Something Churchill this way comes

Vernoica Barron, bassist Tony Leva, and the witches of Vinegar Tom.

Caryl Churchill liked to call her script Vinegar Tom (through Feb. 2 from Whistler in the Dark) "a play about witches with no witches in it."  She might have added, "And in which the lead character never appears," for indeed we never set eyes on the eponymous tom-cat who's supposedly the "familiar" of her poor, persecuted characters.  (That is, unless he is represented in spirit by the masculine villains of the play.)

But that isn't the end of what's downright odd about Vinegar Tom.  The show is also, believe it or not, a cabaret - yes, a cabaret about hanging witches - and is studded with quotes from such hair-raising sources as the Malleus Maleficarum, an influential 15th-century tract which advised its readers that "All witchcraft comes from carnal lust . . . which is in women insatiable."

For Churchill, that point was of particular significance, for she has always been deeply feminist in her perspective.  Although I don't mean by that anything like today's amoral, careerist feminism; Churchill is a long way from the slick likes of Diane Paulus or Kathryn Bigelow.  Indeed, the playwright often critiques feminism - unheard of today! - as it's really only one aspect of her deeper concern with human equity in general.

But the f-word looms so far over the action of Vinegar Tom (which was devised in collaboration with the 70's-era collective "Monstrous Regiment"), that it has prompted several (male) critics to complain that the play is didactic. And it's certainly true that Churchill offers us no enlightened male hero, à la Arthur Miller, to provide something like a pleasing gender balance.  But then she doesn't really give us a female hero, either; her victims are as benighted and ignorant as their persecutors (indeed the campaign against female sexuality she illuminates may have its staunchest allies among women themselves).  

No, Churchill's "witches" are simply as helpless as they would have been in their actual time and place (17th century England), and with the resources they had to hand; and we're struck forcefully by their plight because it has rarely been depicted quite so bluntly. These women are essentially chattel in a system designed by and for male desire - and so they are generally unable to own property, have no voting rights, and indeed often lack even the ability to read. Thus Churchill sensibly denies them any rhetorical power; none of the women in Vinegar Tom spout poetry in a pinch like Portia or Rosalind. And as for masculine chivalry - well, even though one of these women is literally locked up in a tower, no one comes to their rescue.

Arresting a Witch, by Howard Pyle

Of course, if "accurate" counts as "didactic" - well, so be it. But even those hostile to Churchill's framing would have to admit her sheer talent keeps poking through her lesson plan.  Her characters are indeed rounded (though rough) and their conflicts operate through full degrees of freedom; nothing in Vinegar Tom feels over-determined, even if much in it feels inevitable.

This is because so many of Churchill's characters themselves operate (or try to) with some degree of personal choice in a world that's hostile to it.  Take Alice, for instance (Becca A. Lewis) - she's a misfit who simply enjoys a roll in the hay. And her mother (Karin Webb) is simply trying to make her own living, on her own.  As is outsider Ellen (Obehi Janice), who sells charms and spells to get by. Finally there's pretty young Betty (Melis Aker) who only wants to choose her own husband.  All these desires bring them into harm's way; their autonomy from men targets them, and the mysterious power of their sexuality offers the perfect pretext for their persecution.

Or to be honest, sometimes the repellent power of their loss of sexuality does.  The contempt men feel for the used woman, as well as their horror of those beyond the child-bearing years, obviously figure in the myth of the witch, and if the Whistler production has a major flaw, it's that it doesn't really explore the iconography of the crone as it should (see Howard Pyle's evocation of one of Salem's victims, above).  Even the supposedly elderly women in this version are hale, hearty and attractive, which rather lets us off the hook of our own prejudices (for what really drives our own desperate cult of youth?).

And then there are the curious songs - delivered here by a coolly stylish chanteuse - with which Churchill comments on and critiques her action.  These are in a fully modern idiom, and are often rendered with rather obvious irony - which makes for a curious contrast with the rest of the material (spoken in thick accents, and costumed in a loose historic mode).  To be fair, though, I'm not sure exactly how any production could smoothly bridge this gap - and the song settings themselves, by Molly Allis, Juliet Olivier and Veronica Barron, proved of high quality, and were delivered with diverting élan by a poised (and pitch-perfect) Barron.

As you may have guessed by now, Vinegar Tom defies classification.  But then Churchill was never one to value formal consistency for its own sake, and the Whistler production is so imaginative, forceful and focused that the rough joints and seams in her conception didn't seem to matter much.   The acting - rendered in a thick but precise dialect - is strong across the board, although particular praise must go to Lewis's knockabout free spirit, Obehi Janice's dignified spell-peddler, and especially the luminous Melis Aker's romantically stricken prisoner. 

