CHALFANT: Hannah’s basically monosyllabic. In this play in which people speak in paragraphs, Hannah is lucky if it’s a ten-word sentence for most of the play. I was younger and more ambitious and worried about these things then and I thought, Oh, I’m just disappearing. But it wasn’t true. I realize now, and wish I had then, because it would have saved me a lot of anguish, that she said exactly as much as she needed to say. Everything’s going on inside, behind—there’s this wonderful Greek expression, “the fence of your teeth.” Hannah’s fence of her teeth was a portcullis.
