Caryl Churchill may be the best living playwright in the English language. And at 86, she’s still producing work of remarkable vigor and nuance in her quintessentially absurdist style. Her sense of craft, and her challenge of narrative conventions, is on full display in Glass. Kill. What If If Only. Imp., a compendium of four recent short plays now playing at the Public Theater. Three of these were first produced in London in 2019, while a fourth ran in 2021 as a 20-minute theatrical aperitif before a mainstage production at the Royal Court Theatre.
The evening opens with the most esoteric of the bunch, Glass, in which four plain-clothes figures appear on an elevated glowing mantel that seems to exist in a kind of all-black space (strikingly designed by Miriam Buether and lit by Isabella Byrd). We come to understand that they represent a delicate glass figure (Ayana Workman), a vase who develops a crush on her (Japhet Balaban), a clock who taps out the seconds with his sneakered feet (Sathya Sridharan), and a souvenir plastic dog who’s now a dusty “memory of a happy holiday” (Adelind Horan). They exist in a kind of liminal space that will be familiar to students of Samuel Beckett — and each conveys the sense of abandonment or unfulfilled promise. The vase notes that he’s never noticed without flowers, while even the clock feels past it’s prime. “A clock isn’t useful any more,” the glass object notes. “Time’s on the phones.”
Churchill leans into the anthropomorphizing of these figures/figurines as we shift from whimsical banter into the more serious issue of child abuse and the legacy of past trauma. The transition is so oblique that it almost doesn’t register, like an image seen through glass wiped clean, but it still builds to a climax that feels as inevitable as it is tragic.
Next, the inimitable Deirdre O’Connell appears as a goddess, perched on a fluffy tulle cloud in an all-white suit with feathers flicking off the shoulders (costumes by Enver Chakartash). She delivers an elegant monologue that recaps Greek mythology as well as the history of Western civilization’s complicated relationship with higher powers. “We gods can do that sometimes, quieten the furies,” she says, quickly adding, “we don’t exist, people make us up, they make up the furies and how they bite.” In O’Connell’s telling, the gods are both distant and yet fully engaged in the unfolding drama of human suffering. If they didn’t exist — and they don’t exist, she repeatedly reminds us — we’d need to make them up as an excuse for our bad behavior and a scapegoat for when our best intentions go horribly, violently wrong.
Just before the intermission, we get a kind of existentialist update of A Christmas Carol — a Christmas Caryl? — in which a man (Sridharan) still smarting from the death of his one true love is visited by a spectral figure (Workman) who calls herself the “ghost of a dead future.” Soon, the walls of the white-box set lift to produce more ghosts, each promising an alternate reality in which his lover is still alive but with hidden consequences that he feels overwhelmed to parse. Dismissing them all, the man then encounters a blunt-talking Present (John Ellison Conlee), who reminds him that there are still many possible futures but “in none of them will your beloved be there.” Finally, a young girl (Cecilia Ann Popp) representing the certain future arrives and insists, “I’m going to happen,” but she remains tight-lipped about what sort of world she brings with her.
Sridharan effectively conveys the forlornness of a man still in the throes of mourning, who perks up at the prospect of hope but is quickly confounded by the burden of choosing just one alternative — and later, of accepting the inevitable reality of not knowing how things will turn out.
Director James Macdonald, who also oversaw the productions at London’s Royal Court, introduces an acrobat (Junru Wang) and mop-haired juggler (Maddox Morfit-Tighe) between the playlets — interstitial acts that remind us of the heightened circuslike reality of the worlds that Churchill creates.
The final and longest play of the bunch, Imp, is also the most realistic — in a manner of speaking. We meet two pensioner-aged cousins (Conlee and O’Connell) who uneasily share a home together and bicker agreeably while engaging with two regular visitors: a much-younger quasi-niece who’s moved to London from Ireland (Horan) and a 30ish homeless man (Balaban) whom Conlee’s Jimmy has taken under his wing while the younger man seeks to get back on his feet and reconnect with his estranged son.
In a series of short scenes, we get to know a bit of these characters — and some of their secrets. And then Dot introduces the Imp, a supernatural creature she’s convinced exists inside a corked wine bottle and that she hopes to unleash to punish a person whom she’s convinced has wronged her beloved niece. But what punishment is appropriate? “Make it so nothing good ever happened to him,” she ponders. “Make him never work again … and he’d always be homeless and go back to drugs and never have anyone love him and kill himself.” (We’ve already seen signs of her mean streak, a disposition no doubt enhanced by the fact that she never leaves her favorite chair.)
Conlee’s Jimmy immediately challenges her — not only on the cruelty she’s proposing but also the preposterousness of thinking that such a magical creature exists to do her bidding. To him, the Imp is a bit of fun. But for Dot it clearly holds a deeper significance. And therein lies the power of Churchill’s gifts, which are often about the stories that we tell ourselves to explain the world around us and to justify both our actions and our inability to significantly alter the outcome. We blame the gods, we look for ghosts, we summon supernatural fairies — anything to avoid the reality of our limited agency in a world that is too big and too complicated for us to comprehend, let alone influence.
Churchill’s approach to these questions is not for everyone (there were a number of walkouts at my performance). But for those who are willing to engage with her absurdist style and the off-kilter way she delivers her message, these playlets offer rich rewards. For one thing, they are often very funny. (Macdonald’s cast is note perfect in handling tricky material.) But this quartet — which explores similar themes about storytelling, processing trauma and loss, as well as the idea of brokenness — resonates more clearly in its stylized delivery than in a more traditional, naturalistic mode. ★★★★☆
GLASS. KILL. WHAT IF IF ONLY. IMP.
Public Theater, Off Broadway
Running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes (with 1 intermission)
Tickets for sale through May 11 for $89
Culture Sauce 