The lion's share of props, however, I feel must go to director and designer Mac Young, a protean talent on the fringe who actually built for this production (in a rehearsal hall of the BCA, no less) a full-sized, completely structural - though utterly off-kilter - house frame, whose raw joists make the perfect setting for the scrapes of Churchill's script.  Director Young and costumer Emily Woods Hogue have even dreamt up a trick by which Churchill's witches are hanged, quite convincingly, before our horrified eyes (although they soon spring back to life for a disconcerting vaudeville routine).   Something about this seems just right for Churchill, too. And so once more Whistler in the Dark has pushed the artistic limits of the fringe in unexpected directions.

And now, what Ian Thal calls a crude piece of anti-Semitic agitprop

This time seemed like a good one to revisit Caryl Churchill's Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza, which I first posted at its premiere, but which Ian Thal has recently called "crude anti-Semitic agitprop" which "invokes the blood libel" (in various articles on other sites and in our ongoing debate a few posts down).

Given that passions run high around these issues, I thought readers of the Hub Review should be able to judge the text for themselves.  I'm a fan of Churchill - and even a fan of this play (that's why I posted it), even though, needless to say, I am far from anti-Semitic (in fact I adore Jewish culture).

I wouldn't rate it among Churchill's very best, it's true - it was clearly written in haste and passion - but it has an urgency, obviously, that some of her more polished works lack.  And it not only posits a stern critique of Israeli policy - implying that consciousness of the Holocaust and anti-Semitism has begun to infect Israeli attitudes toward the Palestinians - but also convincingly evokes a a panoply of Jewish voices in conflict.  In fact rather obviously the play makes no monolithic anti-Jewish statement, but instead develops from a rush of panicked instructions to an argument between Jewish factions as to what the legacy of their shared experience is going to be; is it going to be about love, or is it going to be about fear?  The script also taps into Churchill's deep belief that culture and humanism are linked to the feminine rather than the masculine; the seven Jewish children seem to all be girls, and the text refers most warmly to female ancestors - while we feel angry, masculine voices are generally raised in an atmosphere of ironic critique.  All this, I think, makes the script valuable - however discomfiting its portrait of some intolerant Israeli voices may be - which is why I hope someday Boston sees it staged.


Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza 

Seven Jewish Children is Caryl Churchill’s response to the situation in Gaza in January 2009, when the play was written.

1

Tell her it’s a game
Tell her it’s serious
But don’t frighten her
Don’t tell her they’ll kill her
Tell her it’s important to be quiet
Tell her she’ll have cake if she’s good
Tell her to curl up as if she’s in bed
But not to sing.
Tell her not to come out
Tell her not to come out even if she hears shouting
Don’t frighten her
Tell her not to come out even if she hears nothing for a long time
Tell her we’ll come and find her
Tell her we’ll be here all the time.
Tell her something about the men
Tell her they’re bad in the game
Tell her it’s a story
Tell her they’ll go away
Tell her she can make them go away if she keeps still
By magic
But not to sing.

2

Tell her this is a photograph of her grandmother, her uncles and me
Tell her her uncles died
Don’t tell her they were killed
Tell her they were killed
Don’t frighten her.
Tell her her grandmother was clever
Don’t tell her what they did
Tell her she was brave
Tell her she taught me how to make cakes
Don’t tell her what they did
Tell her something
Tell her more when she’s older.
Tell her there were people who hated Jews
Don’t tell her
Tell her it’s over now
Tell her there are still people who hate Jews
Tell her there are people who love Jews
Don’t tell her to think Jews or not Jews
Tell her more when she’s older
Tell her how many when she’s older
Tell her it was before she was born and she’s not in danger
Don’t tell her there’s any question of danger.
Tell her we love her
Tell her dead or alive her family all love her
Tell her her grandmother would be proud of her.

3

Don’t tell her we’re going for ever
Tell her she can write to her friends, tell her her friends can maybe come and visit
Tell her it’s sunny there
Tell her we’re going home
Tell her it’s the land God gave us
Don’t tell her religion
Tell her her great great great great lots of greats grandad lived there
Don’t tell her he was driven out
Tell her, of course tell her, tell her everyone was driven out and the country is waiting for us to come home
Don’t tell her she doesn’t belong here
Tell her of course she likes it here but she’ll like it there even more.
Tell her it’s an adventure
Tell her no one will tease her
Tell her she’ll have new friends
Tell her she can take her toys
Don’t tell her she can take all her toys
Tell her she’s a special girl
Tell her about Jerusalem.

