Aphasia may be too powerful for the stage -- not even the Greeks, to my knowledge, wrote about the tragedy of wordlessness.

Playwright Jean-Claude van Itallie has written two plays, "The Traveler" and "Struck Dumb," about the aphasia of his friend, acclaimed actor/director Joseph Chaikin, who suffered a stroke during heart surgery in 1984. Until a local theater company performs these scripts, "After Words" gives an affecting tongue to the world of the wordless.

Two productions, one at Yale Repertory Theatre, the other on a street in Somerville, MA, prove that adapting a short story for the stage is a risky business. You can end up with the worst the page and the stage has to offer, especially if the adapter tackles tales by such masters as Anton Chekhov and Bernard Malamud. In the case of Chekhov, who was a great playwright, it poses an interesting question: If his stories were so dramatic, why didn't the writer turn them into plays himself? The answer is particularly relevant given that a lauded Russian director, Kama Ginkas, will stage world premiere adaptations of Chekhov stories at two major American regional theaters next season.

The current interest in adapting Chekhov stories for the stage is understandable. Companies weary of recycling his four masterpieces want to take advantage of the fact that, among authors who don't write in English, Chekhov is the most accessible to British and American audiences. Modern short story writers, such as Richard Ford and Alice Munro, hail Chekhov as a probing humanist whose best yarns deftly fuse clear-eyed sympathy with wry skepticism. Playwright David ("Hurlyburly") Rabe, who adapted Chekhov's "The Black Monk" for Yale Rep (through June 1), admires Chekhov's short stories for their "modernity, freedom, and ability to surprise."

On stage, however, love can only take you so far. "The Black Monk" revolves around an uncanny apparition: a young philosophy student becomes friends with a fabled black monk, who flies around the globe. The constant ego-stroking of the smiling figure leads the student to drastically change his life. Nathaniel Hawthorne would have condemned the student's obsessive delusion; Chekhov treats his dark retreat with bemused wonder. This is a tragicomedy about a ridiculous man in an even more absurd society and the relationship between idealism and madness.

There is no supernaturalism in Chekhov's plays, which is one reason the writer left this story on the page. The encounter between the student and the black monk should come off as unnerving. Alas, director Daniel Fish skimps on mystery: a giant black cutout of the monk bodes well, but Chris McCann, a fine actor, turns out to be an anticlimactic bore. Rabe compounds the prosaic by having the student share his inner turmoil directly with the audience. The effect shatters Chekhov's preference for subtle suggestion. The first-rate Yale Rep cast, including Sam Waterston, presses too hard to beef up the thin proceedings, hampered by a postmodern fish bowl of a set. I had to leave the production at intermission, but, from what I saw, "The Black Monk" was flat-footed.

The best stage adaptations of stories step out of bounds. Last weekend, the troupe Invisible Cities Group(which includes actors, musicians, and artists) and the rock band Shelley Winters Project staged a musical version of Bernard Malamud's short story "A Summer's Reading" on Aberdeen Road in Somerville. Actors sat on actual porches, danced in the street, and bumped into people who had no clue they were walking into make-believe. The production shouldn't be sentimentalized. The tunes were catchy, but they didn't always jibe with the story of a working class kid who, with the help of his neighbors, makes good on an empty boast: to read a hundred books one summer. Still, it was an exhilarating, often moving example of homegrown dramatics on the tarmac: in the streets of Somerville, Malamud's pathos was alive and kicking.

Here's more depressing evidence that America wants to know less, not more, about the world. Publisher Robert Wechsler announced this month that Catbird Press would release its final titles on August 1. Located in North Haven, CT, Catbird Press published American and British authors, but specialized in fiction in translation, especially from Eastern Europe." After 16 years of publishing quality literature and humor," writes Wechsler in his farewell letter, "I can no longer honestly tell my authors that I can sell sufficient quantities of their books, no matter how well or widely reviewed they are."

Many of his writers will not be picked up by other publishers, who are not interested in translating literary works. English is becoming the dominant global language: an author either writes in English or assumes his or her work will never reach a broader audience. And that's a shame, because a number of the works published by Catbird deserve a wide readership among discerning readers. Catbird's series of books by Czech writer Karel Capek garnered admiring reviews here and abroad. Wechsler will keep his backlist available, but Catbird is another dead canary in the mine shaft.

Along with Catbird, a farewell must be extended to another disdainer of provincialism, British critic, poet and translator D.J. Enright. He died after a seven-year struggle with cancer on the last day of 2002. Enright will be best remembered as a poet and essayist, but early on he taught English literature in Japan, Berlin, Bangkok, Singapore, and Egypt. These experiences fuelled his fine novel "Academic Year" and the non-fictional "Memoirs of a Mendicant Professor." Enright translated from the German, Japanese, and French, helping to revise the English version of Proust's "In Search of Lost Time." The recently published "Injury Time" is the last of three books he wrote during his illness, delightful compendiums of aphorisms, criticism, and quotes, autobiographical observations ("In age your chickens come home to roost, and now they wear spurs") and playful musings from a trenchant, humane mind which was, to the end, impatient with humbug and obsessed with what made the languages of the world tick.

Enright represented an England that could boast a thriving international fiction scene. Today, the British Arts Council is cutting funds for literary translations. Of course, governments are more gung ho about financing translations of English and American writers into other tongues. In December 2002, the Bush administration announced it was recruiting a group of American writers to contribute to a State Department anthology, which will be translated into Arabic, French, Spanish, Russian, and two dozen other languages. According to "The New York Times," the writers would be sent around the world "to further American diplomatic interests."

