The wonder of surrealist art, in any medium, is how disorienting it can initially be. Like setting off on a boat ride or, I imagine, accepting zero gravity after leaving the Earth’s atmosphere, it can take a good few moments to adjust one’s body and mind to this new reality.
The works of British playwright Caryl Churchill force you to get your sea legs quickly, and that’s very true of a quartet of her plays from 2019 presented this month in Portland in an extraordinary production by Shaking the Tree Theatre. Glass. Kill. Bluebeard. Imp. isn’t some kind of greatest hits presentation, mind you. Churchill intended these for short plays to be presented together, connecting as they are by themes intrinsic to her work: the long history of violence against women and the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of a senseless world. And it all opens with a short, poignant, yet increasingly dark piece about a young girl made entirely of glass.
Played with subtle care by Sami Yacob-Andrus, the unnamed character lives with her every desire and emotion made visible to the world through her clear body. To make matters worse, she’s navigating this as a teen. But just like the unheard secret whispered to her by her first romantic partner (Lennox Blodgett), there’s an unspoken terror that bubbles under the surface, an anticipation of the first cracks to show in her fragile body.
Director Samantha Van Der Merwe fuels that undercurrent of unease by staging Glass mere feet from the front row with no stage decoration and few props. In such tight quarters, players can’t help but loose strays into the audience. At a certain point, Blodgett’s character inadvertently directed a comment about his father’s abusive tendencies right at me, flustering me greatly.
As the show progressed, panels opened up to reveal a larger stage, necessary to give the actors and audience more room to breathe.
The other thing you may need to know about Churchill is that she is stingy with stage direction. With much of her plays, they are wide open to interpretation. For example, when this quartet premiered in London, the actor playing an unnamed god—who rattles off a litany of violent myths and legends—was seated upon a glowing cloud that hung over the stage. Beneath, a child colored in a book, interjecting one-syllable shouts.
Van Der Merwe’s staging of Kill. brings everything much closer to the earth. Still in her school uniform from Glass, Yacob-Andrus recites the monologue standing on a table, while much of the cast sits around it, quietly reacting and commenting on each murder and sacrifice being recounted above. The script’s single child becomes a pair of teens (local high schoolers Pearl Fisher and Jinju Colt) caressing and moving oversized chess pieces back and forth between yells of “No!” and “Stop!”
The experience of watching Kill was akin to the first time I saw Alfred Molina’s lone scene in Boogie Nights as a freebasing drug dealer blasting his favorite rock tunes against a background of firecrackers while brandishing a revolver. In both cases, my senses neared overload. With Kill, that overrun of action occasionally pulled me away from the ongoing monologue, but Yacob-Andrus deserves credit for snapping my attention back in place. She delivered a virtuosic performance, folding into the dialogue both wonder and flippance, regret and detachment.
The strongest, and most prescient, of the four plays Bluebeard took up even more of the stage and an even wider allegorical scope. In it, a group of revelers booze and dance as they discuss the fate of the titular Bluebeard, their wealthy friend who, according to the folktale on which this was based, murdered his many wives and stored their bodies in a secret chamber.
However, the characters aren’t so much aghast at Bluebeard’s actions as they are slightly bemused and titillated. Soon enough, they’re all wondering how they can cash in on his infamy. The character’s complicity in this whole affair, and the brutal subjugation of these women, is presented with blunt directness. At one point Yacob-Andrus’s character reveals she has the blood-stained dresses of Bluebeard’s wives, and with ugly delight, the friends don these frocks and continue to cavort, leaving a line of coat hangers dangling from the ceiling. It’s a chilling reminder of our pre-Roe world and a potential harbinger of our post-Roe present.
The final and longest in this quartet, Imp is the work most rooted in theatrical norms. It’s a kitchen sink drama that takes place in the sitting room of the apartment of cousins Dot (Anna Fitzwater) and Jimmy (Jonathan Cullen). Presented in short scenes meant to convey several months, the cousins receive visitors: Niamh (Kayla Hanson), a distant relative from Ireland who they refer to as their niece, and Rob (Murri Lazaroff-Babin), a soft-spoken man who sleeps in a nearby cemetery.
As the action rolls forward, a bottle on a shelf in the apartment gains prominence. It supposedly contains an imp that grants wishes. Its origins are fairly irrelevant, the bottle serves more as a totem for repressed anger and trauma, some of which spills over when Jimmy and Rob dare to uncork the bottle one drunken night.
I’d be very interested in returning to Shaking The Tree later in this production’s run to see how the four actors in Imp have settled into their roles. On opening night, there was a stiffness to a lot of the dialogue—and some wobbly accents—that will likely get smoothed out by practice. Like much of Churchill’s plays, Imp is an unnatural situation that needs to be played as naturally as possible for the story to have the deepest impact.
Glass. Kill. Bluebeard. Imp. plays at Shaking the Tree Theatre, 823 SE Grant, through Nov 7, $39 w/ several pay tiers, showtimes and more info, 16+