Shaking the Tree and Caryl Churchill are a match made in theater heaven. The former is the production company that has, since 2003, presented some of the boldest, strangest, and most unforgettable stage work that Portland has ever seen. The latter is one of our greatest living playwrights whose audacious creations fuse the surreal and the everyday, the personal and the political, the sacred and the profane.
“I think she’s very into spectacle, and I’m very into spectacle,” says Samantha Van Der Merwe, Shaking the Tree’s artistic director. “I think she’s also prophetic because sometimes you’ll do a piece, and you’re like, ‘How did she know this about the future?’ I think she just allows herself to imagine and sometimes imagines a very dystopian future, which we’re all grappling with right now. So I think that’s why she’s so compelling. She has an understanding of human nature that we’re not willing to look at directly in the eye, and she is.”
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Van Der Merwe’s love of Churchill’s work led Shaking the Tree to stage two of her plays in previous seasons: Escaped Alone, a short, shattering one-act featuring five women enjoying tea in a backyard garden while the outside world is collapsing around them, and Far Away, which takes place in a world where every part of nature, from humans to patches of grass, is engaged in an all-out war.
Shaking the Tree is taking perhaps their biggest swing yet with their upcoming production of Glass. Kill. Bluebeard. Imp., a quartet of one-acts from Churchill that are loosely connected by threads of magical realism and a simmering undercurrent of potential violence. The four plays premiered together in 2019 and, soon thereafter, Van Der Merwe chose them for a play reading club she started at the Shaking the Tree Theatre on SE Grant.
“I thought it was perfect because they were short, and there were quite a few different characters for people to read,” Van Der Merwe says. “When I presented it to the group, I was like, ‘I’ll probably never [produce] this, but it’s so fun.’ The reason why I thought ‘no’ is because the final one Imp, which is about a genie in a bottle, I didn’t really get. I didn’t think it was that powerful of a piece. Then when we read it out loud, it was the one that everyone in the group loved the best. I think it needs to work its magic out loud.”
There is a strange, dark magic in all parts of this quadriptych. Glass concerns a young woman made of glass sitting on a mantelpiece whose fragility and transparency is a source of both wonder and danger. (In that way, it serves as a perfect follow-up to Shaking the Tree’s masterful production of The Glass Menagerie.) Van Der Merwe’s favorite Imp concerns two cousins who are cohabitating and slowly rotting away in a small apartment. One claims to have the titular demon in a bottle by their chair and is considering unleashing it because their niece has taken up with a homeless man who sleeps in a nearby cemetery. Kill is an extended monologue by a character taking on the voice of various Greek and Roman deities and recounting the bloody acts that humans have committed in the name of these gods.
The other play in this quartet, Bluebeard (full title: Bluebeard’s Friends) is the one that most easily mirrors our recent history. In it, a group of people sit around a table and try to make sense of the reality that their friend is a monster who has married and then killed multiple women. As the short work goes on, their own potential complicity in those heinous acts or indifference to them feels akin to the many, many people who kept powerful figures like Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein from facing any real repercussions for decades.
As Van Der Merwe prepares Churchill’s plays for the stage, there’s a lot to fret over. The playwright is notoriously unwilling to talk about her work and the printed versions leave much open to interpretation.
“I think the thing I love about her most, and the thing I’m most terrified about, is that she doesn’t give a lot of stage directions,” Van Der Merwe says. “She’s like, ‘You could do this, or you could do this, or you could do nothing,’ and you’re like, ‘Oh God, what shall I do?’”
Van Der Merwe said the plan was to start working with the cast and Shaking the Tree’s technical director Nate Raphael to devise the perfect way to both present these four separate works and to transition between.
“I realized that we could play a lot in between the pieces,” she says. “Because we’re a small theater company, we don’t have millions of dollars. We have to be a little more smart about how we reveal these worlds to our audiences. What I would love to do is almost have it be like an onion where we peel back the layers, and you see an element of the next piece in the piece before. And each layer is revealed to you as the pieces unfold.”
Glass. Kill. Bluebeard. Imp. opens at Shaking the Tree Theatre, 823 SE Grant, Oct 10-Nov 7, $39 w/ several pay tiers, tickets and showtimes at shaking-the-tree.com, 16+