fr_defenestrato (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
fr_defenestrato) wrote2006-12-15 12:41 pm
fr_defenestrato) wrote2006-12-15 12:41 pm
The Skriker by Caryl Churchill at Warehouse Theater (spoiler alert)
Yes, a few pertinent plot points are dropped below, so if you plan to go see it—which I recommend—read nae ferre. BTW, the run ends next Saturday, 23 December. Tickets are cheap. Note: the LJ userpic is NOT from the current Warehouse production but from a 2000 production at San Diego State University. See http://theatre.sdsu.edu/Archive/theatre_archive/1999-00_season/skriker/The%20Skriker/index.htm for more photos.
While I read Top Girls in Bob Bennett's excellent "20th century Drama" seminar at University of Delaware and have heard and read variously about Blue Kettle, The Skriker is the first Caryl Churchill play I've seen performed. Certainly interesting, alternately spooky and silly, and full of random word association (dissociation socialization so she, a shunned unsunned unsung faerie living at the Moby Dickensian bottom of the garden maudlin), The Skriker stalks and seduces first one young woman, Josie, and then Josie's friend Lily, in various shape-shifted guises: mentor, mental patient, sweet young girl, impetuous lover. The notes in the play describe the titular goblin as "malevolent... ancient and damaged," and as interpreted by Nanna Ingvarsson all three attributes are abundant.
Most of Churchill's work is, I think, famously difficult, and this is no exception. The opening of the play (apart from a brief visit from a strange two-headed creature throwing stones) is a 10-minute nonstop soliloquy from the skriker, one that only very grudgingly allows comprehension of her history, her plans, her state of mind—"deranged" would be the best guess for the latter until, a ways into the asylum scene, she reappears in human guise and speaking perfectly sensible English to Josie. During the opening monologue a variety of oddball creatures are awakened from under the "earth"—the earth being a piece of techno-fabric stretched across the stage in a nice effect (especially as these six actors have been inert and hidden under the fabric since the house opened). These apparently magical, but similarly damaged, creatures mill about the stage throughout, interacting mostly in pantomime with each other and, occasionally, with our two young women, such that there is very little distinction between the mental institution and every other setting in the play (bar, living room, etc.). In the first scene with human dialog, Josie is confined in a mental hospital for murdering her baby. She swears to Lily she didn't do it, which first brings up the possibility of goblins' involvement in her life; she also swears there's another inmate who's really hundreds of years old and who has been granting her wishes. While the plot is temporally forward-moving, the time correspondence between human and fairy worlds is erratic. All of these elements could lead to a nice (though hardly novel) conundrum about whether the entire play is a delusion of Josie's while in hospital; but Churchill is both more overt and more subtle than that: It seems clear that both women see, interact with, and believe in the skriker as a magical being; indeed, they take turns as the fairy's focus/object of seduction/wish-maker. But when, late in the play, Josie is positively raving that Lily's new baby has been replaced by a goblin changeling, Lily wishes that Josie were "not mad," the effect of which is un-suppress, to acute mental and physical anguish, Josie's memory of the act of murdering her baby. In the end, despite plentiful moments of humor, both bitter and goofy, both women suffer nightmarish outcomes at the hands of the goblin (or at their own hands? the result of all those wishes?), and a lingering sense of existential dread followed me out of the theater.
What was not at all apparent to me is that Churchill intended The Skriker (or so I am told in the program notes) as commentary on how broken the human world is: how polluted the environment, how out of balance and out of touch with "the spiritual world." The latter theme would not resound for me in any case, and the former is hardly perceptible. A scene where the skriker asks Lily to explain how television works comes off as less than ideally potent: We can't really be expected to commiserate with centuries-buried magical-creatures-who-want-to-eat-us in their befuddlement and disdain for modern technology, can we? I think the play is best left to its own obvious devices: a meditation on human frailty and the power of selfish wishes, as woven into a backdrop of decidedly un-Disnefied English fairy tales.
