Dot (Deirdre O’Connell, left) and Jimmy (John Ellison Conlee) discuss an imp supposedly trapped in an old wine bottle in the Caryl Churchill’s play Imp at The Public Theater.
English dramatist Caryl Churchill is turning 87 this September. In advance of that landmark, the Public Theater is presenting Glass. Kill. What If If Only. Imp., a quadruple bill of Churchill one-acts new to New York. Like Albee on this side of the Atlantic, Churchill has always had a penchant for depicting humanity in rather abstract terms. Directed by Churchill specialist James Macdonald, these shorts are supplemented with entr’acte circus feats by a juggler (Maddox Morfit-Tighe) and an acrobat (Junru Wang). The evening’s fare may seem, at first blush, a random assortment but, upon reflection, common themes emerge.
Sathya Sridharan, as a recently widowed man, communes with a visitor from another realm of existence (Ruby Blaut) in Caryl Churchill’s What If If Only.
In Glass, the playwright presents inanimate objects come to life (among them, a glass figurine, a clock, and a toy dog), sharing an unspecific space (presumably, a mantelpiece). What could represent menaced fragility more aptly than a glass girl (Ayana Workman), cloaked in bubble-wrap, pursued by a clumsy, hot-blooded young man (Japhet Balaban)?
The second play, Kill, is a monologue delivered by the incomparable Deirdre O’Connell, elegantly dressed and perched on a cloud. (Enver Chakartash is the resourceful costume designer and Miriam Buether has done the sets, with complementary lighting by Isabella Byrd.) O’Connell plays “Gods,” a panoply of unnamed deities. Like the immortals in Homer, she’s shallow and conniving. She oozes gossip in a mesmerizing stream of consciousness, dishing about Agamemnon’s sacrifice of Iphigenia and Clytemnestra’s revenge.
O’Connor’s monologue concerns irrationality (Olympian and mortal), Homeric carnage, and humanity’s capacity for evil (the last, a familiar Churchillian theme). “We gods can … quieten the furies,” she says, but “we don’t exist. …” That’s right, she assures the audience, the gods don’t exist—“people make us up, they make up the Furies and how they bite.” Gods’s dark, unforgiving view of society and its constituents, pronounced with O’Connor’s seemingly effortless élan, is a position the playwright clearly endorses.
The most poignant of the four plays is What If If Only, in which a newly widowed man (Sathya Sridharan) fantasizes about summoning his wife from wherever her spirit now dwells. When the disconsolate husband somehow manages to pull back the veil between worlds, however, it’s not the ghost of his wife who arrives but a representative of what would have been, now foreclosed by her demise.
Jimmy (right) cultivates the friendship of a homeless man (Japhet Balaban) in Imp, the longest of the four short Churchill plays currently at the Public Theater.
“I’m the ghost of a dead future,” says the otherworldly visitor. “I’m the ghost of a future that never happened. And if you can make me happen then there would be your beloved real person not a ghost … because what happened will never have happened what happened will be different will be what you want …”
By connecting with the realm of the dead, the widower opens the door for other spirits, representatives of a multiplicity of might-have-been futures, to push into the earthly realm. Only one of those spirits is significant: she’s a child (Ruby Blaut), representative of what is “going to happen.” This child is unknowable, except to the extent of her mantra: “I’m going to happen.”
Buether has engineered a visual tour de force for the what-if juncture when the widower breaches the boundary of earth and heaven. Evoking symbolism of the temple veil rent at the moment of Christ’s death in the Synoptic Gospels, it’s the most striking optic in an evening of memorably stark stage images (and goes a long way toward justifying the cost of a ticket).
The final play, Imp, is the longest. Though more conventionally structured than the previous three, it’s no less enigmatic. Imp concerns Dot and Jimmy (O’Connor and John Ellison Conlee), retirement-age cousins living together in the north of England. The scant information revealed about the pair’s relationship fairly screams lifelong disappointment; and the two amuse themselves by meddling in the affairs of younger people, a niece (Adelind Horan) and a homeless man (Balaban).
“We don’t exist, people make us up,” says O’Connell, who plays a panoply of Greek gods in Churchill’s stream-of-consciousness monologue, Kill. Photographs by Joan Marcus.
Dot claims she has a supernatural entity trapped in an old wine bottle. The four characters natter about this imp, its supposed powers, and whether it truly exists. The multi-scene drama trails off with bewitching irresolution, consistent with the final beats of the other plays on the bill. Irresolution is just right in this handful of sketches concerning the inevitability of grief and disappointment, the impermeability of the divide between life and death, and all that’s perilous about human existence.
There’s no knowing when or if New York will see further new works by this insightful, socially engaged octogenarian. That uncertainty makes the array of plays that director Macdonald has assembled all the more valuable. Whether as a reminder or an introduction, Glass, Kill, etc., illustrates the intellectual challenge of Churchill’s writing, the offbeat atmosphere of her imaginative world, and the electricity of those moments when she touches the spectator’s heart.
Glass. Kill. What If If Only. Imp. plays through May 25 at the Public Theater (423 Lafayette St., at Astor Place). Evening performances are at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday; matinees at 1:30 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. For tickets and information, visit publictheater.org.
Playwright: Caryl Churchill
Director: James Macdonald
Scenic Design: Miriam Buether
Lighting Design: Isabella Byrd
Costume Design: Enver Chakartash
Sound Design: Bray Poor
