A glowing platform. A cloud. A white box. A living room rug.
These are the four settings of Caryl Churchill’s series of one-act plays presented this past spring at the Public Theater under the catch-all title Glass. Kill. What If If Only. Imp. Written separately, Churchill’s short, punchy pieces range from the absurd (a girl made of glass) to the seemingly mundane (a set of 60-ish cousins somewhere in England), and each gives the sense of being contained within its own cubic confines. Glass, Kill, What If If Only, and Imp each illuminates from its own unique position – but with the same laser-like focus – the inescapable precarity of being alive. When performed together, under the expert direction of Churchill’s longtime collaborator James Macdonald, the collection of studies transports the audience to a kind of narrative multiverse, creating an eclectic theater-going experience at once effortlessly entertaining and primed for deeper investigation.
Glass takes place entirely on a suspended walkway illuminated in the center of an otherwise black stage. In just seven short scenes, we experience the life of a girl made of glass (played by Ayana Workman). Placed on the mantelpiece by her mother to keep from breaking, the girl talks to her neighbors – a red plastic dog, an arrogant clock, and a rather dignified vase – is taunted by her brother, and soon becomes besotted with a real flesh-and-bones boy. He, likewise, becomes infatuated with her. The boy delights in her transparency. “I love it when the light shines through you,” he tells her, “I know what you feel. I know what you think.” But when the boy gives voice to his innermost feelings, his pain quickly darkens their romance and eventually shatters (in tragically literal terms) our glass girl, ending the play in an abrupt blackout.
In Glass, Churchill toys with ideas of womanhood, perhaps in an attempt to draw attention to the ridiculous fragility so often ascribed to the feminine. The glass girl is flimsy in every sense of the word; her body is breakable, her language simple, and her character largely passive – even her suicide feels uncomplicated, not to mention entirely dependent on a male character. Yet in stylistic terms Churchill’s light-handed characterization is oddly satisfying. The girl’s mother, for example, insists that she wear bubble wrap when she goes for a walk with the boy, and the girl herself gestures to places where she’s been repaired over the years. But other than that, the girl’s substance remains largely figural. As the glass girl, Workman makes no attempt to pantomime a brittle physicality, nor does her costume – a long sleeve t-shirt, baggy shorts, and a pair of blue Converse – aim to reveal anything about her character other than her youth. While Churchill certainly delivers us into an alternate world, it’s not quite fleshed-out, and intentionally so. The world of Glass is as delicate as its excessively fragile heroine, creating an experience of compounding precarity. The glass girl may shatter, and so does her half-baked world. Her sudden end is devastating, but her very existence was allegorical. The audience’s gasp is followed by a sigh of relief. The world of Glass, along with its faint outline of womanhood, was never meant to last.
Glass is immediately followed by an acrobatic act performed by the talented Junru Wang. As she carries out a mesmerizing, upside-down dance, elegantly balancing – for minutes on end – the weight of her body first on both hands then one, Wang seems to embody the sense of risk that courses through Glass. She, however, is anything but fragile. Through her astounding show of physical control, Wang chases away the memory of the glass girl’s crashing end.
In Kill, we encounter a third woman. Up above the stage on a wooly white cloud perches a cross-legged Diedre O’Connell. She opens her mouth, and out comes the voice of every ancient god combined – or something like that. Outfitted in a feathered cream suit, O’Connell is at once a single woman and a many-faced personification of ancient divinity. For twelve uninterrupted minutes, she rapidly narrates an only somewhat-traceable jumble of Greek and Roman tragedy, a sequence of matricides and marriages in which unnamed heroes slash, hack, and, conversely, emit bloody mists. She delivers the monologue like a piece of half-interesting local gossip, punctuating the narrative mess with the same reminder: that it’s “not our fault, we don’t exist,” that “people make us up.” Yet there she is on her cloud, this figment of ancient imagination made corporeal. Humanity, by contrast, is reduced to an anonymous, bloody spectacle – a humorous (at least when placed in O’Connell’s deft hands) spectacle but a sickening one too. Look at the fantasies we create to make ourselves feel better, Churchill seems to say as we watch O’Connell expatiate. In Kill, we’re reminded of the great precarity of living – and dying – in what is, in the end, a truly godless world.
