Conjuring up a new take on ‘Witch’
The Huntington stirs up social commentary and dark humor
The English theater scene of Shakespeare and his contemporaries spent a lot of time reinforcing what it meant to be a witch. The nasty women spent a lot of time over bubbling cauldrons filled with newts’ eyes and dogs’ tongues and cursing men into impotence.
“The plays written in the 1600s were mostly propaganda against witches, trying to show that they were evil,” director Rebecca Bradshaw told the Herald. “‘The Witch of Edmonton’ was the first play that actually sympathized with the witch character, sympathized with the outcast, who was never actually a witch.”
Flash forward 400 years from when “The Witch of Edmonton” debuted in London and, well, what has changed? Bradshaw gets at that question while directing the Huntington’s production of “Witch,” a dark comedy written by Jen Silverman and loosely based on “The Witch of Edmonton.”
“We have a preconceived notion of what a witch is, we think it’s a woman who is an evil crone casting spells in the woods, ” Bradshaw said. “That’s the notion we have of the witch, but there’s a human behind that notion who is often cast aside because they have asked questions, they have challenged the world.”
“Witch” also nods to “The Crucible,” another piece of theater about patriarchal hysteria where there should be open-minded curiosity.
The second production of the Huntington’s 40th anniversary season, which runs Friday to Nov. 14 at the Calderwood Pavilion at the BCA, “Witch” begins simply enough. Elizabeth Sawyer is an unmarried woman who keeps to herself in a small village. In an unsurprising twist, the villagers brand her as a witch. But things get topsy-turvy when a devil named Scratch arrives to tempt the townsfolk with rewards in exchange for souls. Elizabeth won’t play ball, but Scratch finds eager bargainers in the neighboring castle.
“It doesn’t stray away from being dark, and I think that’s important right now,” Bradshaw said. “We can laugh at ourselves, we laugh at these characters, there are plenty of moments where we see people behaving badly, which allows us to laugh and have moments of understanding about the world and why people do things inappropriately. But ‘Witch’ doesn’t make light of anything.”
“The play challenges everything around us,” she continued. “It challenges the status quo. It challenges what it means to have power and hold power. But it also challenges what it means to be the other.”
Finding that sweet spot between humor and hurt can be tricky. Bradshaw believes Silverman has done a masterful job at it in a work that depends on a cast of just six actors and crams a lot into a 90minute runtime.
“Witch” will no doubt reflect ugly parts of the past and present. But the play is wider than satire and dark humor.
“This can also easily be read as a love story,” Bradshaw said. “There are multiple love triangles. There are love partnerships, familial love, companion love, desire. You see people stumble because they don’t want to confess their emotions. … As a director, I have to thread a lot of brilliance together.”