Warehouse is an intimate space, and despite positive reviews from Bob Mondello in the Washington City Paper and others, last night's audience filled maybe a third of the small house. I suppose it's kind of inept to stage a secular (or at least holiday-nonspecific) horror fable at a time when most people are going to see yet another adaptation (or even the same adaptation for the last 40 years) of A Christmas Carol (not to mention perennially sleep-making bullshit like The Nutcracker). But honestly, I really appreciate this Christmas Caryl. (Tim Burton, you miserable hack, take note.)
While I read Top Girls in Bob Bennett's excellent "20th century Drama" seminar at University of Delaware and have heard and read variously about Blue Kettle, The Skriker is the first Caryl Churchill play I've seen performed. Certainly interesting, alternately spooky and silly, and full of random word association (dissociation socialization so she, a shunned unsunned unsung faerie living at the Moby Dickensian bottom of the garden maudlin), The Skriker stalks and seduces first one young woman, Josie, and then Josie's friend Lily, in various shape-shifted guises: mentor, mental patient, sweet young girl, impetuous lover. The notes in the play describe the titular goblin as "malevolent... ancient and damaged," and as interpreted by Nanna Ingvarsson all three attributes are abundant.
Most of Churchill's work is, I think, famously difficult, and this is no exception. The opening of the play (apart from a brief visit from a strange two-headed creature throwing stones) is a 10-minute nonstop soliloquy from the skriker, one that only very grudgingly allows comprehension of her history, her plans, her state of mind—"deranged" would be the best guess for the latter until, a ways into the asylum scene, she reappears in human guise and speaking perfectly sensible English to Josie. During the opening monologue a variety of oddball creatures are awakened from under the "earth"—the earth being a piece of techno-fabric stretched across the stage in a nice effect (especially as these six actors have been inert and hidden under the fabric since the house opened). These apparently magical, but similarly damaged, creatures mill about the stage throughout, interacting mostly in pantomime with each other and, occasionally, with our two young women, such that there is very little distinction between the mental institution and every other setting in the play (bar, living room, etc.). In the first scene with human dialog, Josie is confined in a mental hospital for murdering her baby. She swears to Lily she didn't do it, which first brings up the possibility of goblins' involvement in her life; she also swears there's another inmate who's really hundreds of years old and who has been granting her wishes. While the plot is temporally forward-moving, the time correspondence between human and fairy worlds is erratic. All of these elements could lead to a nice (though hardly novel) conundrum about whether the entire play is a delusion of Josie's while in hospital; but Churchill is both more overt and more subtle than that: It seems clear that both women see, interact with, and believe in the skriker as a magical being; indeed, they take turns as the fairy's focus/object of seduction/wish-maker. But when, late in the play, Josie is positively raving that Lily's new baby has been replaced by a goblin changeling, Lily wishes that Josie were "not mad," the effect of which is un-suppress, to acute mental and physical anguish, Josie's memory of the act of murdering her baby. In the end, despite plentiful moments of humor, both bitter and goofy, both women suffer nightmarish outcomes at the hands of the goblin (or at their own hands? the result of all those wishes?), and a lingering sense of existential dread followed me out of the theater.
What was not at all apparent to me is that Churchill intended The Skriker (or so I am told in the program notes) as commentary on how broken the human world is: how polluted the environment, how out of balance and out of touch with "the spiritual world." The latter theme would not resound for me in any case, and the former is hardly perceptible. A scene where the skriker asks Lily to explain how television works comes off as less than ideally potent: We can't really be expected to commiserate with centuries-buried magical-creatures-who-want-to-eat-us in their befuddlement and disdain for modern technology, can we? I think the play is best left to its own obvious devices: a meditation on human frailty and the power of selfish wishes, as woven into a backdrop of decidedly un-Disnefied English fairy tales.
Warehouse is an intimate space, and despite positive reviews from Bob Mondello in the Washington City Paper and others, last night's audience filled maybe a third of the small house. I suppose it's kind of inept to stage a secular (or at least holiday-nonspecific) horror fable at a time when most people are going to see yet another adaptation (or even the same adaptation for the last 40 years) of A Christmas Carol (not to mention perennially sleep-making bullshit like The Nutcracker). But honestly, I really appreciate this Christmas Caryl. (Tim Burton, you miserable hack, take note.)