Caryl Churchill Plays at The Public Theater
The great playwright sings four sad last songs that end up raising the spirits
A Dark Variety Show
In “Glass. Kill. What If If Only. Imp.” at The Public Theater, we are treated to three short plays and two exhilarating circus routines in the first half of the production.
“Glass” follows the story of a young girl made entirely of glass. It is, rather predictably, a fatalist tale. Yet like Hans Christian Anderson, the pain that the glass-girl experiences reverberates in our own experience and is rendered with great tenderness.
“Kill” offers a long monologue to the wonderful actor Deirdre O’Connell who plays a Greek god or goddess perched aloft on a cloud. The goddess recounts the bloody history of the House of Atreus in her own eccentric way. She begins only as a lofty observer, almost as an audience member, taking no responsibility for the brutal acts of the humans on the earth because as deities, “We don’t exist”. Yet as the tide of blood rises and the bodies begin to pile up generation after generation, the goddess becomes more and more horrified.
“What If If Only” plays with the possibility and anguish of time. A man (Sathya Sridharan) ruminates over the loss of a loved one. The loved one appears as a kind of spirit of the remembered past, giving the man the possibility to remember or to forget his beloved. That apparition opens up a flood of other personifications of the past, present and future who crowd the stage each with their bounded force of time.
The gymnastic and juggling routines that separate these short pieces are performed by the exquisite Junru Wang and the saucy Maddox Morfit-Tighe. These two gravity defying routines where limbs and objects are sent into the air to elegantly twist and turn make a nice rhyme with the experimental forms of Churchill’s plays. It is a matter-of-fact poetic addition to the production. It is entertaining and apt.
The Imp of the Perverse
After an intermission the audience returns for a final short play “Imp” which proves to be the centerpiece of the production. “Imp” is a departure from the more free-form earlier plays in that it is set in a realistic living room and follows four realistic characters. That is until a magical element is introduced, a mischievous Imp in a bottle trapped by a cork.
Dot (Deirdre O’Connell) is a chair-bound former nurse who lives with her cousin Jimmy (John Ellison Conlee) in a kind of sexless marriage. Together they befriend two younger people who are either being mentored or being prepared for some kind of victimization.
Dot is a bottled up Imp herself, struggling to tamper down a destructive rage inside her and causing herself serious asthmatic harm in the struggle. O’Connell plays Dot with a ferocity that is both scary and endearing. She is the cutest and coziest witch of vengeance you could ever meet. Conlee, as her partner in crime, matches Dot with a mixture of avuncular adorableness and an undercurrent of desperation. “Imp” leaves us at its end with as much of a feel-good ending as can be had in a Churchill play... but then again, perhaps not. The play is still haunting me a day later as are its two fine performances from O’Connell and Conlee.
James MacDonald’s direction here as with the entire evening takes its confident time in establishing the borders of the plays’ worlds and gives its performers exactingly defined spaces to turn each vision into a palpable reality.