After Kill comes a second circus act. This time Maddox Morfit-Tighe performs an impressive juggling sequence with large clubs. He pulls exaggerated faces and teases audience members as he spins, jumps, and maneuvers through the narrow space in front of the stage. The bright flash of the proscenium lights that punctuated each piece of the performance frames Churchill’s plays as something akin to the evening’s acrobatic interludes. Pairing the four plays with simple, almost mindless entertainment makes a point: whether it be acrobatics or suicide, juggling or mourning, each segment of the performance is part of the same cabaret.
The third play, What If If Only, opens on a pristine, blindingly white three-sided box. In its center, a man (Sathya Sridharan) sits alone at a table and grieves aloud about his dead partner. He grieves her so deeply that he unintentionally conjures up a ghost – not her ghost, not exactly, but a ghost of the future that might have been. “I can give you what if if only if only you hadn’t something if only they hadn’t something,” the future (played again by Workman) chirps at him in one representative unpunctuated stream. Soon another future materializes, then another, and another after that until the man finds himself surrounded by impossible possibilities. “Make me possible” the future tells him. He cries that he does not know how. Soon, his voice is drowned out by the cacophony. He clamps his hands over his ears in desperation, but to no avail. Sridharan’s despair is tangible, his performance heartbreaking. Here exists a fantasy that fails to make him, or us, feel better.
Churchill gives human voices to the most internal truths of grief and crafts characters out of the aching that comes from great loss. Her point is painfully simple: once it’s gone, life cannot be restored. Even, maybe especially, in the echo chambers of our imagination, where in our solitude we are haunted by our strongest, most impossible desires.
In Imp, the last and longest of the four plays, we meet Dot (O’Connell again) and Jimmy (played by John Ellison Conlee), two 60-ish cousins who live together somewhere in England. Jimmy seems to be eternally headed out for a jog while Dot’s mysterious aches and pains keep her firmly seated in her lounge chair. Into their quotidian routine enters their niece, Niamh (Adelind Horan), just arrived from Ireland, and the nomadic Rob (Japhet Balaban), a newly divorced – and now homeless – friend. Entirely situated in the cousins’ living room, Imp unfolds in a sequence of twelve scenes. Churchill’s immersive tale is equipped with the ups and downs of a budding romance (between Niamh and Rob, much to Jimmy’s delight), the sweet feeling of found family, and a wealth of snappy – and hilarious – dialogue, especially between the two bickering cousins.
But the star of Imp, as its title implies, is a tiny creature – or rather the possibility of a tiny creature – trapped inside a wine bottle. For the majority of the play, the inconspicuous bottle sits off to the side of Dot’s chair, left untouched and undiscussed by the four characters. But eventually, Dot’s secret gets out, along with the bottle’s supposed contents. Were it not for the accident of the bottle opening, Imp might offer us a charming glimpse at an ordinary group of people. The play could perhaps be a meditation on aging, or on the importance of family. But the moment the imp makes an appearance, the very boundaries of the play’s universe begin to bend, just enough for Churchill to infuse her magic into what might otherwise be a realist drama. Is there really an imp? Did it get out? Does it actually grant wishes and wreak havoc like Dot says? Or is it just some kooky lady’s invention? Is this Dot’s own version, perhaps, of the ancient gods? Our questions go unanswered, and we’re left to decide the play’s degree of realism for ourselves. Just as the imp teeters on the edge of existence, this play seems to balance between genres, seesawing in and out of fantasy from one moment to the next.
In an attempt to deal with death and loss, Churchill’s characters turn toward the fantastic: house-bound and stuck in her aging body, Dot conjures up a magical imp. As he yearns to bring his beloved back to life, the man at the table converses with the alternate realities of his imagination. Seeking consolation from mortality, the ancient heroes dream up their immortal gods. The glass girl, herself already a fantasy of womanhood, is invented by a troubled human boy. The sly truth of Churchill’s work lies in the fact that we’re really no different from her characters – and nor is she. As they search for security in a helplessly arbitrary world, Churchill’s characters act as the playwrights’ own solace-granting inventions – her own ancient gods, her own imps, her own shards of glass. From our seats in the audience we take part in the imagining, allowing ourselves to measure our own pain, our own fears, and our own troubles against the experiences of these Churchillian reveries. The worlds of Glass. Kill. What If If Only. Imp may be compact, but they are infinite in their reach, relatability, and ultimately – fantasies though they are – in their reality.
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