Fusion’s ‘Escaped’ a brilliant production
For almost 50 years Caryl Churchill has dazzled theatergoers with one brilliant play after another. Formally innovative and politically daring, she eschews the formulaic drama of the commercial theater, never repeating herself. At 80 years old she is still in top form. After the passing of Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, she may be the greatest living British playwright.
Her latest play, “Escaped Alone,” is receiving a scintillating production at Fusion Theatre, flawlessly directed by Fusion ensemble member Jacqueline Reid.
This short hourlong drama is by turns funny and terrifying; it defies description, yet stamps itself on the mind indelibly.
As with most Churchill plays, plot is subservient to dramatic form, poetic language, and the boldness of the playwright’s vision. Her 2002 play “a number” was about cloning. “Escaped Alone” is about apocalypse. Yet it is also a domestic play, juxtaposing the perfectly ordinary with the catastrophic. As it says in the Bible, “For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark.” Churchill takes her title from the book of Job, where each messenger that reports the latest catastrophe says, “and I alone escaped to tell the tale.”
The structure is deceptively simple. As three elderly women chat in a suburban backyard on a bright sunny day over tea, a fourth joins them.
While they laugh and sometimes bicker and talk of ordinary things each of the women eventually reveals a paralyzing fear or a dark past. Sally is terrified of cats, and her long monologue on the exertions she makes to keep herself free of them is a tour de force, both in the writing and in actor Elizabeth Huffman’s breathtaking performance.
Lena is bipolar, and perhaps agoraphobic as well. Dodie Montgomery, who inhabits the character brilliantly, at one point oscillates from laughter to tears and back again all in the space of a moment. Vi spent six years in jail for killing her husband, but doesn’t know if it was deliberate homicide or self-defense. In the nighttime breathing is difficult. The part is played with consummate assurance by Nancy Jeris.
The fourth woman is
Mrs. Jarrett, whose bizarre monologues vividly describing flood, famine, fire and plague are the hinge on which this drama opens into the surreal and leaves the audience guessing at their portent. Is she a visionary seeing the future? Can she see events happening now in far off places? Are they dreams? We don’t know. Most of the time the other characters disappear into the dark and only Mrs. Jarrett can be seen, surrounded by pulsating red light. Laurie Thomas, who plays the strange visitor, gives the best performance of her career (at least that I have seen). Her carefully enunciated words in precise British dialect sometimes remind one of Alfred Hitchcock on his television show, at once eerie and amusing.
The design elements are superb. Sound and lighting designers Brent Stevens and Richard Hogle are as instrumental to the success of this show as the cast. Everything works together brilliantly. Not to be missed.
“Escaped Alone” is playing through Dec. 16 at The Cell, 700 First NW. Go to fusionnm.org or call 766-9412 for reservations.