Opening on Wednesday at the Public Theater, four brief, contrasting plays of circa 2020 vintage composed by the great British dramatist Caryl Churchill appear in their New York premieres. They are handsomely arranged in a program cleverly directed by James Macdonald, a longtime collaborator, under a banner naming their titles in order of performance: Glass. Kill. What If If Only. Imp. The front of the usually stark Martinson Hall stage has been made extra-theatrical by scenic designer Miriam Buether who has built a big, old-fashioned proscenium framed in Venetian red and dotted with chaser lights, complete with a crimson velvet curtain sporting gold fringe. It looks like a music hall or vaudeville house and that’s the way Macdonald presents Churchill’s plays – as a bill of diverse acts.
To underline this apt vaudeville concept, a pair of modest solo circus routines are sandwiched between the first three plays: Against rippling Fred Hersch piano music, Junru Wang gravely performs a sinuous hand-balancing act. Upbeat jazz accompanies Maddox Morfit-Tighe while he amiably juggles Indian Clubs. These pleasant youngsters are nice to observe, but they’re merely the sherbet served amid Churchill’s exotic fare.
Glass demands instant suspension of disbelief from viewers as characters are depicted as items situated along a thin mantelpiece floating amid a black void. Anthropomorphism rules during this perhaps intentionally fragmentary piece where bric-a-brac such as a clock and a souvenir dog, personified by actors in street clothes, bicker over who’s nicest. They realign to present a tragedy about a girl whose intrinsic need for transparency proves fatal. Glass is the WTF sequence in the series, certain to startle newbies to Churchill.
[Read David Finkle’s ★★★☆☆ review here.]
Kill is a wonderfully bloodthirsty mashup of the endless curses, rapes, murders, madness, wars, sacrifices and sufferings experienced among many generations of the House of Thebes and the House of Atreus amid other unlucky souls in classical mythology. It is dazzlingly rendered in blazes of emotion by Deirdre O’Connell, grandly perched atop a cloud as a glamorous leonine goddess. Her seriocomic aria of nonstop horrors is composed in lengthy run-on sentences suggesting the threads that The Fates spin out. The goddess dryly notes mortals don’t believe in them but somehow commit all sorts of crimes in their names.
Belief in its varying forms is a notion running through all four plays; as in viewers believing actors are ornaments on a shelf or people carrying out atrocities in the name of a religion they may doubt. Viewers who believe in ghosts or merely wonder what their future may prove to be are likely to be intrigued and possibly even creeped out by What If If Only. Disconsolate in a vast white room, a man is mourning for a lost love. “If I was the one who was dead would you still be talking to me?” he wonders. A familiar figure who materializes is really someone else. “I’m the ghost of a dead future,” she says. “I’m the ghost of a future that did not happen.” Soon a haunting chorus of never-will-be futures are whispering their multitudes of brilliant, sweet, catastrophic, ghastly or utopian possibilities. After they depart, the guy is confronted with a forthright fellow who claims to be The Present and suggests he better get on with life in the moment.
The final work, Imp delivers a mostly low-keyed, eventually tender slice of realism regarding some working class English people. Just seen depicting The Present, John Ellison Conlee joins Deirdre O’Connell in a fond, bantering relationship as retired cousins who share a quiet, shabby home. A young relative from Ireland visits and begins an affair with a neighbor. Crafted in a dozen brief scenes – laced with a macabre running joke related to Kill – this glimpse of seemingly humdrum modern life is gradually revealed to be touched by a supernatural being. Or is it? Depends on who can be believed.
These four servings of Churchill are staged extremely well by Macdonald in the varying styles they require. The ten-member company headed by O’Connell and Conlee very naturally enact tricky material. Excellent support is provided by the designers. Miriam Buether packs surprising angles in the scenery. Enver Chakartash fashions clothes that look true to character. Isabella Byrd creates lighting in many moods. Sound designer Bray Poor contributes subtle effects, bright music and clear reinforcement. With this inventive and cogent production of Churchill’s most recent plays, the Public Theater honors a remarkable writer whose mind-bending works have electrified its seasons on and off for nearly half a century.
Glass. Kill. What If If Only. Imp. opened April 16, 2025, at the Public Theater and runs through May 11. Tickets and information: publictheater.org
