A girl made of glass. A god — or, really, all of them. Ghosts, but of the future. An imp who may be trapped in a bottle.
Just another day in Caryl Churchill’s world.
The arrival of new work by Churchill is like the arrival of a new theorem in a supposedly settled body of knowledge. “Cloud Nine” (1979) explored gender as colonialism; “Escaped Alone” (2016) domesticated the apocalypse. “Drunk Enough to Say I Love You” (2006) reframed the alliance of Britain and the United States as a sloppy date. Clones and multiverses are part of her world. With a mathematician’s precision, she posits ways of thinking about the universe and its inhabitants that, even when baffling, give more dimension to our experience of both.
Her latest investigations take the form of a collection of four one-act plays at the Public Theater, under the portmanteau title “Glass. Kill. What If If Only. Imp.” Written separately over the last few years, each is pointed enough on its own: short and edgy. But together, in a splendid and surprisingly emotional production directed by James Macdonald, a frequent Churchill collaborator, they are so sharp you hardly feel them slicing your skin.
“Glass” is the most literally shattering. The life of a girl made of the substance, who lives on a mantelpiece for safety, is encompassed in 13 minutes. Her mother frets over her, her brother brags about her, her mantelpiece neighbors — an old clock, a plastic dog, a painted vase — compete with her. (She may be pretty, the clock says, but he’s useful.) Soon the girl (Ayana Workman) meets a flesh-and-blood boy (Japhet Balaban) who is entranced by the transparency of her feelings: He can see straight into them, with no need for words. When his own feelings are spoken, in the form of whispers we do not hear, the express bus to tragedy departs.
The way intimacy opens to loss is a theme here; the way abstractions become characters is a miracle. Somehow, it takes just a moment to adjust to the bizarre setup and the ensuing complications. (The mother warns that if the girl goes out for a walk with the boy, she had better wear Bubble Wrap.) Nor do we trouble ourselves that the production makes no attempt to literalize the figurines. They’re just us.
Likewise just us: the gods represented by one actor in “Kill.” I say one actor, but Deirdre O’Connell is so singular, she’s plural. On a puffy white cloud (sets by Miriam Buether), in a cream and gold chenille lamé suit (costumes by Enver Chakartash), she looks down on the ancient parade of human viciousness with amusement and despair and every feeling in between.
Not many actors could parse — let alone make both funny and awful — a maniacal, 12-minute monologue that’s basically a mixed grill of Greek and Roman sagas. A typical, barely punctuated sample: “She’s committed to being her husband’s enemy taking his longtime enemy as her lover, her husband’s cousin who wants all that family dead, she’s his enemy as soon as he kills their daughter cutting her throat on the altar to get wind for sailing to his brother’s war” — on it goes through a thousand horrid demises. Bring a classicist with you to sort out the sources, though it doesn’t matter. To the gods, it’s all gossip, delivered by O’Connell in the manner of a Southern barfly facing last call.
Representing the divine as a debauchee is a brilliant choice, demonstrating a key Churchillian theme: All evil is human evil. “It’s not our fault,” O’Connell says at one point, voicing the gods. “We don’t exist.”
The human need to fabricate other worlds and blame ours upon them is also the subject of the third play, “What If If Only.” A man (Sathya Sridharan) so mourns the loss of his wife that he opens a metaphysical door to an afterlife. But the being who then enters isn’t in fact his wife; she’s a ghost of “the dead future,” one of the innumerable possibilities of who she might have become. All the man must do to revive her, the being explains, is “make me happen” — but, he wails, he doesn’t know how.
I say he and she for the mourner and the mourned, because that’s how this production has cast them, but Churchill doesn’t specify. (In the play’s online premiere, the mourner was female and her late spouse male.) The story doesn’t care about that; it cares about the larger truth that anyone who has suffered a great loss, which is to say everyone, will understand immediately: We can’t get them back. There are only more-or-less unwanted substitute futures, suggested in a swishing soundscape of voices designed by Bray Poor. Though written earlier, the play appeared shortly after Churchill’s husband of 60 years, the lawyer David Harter, died in 2021.
“Glass,” “Kill” and “What If If Only” make up the first half of the Public’s program, along with two charming intermezzos: an acrobat (Junru Wang) performing hand balancing maneuvers on tiny podiums called canes; and a juggler (Maddox Morfit-Tighe) executing flourishes, spins and traps with clubs. In front of a gold proscenium with flashing chasers (lighting by Isabella Byrd), these acts suggest a kind of vaudeville, so fitting for Churchill’s evolving take on tragedy as comedy, and vice versa.
After an intermission, that thought is further revised in “Imp.” Two 60-ish cousins, but not the kissing kind, share an apartment somewhere in England. Dot (O’Connell) has unspecified back problems that keep her in her easy chair. Jimmy (John Ellison Conlee) has ambitions toward fitness but sneakers not quite up to the task. Into their pleasantly carping ménage come two newcomers: their niece, Niamh (pronounced “neeve”), from Ireland, and Rob, a local homeless man.
I have not seen a Churchill work in the naturalistic domestic dramedy vein before, and it’s fascinating. In 12 swift scenes that take up an hour, she easily achieves the plot density of premium cable, with its regular revelations, its ruptures and reunions. Niamh (Adelind Horan) and Rob (Balaban) begin a relationship that worries Dot and pleases Jimmy. Things progress and devolve in a broadly satisfying, almost familiar way.
What makes this pure, strange Churchill is off to the side. It’s that bottle, near Dot’s chair, which she keeps as a kind of talisman or threat. Is there really something in it? What if it got out? Does it (as Dot claims) grant wishes, especially evil ones? Or is Dot, with her sharp tongue and tendency toward havoc, herself the imp?
These questions, always physically present onstage, derange the domestic dramedy and get at the heart of Churchill’s worldview. There is always something in the bottle. It did get out. Wishes, especially evil ones, are granted. Yes, Dot is the imp, and so are we all.
Glass. Kill. What If If Only. Imp.
Through May 11 at the Public Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes.
