Hard to resist dubbing Caryl Churchill England’s greatest living playwright. Yes, a thousand Stoppard partisans will spit out their PG Tips and insist that Sir Tom deserves the honor, after his decades of deeply researched and cleverly constructed exercises in rhetoric. Both writers are close in age—he 87, she ———and each absolutely shaped postwar British theater, but my vote goes to Churchill. Where Stoppard has offered many a glib answer, Churchill has left us with appalling questions. Across more than 50 years her clinical yet fiercely moral studies of the human animal in all its fluid, chaotic, unknowable glory have retained prophetic intensity. Gender, class, revolution, cloning, cycles of revenge, how we die—those are just some of the primal hyperobjects Churchill has dissected in language as clear and cutting as a glass scalpel. What dramatist has juggled form and genre so deftly, mastering social realism, fable, science fiction, and lyrical deconstruction? To witness a mind still finding new ways to pare language and stage imagery to their explosive core, head to the Public, where four of Churchill’s latest short works blaze forth in outstanding American debuts: Glass. Kill. What If If Only. Imp.
Several years after her political glosses on the Israel-Palestine conflict (Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza), American and British complicity in war crimes (Drunk Enough to Say I Love You), and our atomized digital age (Love and Information), what obsesses Churchill these days? Myths, spirits, and other denizens of an unseen realm. (Mind you, since Vinegar Tom and The Skriker she has explored folk horror and supernatural invasion.)
Staged with immaculate focus by her longtime collaborator James Macdonald, these short works range from 12 minutes to an hour. They each have a dreamy queasiness overlaid with terse, suggestive language that carries undertones of violence. Glass follows a fragile but feisty girl made of glass (Ayana Workman) and veers into a story of child abuse and suicide. Kill presents a debonair deity (Deirdre O’Connell) perched on a cloud summarizing Greek myths with a breeziness that curdles into anguish, as she catalogues a fugue of incest, murder, vengeance, chopping children into a stew. What If If Only is a modern mystery play about a grieving man (Sathya Sridharan) learning to live in the present, buffeted by ghosts of the future. Lastly, the one-act Imp is a shaggy domestic tale with glimmers of the occult: a wish-fulfilling sprite corked up in a bottle by a sickly ex-nurse (O’Connell again) who lives with her inscrutable cousin (John Ellison Conlee). Surrogate parents of a sort, they watch with mixed feelings the courtship between their Irish niece (Adelind Horan) and a melancholy homeless man (Japhet Balaban).
Between the shorter pieces in the first half, Macdonald inserts a pair of circus acts: the awesome hand-balancing control of Junru Wang, and the comedy juggling of sly pin-flipper Maddox Morfit-Tighe. These carnival palate cleansers, along with cheeky light bulbs that ring the proscenium’s red curtain (scenic design by London fixture Miriam Buether), contribute to an arch vaudeville vibe (or, since it’s Churchill, oddville). I kept searching for a visual analog to the writing. Wang is able to rest her weight on the muscles and bones of her arm, as she inverts her body atop a slender metal pole with round plate for her hand, legs scissoring with balletic grace. Likewise, Churchill’s language is often spare and blunt (like later Beckett, she can say more with less), resting crushing concepts atop the steel bones of a terse phrase.
If such airy meditations don’t interest you, simply luxuriate in the theater: an excellent cast and Buether’s boldly morphing interiors—a glowing horizontal bar in black, a room of diaphanous white, a homey living room. They keep you locked into Churchill’s hallucinatory vignettes. Isabella Byrd’s lighting and Bray Poor’s sound design contribute to the dual aura of magic and menace. What a privilege to see O’Connell, an actress of tremendous grit and spontaneity, tear through the incantatory, ancient horrors of “Kill” and then settle into the bitter and moody Dot of Imp, which closes the show on a somber note of redemption and stasis. In a gentler register, Conlee plays Dot’s affable but repressed cousin, Jimmy, who wards off the blues by jogging. Churchill establishes a quirky running joke: Jimmy describes various acquaintances and strangers he encounters on his runs, whose stories are barely concealed summaries of Othello, King Lear, Medea, Hamlet, and other Greek tragedies and Shakespeare. “I saw an old guy this morning when it was raining,” Jimmy tells Dot. “Used to have his own business and he gave it all over to his daughters, I suppose it was a tax thing, and they’re treating him so badly. He’s really out of it; he’s not like the same person at all.”
Tragedy isn’t just flowery language and flashy emoting in the playhouse. It’s bleeding on the street, shivering in the park. Put it another way: All the world is Churchill’s stage.
Glass. Kill. What If If Only. Imp. | 2hrs 15mins. One intermission. | Public Theater | 425 Lafayette Street | 212-967-7555 | Buy Tickets Here