 4

Don’t tell her who they are
Tell her something
Tell her they’re Bedouin, they travel about
Tell her about camels in the desert and dates
Tell her they live in tents
Tell her this wasn’t their home
Don’t tell her home, not home, tell her they’re going away
Don’t tell her they don’t like her
Tell her to be careful.
Don’t tell her who used to live in this house
No but don’t tell her her great great grandfather used to live in this house
No but don’t tell her Arabs used to sleep in her bedroom.
Tell her not to be rude to them
Tell her not to be frightened
Don’t tell her she can’t play with the children
Don’t tell her she can have them in the house.
Tell her they have plenty of friends and family
Tell her for miles and miles all round they have lands of their own
Tell her again this is our promised land.
Don’t tell her they said it was a land without people
Don’t tell her I wouldn’t have come if I’d known.
Tell her maybe we can share.
Don’t tell her that.

 5

Tell her we won
Tell her her brother’s a hero
Tell her how big their armies are
Tell her we turned them back
Tell her we’re fighters
Tell her we’ve got new land.

 6

Don’t tell her
Don’t tell her the trouble about the swimming pool
Tell her it’s our water, we have the right
Tell her it’s not the water for their fields
Don’t tell her anything about water.
Don’t tell her about the bulldozer
Don’t tell her not to look at the bulldozer
Don’t tell her it was knocking the house down
Tell her it’s a building site
Don’t tell her anything about bulldozers.
Don’t tell her about the queues at the checkpoint
Tell her we’ll be there in no time
Don’t tell her anything she doesn’t ask
Don’t tell her the boy was shot
Don’t tell her anything.
Tell her we’re making new farms in the desert
Don’t tell her about the olive trees
Tell her we’re building new towns in the wilderness.
Don’t tell her they throw stones
Tell her they’re not much good against tanks
Don’t tell her that.
Don’t tell her they set off bombs in cafés
Tell her, tell her they set off bombs in cafés
Tell her to be careful
Don’t frighten her.
Tell her we need the wall to keep us safe
Tell her they want to drive us into the sea
Tell her they don’t
Tell her they want to drive us into the sea.
Tell her we kill far more of them
Don’t tell her that
Tell her that
Tell her we’re stronger
Tell her we’re entitled
Tell her they don’t understand anything except violence
Tell her we want peace
Tell her we’re going swimming.

 7

Tell her she can’t watch the news
Tell her she can watch cartoons
Tell her she can stay up late and watch Friends.
Tell her they’re attacking with rockets
Don’t frighten her
Tell her only a few of us have been killed
Tell her the army has come to our defence
Don’t tell her her cousin refused to serve in the army.
Don’t tell her how many of them have been killed
Tell her the Hamas fighters have been killed
Tell her they’re terrorists
Tell her they’re filth
Don’t
Don’t tell her about the family of dead girls
Tell her you can’t believe what you see on television
Tell her we killed the babies by mistake
Don’t tell her anything about the army
Tell her, tell her about the army, tell her to be proud of the army.
Tell her about the family of dead girls, tell her their names why not, tell her the whole world knows why shouldn’t she know? tell her there’s dead babies, did she see babies? tell her she’s got nothing to be ashamed of. Tell her they did it to themselves. Tell her they want their children killed to make people sorry for them, tell her I’m not sorry for them, tell her not to be sorry for them, tell her we’re the ones to be sorry for, tell her they can’t talk suffering to us. Tell her we’re the iron fist now, tell her it’s the fog of war, tell her we won’t stop killing them till we’re safe, tell her I laughed when I saw the dead policemen, tell her they’re animals living in rubble now, tell her I wouldn’t care if we wiped them out, the world would hate us is the only thing, tell her I don’t care if the world hates us, tell her we’re better haters, tell her we’re chosen people, tell her I look at one of their children covered in blood and what do I feel?  Tell her all I feel is happy it’s not her.
Don’t tell her that.
Tell her we love her.
Don’t frighten her.

For Whistler's second number, A Number

Danny Bryck - but which one? - with Mark Cohen in A Number.

Whistler in the Dark has taken to a kind of "expanded," "Season 2.0" approach to their programming these days - works come in pairs, often in orbit with offerings from other friendly companies, and with various Easter eggs and one-offs hidden away on nights when the main stage is dark.

