Review: Caryl Churchill Continues to Challenge Us in a Quartet of New Short Plays

Legendary British playwright Caryl Churchill has a reputation for forthrightly tackling political issues in her plays, especially regarding feminism and capitalism. But works like Cloud Nine, Top Girls, and Love and Information aren’t celebrated just for their sociopolitical content. Only someone as formally boundary-pushing as Churchill could have come up with, say, the idea of repeating scenes with minor variations or increasingly replacing words in everyday speech with “blue” and “kettle” as she does in her experimental 1997 two-parter Blue Heart. That kind of formal restlessness is on thrilling display in Glass, Kill, What If If Only, and Imp, four recent short plays of hers that are being presented together in one heady evening at the Public Theater. Even if some of the plays are better than others, they all bear the fascinating stamp of its singular creator.

The first three shorts make up the show’s first half. Glass revolves around a romance between a girl made of glass (Ayana Workman) and her brother’s (Sathya Sridharan) friend (Japhet Balaban), which turns tragic when that friend reveals his father is forbidding him from seeing her. Kill is a stream-of-consciousness monologue delivered by a god (Deirdre O’Connell)—or rather, “gods,” as Churchill calls the character in the text—that’s marked by wall-to-wall murder. What If If Only is basically a ghost story, though the group of ghosts that eventually swirl around the melancholic main character (Sridharan) isn’t necessarily those of his past. After intermission comes Imp, the longest of the shorts, a story about cousins Jimmy (John Ellison Conlee) and Dot (O’Connell), their niece Niamh (Adelind Horan), the temporarily homeless stranger Rob (Balaban), and a mysterious imp that Dot claims resides in a champagne bottle and that only she can see.

Director James MacDonald stages this quartet as a kind of surreal variety show. Two circus performers entertain us during set changes between the first three plays: Junru Wang’s dazzling acrobatic act between Glass and Kill, and Maddox Morfit-Tighe’s bowling-pin juggling act between Kill and What If If Only. The red curtain and light bulbs lining all four sides of the stage that greet us as we enter the theater adds to the carnival atmosphere. By stark contrast, Miriam Buether’s spare scenic designs for all four plays are marked by their near-monochrome severity, with even the most colorful set, for Imp, nearly engulfed by its pitch-black background.

Not that these plays need excessive design for them to fascinate. As whimsical as their premises are, they are always grounded in universal themes. Glass‘s notion of a girl made of glass speaks to the fragility of human relationships, especially over time, as an interlude involving an anthropomorphic clock, vase, and red plastic dog contextualizes. The gods’ view of human beings’ capacity for violence justified by their existence in Kill is darkly funny at first until it becomes simply dark upon repetition. We don’t need to know the specific cause of the main character’s grief in What If If Only to be moved by the way he confronts phantoms of the past and future before being forced to deal with the present right in front of him.

It’s a bit disappointing, then, to go from the poetic heights of those three plays to the more conventionally dramatic Imp, with its reasonably defined characterizations and character arcs. But even Imp‘s relatively straightforward surface has plenty of idiosyncrasies underneath. The idea of a genie-like monster being trapped in a bottle waiting to be unleashed resonates given what Dot gradually reveals about her violent past as a nurse. But that notion also extends to the other characters: Jimmy’s obsession with jogging as possibly his own equivalent of Dot’s bottled imp, Niamh expressing frequent anxieties about her own future, Rob trying to get his own life back on the track amid a divorce and a previous bout with addiction. The play may feel a bit thin even at close to an hour, but it also makes concrete the broader themes the earlier three plays merely hinted at.

Precise performances, so crucial in finding the inner music of Churchill’s prose, make the evening sing. Workman exudes vulnerability as the girl made of glass, as does Sridharan, skillfully making the musings with which he opens What If If Only feel off-the-cuff. O’Connell vividly conveys both the wryness of the gods in Kill and the coiled fury of Dot in Imp, especially with Conlee exuding hearty bonhomie opposite her as Jimmy in the latter. The whole ensemble prove to be excellent guides into the worlds Churchill creates in this inspiring evening, one that shows one of our finest living playwrights continuing to challenge audiences and push the envelope.