urban excavations

Glass. Kill. What If If Only. Imp.
Featuring Japhet Balaban, Ruby Blaut, Kyle Cameron, Orlagh Cassidy, John Ellison Conlee, Adelind Horan, Maddox Morfit-Tighe, Deirdre O’Connell, Cecilia Ann Popp, Sathya Sridharan, Junru Want, Anya Whelan-Smith, Ayana Workman
WP Theater
April 3, 2025 – May 25, 2025 [extended]
production site

Caryl Churchill has authored several dozen plays that push boundaries, test conventions, force us to listen. Four of her most recent are presented by the Public Theater in a full theatrical adventure — as if in the day of vaudeville, scenes interspersed with divertissements in the form of acrobats. And it is a glorious creation.

Glass features four actors on a plank (are they objects on a shelf, as toys in Velveteen Rabbit or the assembly in Toy Story?) that shift from objects to people. Ayana Workman, Sathya Sridharan, Japhel Balaban, and Adelind Horan serve this short story. The screed Kill voiced Deirdre O’Connell as an angel on a cloud (or a goddess or a servant to the gods or a minion) is a litany of violence, what humans do to one another, that enchants and terrifies us. The third section, What If If Only, begins with another solo (Sathya Sridharan) seated at a desk, missing his dead wife, is visited by ghosts or memories or possibilities — the child’s dream of wishing a bad outcome away by changing one essential event meeting the adult realization that to change one event would alter the universe. (This piece is the most recently crafted, influenced perhaps by our global experience with COVID and our daily reminders of our frail human frames.) The final piece of Churchill drama, Imp, is the most conventionally crafted. Middle-aged cousins Jimmy (John Ellison Conlee) and Dot (Deirdre O’Connell) sit in overstuff chairs on a surface askew, perched on a shelf again but quite different from the first rigidly arranged setup in the first act. Two young people, Rob (Japhet Balaban) and Niamh (Adeline Horan) enter their complacent world, he to look for a job and she to start her career. It is a sitcom with a variable: reference to a bottle that has been uncorked in which there may or may not have been a spirit residing as Dot believes.

To allow the events of the plays to settle, to allow us to readjust mentally and physically between the beats of the wildly varied worlds offered in Churchill’s short pieces, director James Macdonald has folded in two different acts — a thrilling gymnast (Junru Wang) and a juggler (Maddox Morfit Tighe). I relished the breaks to allow the extreme emotions evoked by the separate theatrical pieces to settle and dissolve.

Framing all the elements are a lighting design by Isabella Byrd that crafts thrilling pinpoint illumination and terrifying deep dark blacks of blankness. Enver Chakartash’s costumes for O’Connell in the ethereal and terrifying Kill, along with the puffy cloud in Miriam Buether’s set design, are perfection.

Churchill is parsimonious and speaks multitudes. And this production serves us all magnificently.

© Martha Wade Steketee (April 17, 2025)

Playwright | Caryl Churchill
Director | James Macdonald
Set Design | Miriam Buether
Costume Design | Enver Chakartash
Lighting Design | Isabella Byrd
Sound Design| Bray Poor