We review debut of Sarah Ruhl’s ‘Becky Nurse of Salem’ at Berkeley Rep.
Sarah Ruhl’s highly anticipated premiere comes to Berkeley Rep
Amid the toxic misogyny of the Trump era, Sarah Ruhl tries to cast a spell on us so that we see the Salem witch trials and their dark legacy in America today through fresh eyes. A wildly ambitious denunciation of Arthur Miller’s play “The Crucible,” with its sexualization of women and girls, “Becky Nurse of Salem” calls out the way women are taken to task for the ills of the world. At turns bracing and beguiling, the deeply feminist play feels unfinished as it wanders about too long trying to find its soul in this world premiere directed by Anne Kaufman at Berkeley Repertory Theatre. The theatrical hex falls short but Ruhl’s shimmering insights gives this new work some truly bewitching moments. The Pulitzer-nominated playwright has long been fascinated by society’s fondness for equating being a powerful female with being hysterical, dangerous and even mad. The historical need to control women was also at the core of her comedy “In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play),” which debuted at Berkeley Rep before becoming a hit on Broadway. Framed by a set of eerie wax statues and wafts of smoke, this is the tale of the great-great-great-greatgreat-granddaughter of Rebecca Nurse, one of the 19 victims of the 1692 witch trials. The pious 71-yearold grandmother was hung from a tree on Gallows Hill, accused of doing the devil’s bidding. Her namesake, endearingly played by Pamela Reed, is a steely grandma with a salty tongue living paycheck to paycheck, trying to raise her grandchild, Gail (the compelling Naian González Norvind), on her own after suffering the drug-overdose death of her only child. She’s a beaten down working-class American on the edge, until she loses her job as a Salem tour guide because she diverges from the script to speak the truth. Oh, and then she steals one of the dummies. Becky is a bit of a rebel and she has no patience for the contemporary American obsession with trying to boil down the ineffable into the numerical. “Once upon a time people thought the devil explained everything. Then a hundred years later they thought sex explained everything. And now? They think statistics explain everything. But numbers don’t explain anything. Numbers didn’t explain the election, did they? Sorry, I didn’t mean to bring that up.” Pushed beyond the point of desperation, she visits a witch (an enchanting turn by Ruibo Qian) who leads her on a creepy journey though potions and amulets and spells. The play really comes to life in the witch’s parlor as Becky risks it all for a scrap of hope and happiness in her bleak reality. She’ll do anything to keep 14-yearold Gail away from Stan (a full-ofwhimsy Owen Campbell), a goth with black nail polish and a coven, and to lure her old pal Bob (Adrian Roberts) into her bed. It’s all pretty believable until the play veers into heart attack epiphanies, jail time and drug trips. Ruhl is famous for her flights of surrealism, which gave “Eurydice” its transcendent glow, but here her fantastical interludes don’t flow from the universe of the play. Some of the exposition feels leaden, the pacing is often choppy and the twisted dreams feel perfunctory. Certainly the play takes on so many issues that the brew loses its potency. The narrative reaches a resounding conclusion, a ritual smashing of ice cream cones that double as witches’ hats, but this “Becky Nurse” hasn’t quite found its magic.