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Adelind Horan, Ayana Workman, Sathya Sridharan,
and Japeth Balaban in Glass.
Credit: Joan Marcus
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You never know what you’re going to get with a Caryl Churchill play, but it’s sure to be something unique, thought-provoking, and convention-breaking. After exploring gender and racial barriers in Cloud 9, the clash of capitalism and feminism in Top Girls, financial turmoil in Serious Money, magic and demons in The Skirker, cloning in A Number, and numerous other topics in bizarre and weird ways, she tackles the power of legends, myths, and metaphor in a quartet of odd but affecting one-acts, Glass. Kill. What If If Only. Imp. at the Public Theater. The first three playlets are short and explosive, detonating like miniature bombs. Director James MacDonald has separated them with entertaining circus acts, performed with winning charm by balancing whiz Junru Wang and expert juggler Maddox Morfit-Tighe. These fun interludes act as palate cleansers between Churchill’s short unusual dramatic courses. Glass concerns a girl made of glass (played with appropriate delicacy and yearning by Ayana Workman). She is easily breakable and transparent, not just physically but emotionally. MacDonald stages the play on a narrow ledge, emphasizing the precarious space the girl occupies. There is no special costume or effect to convey her crystalline condition, MacDonald and Churchill ask us to use our imagination as she converses with the family clock, a ceramic dog and a vase on the need to remain still on a shelf. She falls for an equally vulnerable boy (tender Japhet Balaban), who is victimized by an abusive father. The climax of this bitter fairy tale is shattering, literally and figuratively.
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Deirdre O'Connell in Kill.
Credit: Joan Marcus |
The powerful Deirdre O’Connell represents “Gods” in the following piece Kill, a Beckett-like monologue. Costume designer Enver Chakartash has clad her in a silvery suit with the suggestion of wings and she is seated on a suspended cloud. After stating that the gods do not exist, she launches on an epic retelling of the numerous tragedies surrounding the House of Atreus. Phrases detailing the murders within Agamemnon’s family and the endless slaughters that followed are repeated emphasizing the senselessness of death in the name of the deities. (The repetitions and circular nature of the speech reminded me of Lucky’s monologue in Waiting for Godot.) O’Connell’s character is a symbol for the made-up supreme beings of mythologies used to explain humanity’s inhumanity. O’Connell delivers this tirade with a leavening of humor and growing passion which finally erupts in an explosion of anger at the useless killing.
