Deirdre O’Connell in Glass. Kill. What If If Only. Imp. Photo: Joan Marcus

I will not pretend to be anything other than a lifelong Caryl Churchill fangirl: I learned how to read a script and envision it onstage from Fen and Vinegar Tom; Cloud Nine was the key text in the proposal for the dissertation I never finished; I can remember exactly the mind-blowing experience of sitting in the audience for The Skriker or Far Away or A Number, barely breathing as the experience unfolded. Churchill’s best-known earlier plays sprawl and spread, building intricate worlds full of characters with complicated interior and exterior lives; often overtly political, these plays mix precise and distinctive language with a vivid, often absurd way of setting a scene. She’s always made you think–and often despair–more than empathize, but her more recent works shift even further toward an exercise in ascetic restraint, furiously compact, rigorously contained, and often resistant to familiar dramaturgical qualities like a conventional beginning/middle/end story arc. She remains second to none as an excavator of the murky subtext of human relations and social structures, but more often now in an ambience that is abstract and allegorical rather than grounded in place or time. And there’s a tantalizing sense of intentional incompleteness, an insistence on giving a brilliant flashbulb-lit snapshot rather than a full feature film. The four short plays presented at the Public as a single evening, directed by Churchill’s most frequent directorial collaborator, James Macdonald, feel, as a program note says, like “tiny, brilliant jewels.” While there are thematic and stylistic reflections and connections from one piece to another, they’re also tonally very different, less a matching set of earrings, necklace, and brooch than a box of semi-polished, variegated stones. 

The staging of the four pieces makes them feel like framed snapshots or dioramas, each occurring on a suspended plane of some kind inside a proscenium framed with warm marquee bulbs. Miriam Buether’s set uses a glowing narrow platform for one piece, a matte white cube of a room for another, a cloud in the sky for a third, and a living room set on a large oriental rug that floats like a magic carpet for the fourth; Isabella Byrd’s lighting adds the sensation that each of those spaces emerges from a black void. And, like a diamond forged from coal under immense pressure, their substance feels compressed, every line rich with purpose and weight. Even Imp, the most realistic in tone and content of the four, has a dense aura of the sinister that keeps us looking for clues in every line; if you think you’ve seen a throwaway, wait for it to repeat and squirm its way into the scaffolding of the play. 

Adelind Horan, Ayana Workman, Japhet Balaban, and Sathya Sridharan in Glass. Kill. What If It Only. Imp.. Photo: Joan Marcus

The title presents the four plays in the order in which they appear: Glass, Kill, What If If Only, and Imp, with the first three, each under twenty minutes, combining into Act 1 and Imp, about an hour, standing on its own after the intermission. Glass is the most abstract and least linear–it feels a bit like Churchill’s 2012 play Love and Information, made up of microscenes that talk to each other but don’t proceed narratively. The scenes follow a girl who is made of glass (Ayana Workman)–literally, and also metaphorically–and while it has some stunning imagery, it’s so elliptical that it’s hard to grasp when you see it; it’s only as the evening goes on that you see its themes of human fragility and the ripple effects of violence and pain link to the other pieces. Kill is an explosion, with the extraordinary Deirdre O’Connell as a personification of all the gods at once in a furious spiraling monologue about the violence humanity commits in the vain hopes of assuaging the gods they have themselves created (“we don’t exist,” she says, “people make us up”). What If If Only is quieter, more meditative, as it ponders the idea of the multiverse as a cure for grief, with a personification of the Present (John Ellison Conlee, channeling the energy of the younger sibling who asks “are we there yet” every thirty seconds) dangling the possibility before Someone (an achingly bereft Sathya Sridharan) of rescuing one foreclosed future–but only one, with all the others crying out to be recognized. And Imp, outwardly realistic, circles around dark kinds of magical thinking–the intrusive thoughts of anxiety or OCD, wishes made on an imp in a bottle–questioning whether we have the power to change our, or others’ fates, as two older people (O’Connell and Conlee) whose lives grow ever smaller try to steer the course of their niece, Niamh (Adelind Horan), and a young man in their neighborhood, Rob (Japhet Balaban). 

As well as the plays, the evening includes two circus acts (acrobatics performed by Junru Wang and juggling by Maddox Morfitt-Tighe) to music that blends into Bray Poor’s sound design, which take place at the very front of the audience to fill the changeover time between the plays in the first half–and add another dimension. Wang’s flexibility and enormous strength make an interesting contrast with the jagged rhythms of Glass and its focus on brittleness and damage; Morfitt-Tighe’s juggling allows a breath of whimsy and wit between the rush of verbal violence that is Kill and the hollow portrait of grief in What If If Only.

Kill and Imp, in the end, are the ones that feel the most twinned to me–perhaps because they also have the strongest performances. O’Connell, not surprisingly, is as good as the matter-of-fact, pragmatic Dot as she is as the Gods in Kill. Conlee is a surprising mix of boor and innocent boy, trying to find human connection but never quite sure how other people work. Horan, as a young woman with a troubled past and often a troubled mind who nonetheless tries to look forward with clear eyes, carefully marshals and guards her emotions. And Balaban’s Rob is charming but also always seems to be withholding something. All four characters dance around the things they can’t say to one another–gaps in their relations that Jimmy often fills by telling stories of their neighbors and acquaintances that take the familiar shapes of Shakespeare or the Greek dramatists. 

But Imp, in all its subtle snaky malevolence, is hefty enough to stand on its own—longer, even, than other full-length recent works like Escaped Alone or Drunk Enough to Say I Love You (also produced at the Public, and the set design here visually evokes it, a bit). And because it centers on Dot and Jimmy, two characters who are rooted in place by both circumstance and inertia, it takes on a weightiness greater even than its length. So the question becomes, what do the three shorter pieces bring to the table that makes them, for Churchill and Macdonald, worth pairing with Imp, especially in a way that highlights their tonal differences?

As ever with Churchill, the links are through ideas and images more than through story: Glass, What If, and Imp all touch on suicide; the glass Girl in her bubble wrap also somehow connects to the trapped imp in his bottle and Someone trapped in a white room alone. The pressured rush of speech of the gods in Kill, and the failure of humans to escape the gods’ wrath, resonates with Niamh’s unstoppable thoughts of being unable to evade terrible fates. What If If Only, like Kill, is about the terrible bargains we’re willing to make–with God, with fate, with the future–in a vain attempt to stave off loss and death. And ultimately, all speak of the terrible fragility of the human condition: from the glass Girl’s literal brittleness to all those pitiful humans ranted at by the gods to What If’s bereaved Someone to Imp’s Dot and Jimmy, both slipping ever closer to destitution and physical breakdown.

That underpinning of myth, story, and fairy tale, all of them steeped in violence, links all four pieces: The glass Girl feels like a fairy tale character (the Gingerbread Man, perhaps), both anthropomorphized in a scene where she shares a mantel with a plastic dog, a clock, and a vase (all also personified) and meeting a terrible fate. Kill’s Gods churn in a whirlpool that takes in all the worst depredations of Greek drama. What If If Only reminds us of the seductive danger of three wishes. And Imp places the fates of Shakespeare’s most tragic characters all around Dot and Jimmy–those stories playing out in a different time and place, destined for repetition. We all want to believe we can do something–a wish, an action, a bit of magic, a sacrifice to the gods–to escape our darkest destiny, that we’re not doomed to the worst things that can happen. But it’s never a safe bet in Caryl Churchill’s world–old stories never die, humans make dark choices, power is a dangerous thing.