Right now, for instance (or at least through the weekend), they're offering Caryl Churchill's A Number in rep with Fen, and last weekend threw in a reading of the rarely-seen Vinegar Tom just for kicks.

And you know, I'll say this one more time, even though I know you're tired of hearing it: this is what our academic regional theatres should be doing.  It's wonderful that Whistler, thanks to Meg Taintor and her indefatigable team, are steadily providing (on a shoestring) strong productions of intellectually challenging theatre, while with their multi-million-dollar budgets the ART downgrades Gershwin and the Huntington works and re-works various Off-Broadway trends.  It's strange indeed to think that our college theatres are now covertly (or in the case of the ART, overtly) anti-intellectual, but that's the way it is.

Oh well, at least we've still got Whistler, and a few other daring fringe groups.  And the New Rep, Merrimack, and the Lyric do program a "risk" every once in a while.  So all is not lost - it's just all backwards.  Our educated class has decided to abandon high art for popular art with a p.c. political cast.  Which is close to the opposite of the intended goal of the nonprofit regional system, if you ask me.

But anyway, back to A Number, which is minor Churchill, but still of interest.  We've seen it once before in Boston, and though I'd argue this is the slightly stronger production, it's still not perfect.  Churchill penned the script in response to the hysteria over the cloning of Dolly, the short-lived synthetic sheep of the 90's, and she doesn't seem to have been interested much in the actual ethics of the cloning technique per se; she's more interested in what the idea of cloning does to our ideas about morality in general.

In A Number, Churchill posits an intriguing social and scientific experiment "gone wrong" (although actually, in scientific terms it has been wildly successful).  An unhappy parent saddled with a troubled child decides to dump his firstborn and "start over" with the same genome - i.e., the same "nature" - but with a far more engaged and loving "nurture."

Thus Churchill sets up a rather obvious Cain-and-Abel conflict (once you-know-who finds out about you-know-what).  But the playwright's most striking dramatic gambit comes with her introduction of a third clone (when Dad wasn't looking, his lab took advantage of his frozen samples to produce "a number" of models in addition to the one he ordered).  This happy camper is utterly at ease with the idea that he is simply one of many (who are all just like him, of course), and through his chirpy optimism Churchill seems to giggle low in her throat at both our current Disneyfied ideas of personal satisfaction, and at the pretentious moral judgments of those who are obsessed with moral uniqueness, and horrified at cloning in principle.

The challenge in A Number lies in the curious conundrums it poses its central actor - the three clones must perforce all be impersonated by the same performer, only with clear distinctions in internal "personhood."  But just how far should those distinctions go?  For shouldn't the clones share some deep personality traits?  What in their make-up is due to "nurture," and what to "nature"?  Churchill gives a few hints, but generally stays mum on the problem. It is a puzzlement.

At Whistler, the versatile Danny Bryck has opted to characterize his trio of clones with three cleanly differentiated accents (two of them, appropriately enough, closer to each other than the third), as well as a carefully variegated physical affect.  Questions of internal difference remain murkier, however, largely because as his morally compromised Father, the subtle Mark Cohen remains pretty consistent internally throughout - when part of the point, intriguingly enough, is that he's a different person with each of the clones.  Thus his "tragedy" - when Cain inevitably kills Abel - doesn't shake us as it could, or should.

But the last scene is still wicked fun, as it usually is (Bryck could actually ratchet up the I'm-happy-being-a-Beta vibe a few notches, but he's still in a good place).  And once again, we realize that Caryl Churchill has raised many more questions than she has deigned to answer.

Whistler finds its way through Fen

The subtle cast of Fen.

I suppose we'll never be rid of the minor female playwrights who insist we only think they're minor because of our sexism.  (I just read another of these screeds the other day; sigh.)  It's strange, though, how these types never seek to engage with the examples of the female playwrights whom everyone agrees are truly great - and yes, there are at least two: Caryl Churchill and Sarah Kane, two Brits who made their respective names years ago (in Churchill's case, decades ago).

Sarah Kane, of course, tragically took her own life in 1999; but Churchill is still writing, if at a far slower pace than she did in her heyday.  She's in her seventies now, and overdue for a Nobel, IMHO.  Actually, I'm fairly sure she'll get that Nobel in the end; what I'm far less sure of is her ever winning the respect she's due from the likes of Theresa Rebeck. Which is a little odd, isn't it?