I would be less queasy about the literary propaganda trip if there was also a crusade to make international literature better known here. That isn't about to happen in our navel-gazing culture: we are more interested in marketing a beneficent image of ourselves than learning about others. Still, a dwindling number of serious publishers, large and small, continue to distribute literature in translation. In June, a new online zine, "Words Without Borders," will serve up fiction in translation, essays, and news. Here and there America's linguistic walls will be breached.

Some statements, though wrong, are revelatory. In a recent "Guardian" article, American playwright and film director David Mamet declares he must set his honest voice against the "drivel" he hears around him, particularly huzzahs for the acting of Laurence Olivier. Mamet thinks Olivier was "stiff, self-conscious, grudging, coy and ungenerous." Who does Mamet believe to be the greater actor? Tony Curtis, citing his films "The Sweet Smell of Success" and "The Boston Strangler." Curtis is torpid in the latter, but superb in the former as well as in "Some Like it Hot." But better than Olivier? Has Mamet gone Hollywood in the head?

Mamet's reasoning is as embarrassing as his judgments. He insists Olivier is above criticism in England, which is false, especially regarding the mediocre films the actor made near the end of his life. Mamet attacks Olivier's turns in "Khartoum" and "The 49th Parallel," but doesn't mention "Hamlet," "Othello," and "Henry V," a trio of film performances far beyond Curtis' modest range. The playwright admits Olivier won the status of The World's Greatest Actor "fairly, kept it honorably, and contributed to the British and to the world theatre," but then elevates Curtis as if acting on screen and on stage were the same.

In his book on acting, "True and False," Mamet usefully demolishes the 'method' acting technique, which demands thespians infuse their performances with personal memories. Yet, in its stead, the playwright proffers a minimalist style so single-mindedly unemotional it's downright inhuman. When Mamet directed "The Cryptogram" in Boston a few seasons back, the actors lurched across the stage like zombies. Mamet's preference for miniaturized acting, while extreme, is representative. The "less is more" clich? about the demands of film acting is a mantra for today's stage directors, actors, and critics. Raised on the low-key twitches of TV shows and movies, audiences prefer small gestures.

Thus for Mamet and other hardcore minimalists, Olivier represents a counter tradition of self-conscious flamboyance and bullying brio. The playwright gets one thing right -- Olivier was a greater actor onstage than on film. But Olivier was essentially a creature of the theater, not the silver screen. "For color, dash, animal anguish, sheer crazy size, and heroic ambition," critic Gordon Rogoff wrote in 1989, "there was no one like him onstage this century." And even then, in the epic movie "Spartacus," Olivier handily triumphs over Curtis.

Mamet thinks it is courageous to attack Olivier, but the bravura values the actor embodies are fragile. Olivier's onstage grandeur lives in the memories of those who saw him as well as in the words of his admirers, such as critic Kenneth Tynan, who memorably described the actor's death in "Coriolanus." Speared by his enemies, Olivier's warrior topples off the edge of a 12-foot-stage "to be caught by the ankles so he dangles, inverted, like the slaughtered Mussolini." Our era worships the visual and the conceptual, so stage actors are routinely buzz-sawed down to size. Olivier remains a defiant redwood.

Indifference to history is an American trait, as is the admiration for anything, from cereals to experimental art that can be sold as 'new and improved.' Take the statement made at a recent press conference by Robert Woodruff, American Repertory Theatre's artistic director. He said the company's upcoming season is made up of world premieres, though the lineup includes such classics as "Oedipus Rex." Apparently, letting directorial auteurs such as Joanne Akalaitis loose on Harold Pinter's "The Birthday Party" or having Martha Clarke tackle Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" is enough to make everything old new again. The illogicality is amusing: the A.R.T. has staged two world premieres of "Uncle Vanya;" a second world premiere of "The Miser" is coming.

Even the Boston Globe's theater critic swallowed the A.R.T.'s spin, writing that "so far Woodruff has backed up his claims that each A.R.T. production is a world premiere." To be fair, Woodruff's statement was propelled less by arrogance than by defensiveness. The A.R.T. no longer has the smallish Hasty Pudding Theatre in which to premiere new plays, and the large Loeb Drama Center poses an economic challenge when it comes to untested material. New plays worthy of the theater's attention are a hard sell for audiences raised to expect radical recastings of "sure" things. Along with its genuine artistic accomplishments, auteurism is also about marketing the past, reassuring anxious audiences with known quantities while challenging them with iconoclastic interpretations, a promise that generates increasingly eccentric directorial decisions.

The stated reasons behind Shakespeare and Company's plan to build a replica of London's Rose Theatre, which premiered plays by Christopher Marlowe and Shakespeare, may not be as Orwellian, but there's plenty of fuzzy thinking. The project, at least as depicted in an exhibit at the Boston Architectural Center through June 1, promises to be a fascinating exploration of history, unearthing new details about Elizabethan theater practices, such as that the Rose Theatre's stage once rested on large barrels.

What's more, the erecting of the Rose in the Berkshires will be led by the British team that designed and rebuilt the Globe Theatre in London. But, unlike the Globe, the Rose will be surrounded by a 'Shakespeare village.' Chances are the town will be closer to Bard-y-wood than the Elizabethan reality of bear-baiting and prostitutes. A recent plan to redo England's Stratford-upon-Avon as a Shakespearean theme park crashed, partly due to the amounts of money involved and fears commerce would overshadow aesthetics.

So, is Shakespeare and Company replanting the Rose for the sake of art or tourism? The company's artistic head Tina Packer insists education is the rationale for the Rose. That may be true, but in the case of the popular new Globe Theatre, critics have been skeptical about the quality of the productions. And will financing the expensive Rose project mean even more stagings of the same Shakespeare chestnuts? Faced with that prospect, wouldn't a virtual Rose smell just as sweet at a fraction of the cost?

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