Actually, maybe it's not. For Churchill, unlike Rebeck, can be so difficult; indeed, sometimes she's almost relentlessly experimental.  Everything is on the table with Churchill.  And let's be honest - she's so feminine, but feminine in a strange, gnarly way - she's certainly "feminist," but not in the mode of Rebeck's careerists; indeed, she often interrogates the moral position of such women with a ruthlessly ironic calm.  (She's skeptical of her own gender's claims, particularly when they work against equity for everyone, in something like the way Shakespeare is skeptical of masculinity.)  That skepticism may be the one thing that unites her utterly disparate plays; beneath their wildly different surfaces, you can often feel Churchill questioning her own assumptions about her subject, scratching even at the very fabric of reality, trying to get under things, to comprehend them.   This sometimes leads to structures and modes so free-form that the audience can be left wondering, "What exactly it going on?"  But then that's the playwright's perpetual question, too.  "What is happening to us?" she keeps asking.  "What exactly is going on?"

Take Fen, for instance, which you might at first take for a kind of updated kitchen-sink drama about the lower classes of the lowlands of East Anglia.  The folks of Fen (particularly the women) are practically migrants - their land is literally being sold away from them beneath their feet - and their grinding lives all seem to lead to dead ends; the kids' biggest dreams are of being hairdressers (and they rarely make it that far). Indeed, one woman, caught between competing loves and duties with no seeming way out, becomes so existentially desperate that she ends up begging her lover to kill her (if he loves her, then he will kill her, seems to be the message).

Caryl Churchill - when does she get her Nobel?

But gradually, as we watch Fen, we realize that Churchill is up to something much deeper than some swamp-thing variant of Look Back in Anger.  Time and space have somehow come unstuck in this play; ghosts from earlier eras wander among the characters, and we ourselves cross over into the afterlife at the finale.  Or rather we hover in some plane in which past, present and future are interconnected and co-exist - which is rather how the playwright views her "action" in general, we realize.  After all, the very word "fen" denotes not just a marsh but a kind of miasma - to Churchill, it's perhaps a metaphor for existence itself, in which past and present intermingle in a peculiar kind of stasis, where meaning and even identity are basically fluid.  (And we're all trapped in that kind of fen, aren't we.) I know there's an oppressive history of this kind of metaphor being forced onto the "feminine," but Churchill seems aware of that issue, too; tellingly, there's a hermaphrodite in residence in Fen, a kind of bitter Tiresias taunted by the local kids - the girls, in fact.

Now this is heady (possibly pretentious) stuff, but in Whistler in the Dark's current production (through this weekend at the Factory Theater) director Meg Taintor does well by the tricky text, and conjures much of the play's eerie, questing grimness.  Like other productions I've seen, the show stumbles slightly over the unexpected murder-suicide at the finish, but elsewhere the ebb-and-flow of Churchill's many dramatic eddies is managed well - and some of these tiny-but-brutal vortexes remain just as shocking as they were at the play's premiere some thirty years ago (Churchill's clear-eyed depictions of abuse, particularly of children, have definitely retained their edge).

For her cast, Taintor has relied on many from the loose Whistler ensemble she has built up over the past several seasons, and the results are subtle, detailed, and quietly confident.  Most of these company stalwarts have worked together, and with this director, before, and it shows.  There are a few missteps here and there, to be honest; Anna Waldron's "Japanese Businessman" doesn't quite come off, and the reliable Jen O'Connor is slightly miscast as an abusive stepmother.  But both these actresses score in other roles (everyone has several), and there's generally fine work from Becca A. Lewis, Lorna Nogueira, Aimee Rose Ranger, and Mac Young (who also designed the clever set, which actually does double duty for Churchill's A Number, also in repertory at Whistler).  I can't pretend that Fen is everyone's cup of tea, but those attuned to this brilliant playwright's questing spirit won't want to miss it.

Hmmm. Caryl Churchill: Gaza's Shakespeare, or Fetid Jew-Baiter? Jeffrey Goldberg wants to know!

One of the most embarrassing cultural posts I've ever read on a blog is up now on the Atlantic site. It's Jeffrey Goldberg's crazed pummeling of Ari Roth, the Artistic Director of Theatre J down in Washington D.C., who has had the balls to stage Caryl Churchill's Seven Jewish Children. Reading it, you realize, if you hadn't already, how clueless Goldberg is, and how shocking it is that the Atlantic should have given him a platform at all. If these are the people arguing for Israel, no wonder they're losing the battle of public opinion! (Btw, if you're interested in actually reading this supposed piece of "blood-libel," I posted it in full here. I wonder when, if ever, we will see a Boston production?)