Abstract drama, ‘Escaped Alone,’ gets first US production at Yale Rep
Caryl Churchill’s “Escaped Alone,” first produced in London in 2015, and then performed with its original British cast at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York in 2017, is getting its first U.S. production at the Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven.
The only casting note in the published script for Churchill’s play is “They are all at least 70.”
The complex play “sets in comic and devastating counterpoint the consolations of a good chat and the looming weight of disasters both intimate and global,” according to Yale Rep.
The play has four characters, all women. There is one set, the backyard garden of a character named Sally. The play takes place on several afternoons but the action is continuous. The dialogue is disjointed, with Sally, Vi, Lena and Mrs. Jarrett jointly telling a complex story, saying only a few words at a time each. The play’s short scenes are wrapped up by longer speeches, mostly by Mrs. Jarrett, and the entire performance lasts less than an hour.
Churchill is considered one of the world’s greatest living playwrights. In her native England, she continues to write, and her new works get major productions at important theaters. Yet in the U.S., the Churchill plays that tend to get produced are the ones that she wrote decades ago, like the groundbreaking social farce/ drama “Cloud 9” in 1979 (which Hartford Stage did in 2017), the 1982 feminist classic “Top Girls” (Wesleyan had a student production last year) and her prescient 2002 drama about the ethics of cloning “A Number” (staged by Backyard Theater Ensemble in New Britain in 2022). The Yale Rep, more adventurous
than many other regional theaters, did Churchill’s “Serious Money” in 2002 and “Owners” in 2013.
The David Geffen School of Drama at Yale has done many student productions of Churchill plays over the years, everything from “Fen” (which concerns female laborers in rural England) to the supernaturally inclined “The Skriker.”
Sandra Shipley, who plays Sally in the show, has the range, understanding and experience to tackle an “Escaped Alone” role. Her previous Yale Rep appearances include the world premiere of SuzanLori Parks’ “Venus” in 1996 (directed by avant-garde exemplar Richard Foreman), William Congreve’s Restoration comedy
“The Way of the World” (done in 2001 to mark the play’s 300th anniversary), George Bernard Shaw’s “You Never Can Tell”
(also 2001) and the world premiere of Julie McKee’s historical trans male story “The Adventures of Amy Bock” in 1997. Elsewhere, her many credits include New York productions of plays by Shaw, Noel Coward and Oscar Wilde and a memorable Boston Shakespeare Company blending by director Peter Sellars of Samuel Beckett’s “Play” and Shakespeare’s “Macbeth,” staged in and around three large urns.
“I remember audience members shouting out ‘Enough with the urns!,’” Shipley said, adding that she had to hold the static poses in the show despite having recently broken four ribs as well as a bone in her neck.
Shipley is clearly up to the unique challenges of a script by Churchill, who is known for her feminist themes, juxtapositions of old and new worlds and innovative theatrical concepts.
Shipley described “Escaped Alone” as “a dense piece. You look at that script and go ‘Ohhh …’ How do you go about learning this?” she said. “It’s an adventure we’re still exploring. We all read it on our own, then together, and began to mark out different facts you can see in it.
“The big thing appears to be a murder that has happened. There have been many years of domestic abuse …” she said. “One of them has had a breakdown. Some of these are not on the page but come out of the elliptical conversations. It’s all part of the journey.”
“Escaped Alone” is being directed by Liz Diamond, who has brought fresh takes to works by everyone from Bertolt Brecht to Charles Ludlam at Yale Rep and who specializes in new works. She directed several of the earliest works of Suzan-Lori Parks.
“I love Caryl Churchill’s work,” Diamond said. “I have read all of it, but I have only directed a couple. She has an incredible compassion for human frailty. She’s a remarkable observer of human beings in isolation and in community. She can also be critical, especially with her critical gaze on the patriarchy. This play has four remarkable elderly women in it, but the other reason it thrills me is that I love experiments in theatrical form.”
Diamond said that two of the four women in the “Escaped Alone” cast are “in their 70s, and the others are in that direction.” She includes herself in that remark. She has been on the Yale drama school faculty as the chair of its directing program, as well as a resident director at the Rep, for over 30 years.
Besides Shipley as Sally, the cast includes LaTonya Borsay (the prolific regional theater actor whose previous Yale Rep credits include “Death of a Salesman” and “dance of the holy ghosts”) as Mrs. Jarrett, Mary Lou Rosato (a Broadway and off-Broadway veteran who also teaches acting at Yale) as Vi and Rita Wolf (who has appeared in premieres of plays by such esteemed writers as Tony Kushner and Richard Nelson) as Lena. Diamond said the only member of the cast she has directed in another show is Mary Lou Rosato, and that was in the 1980s when both were just starting out.
Like the acting, the show’s scenic design by David Geffen School of Drama student Lia Tubiana is an attempt to smoothly merge abstract and realistic elements. The garden in which the women sit will hopefully have a living tree and potted plants, but the set also consists of remote platforms and large projected images.
Diamond sees the garden, which she deems “a moderately attended middle-class garden on the Southeast outskirts of London, based on my reading of their accents,” as part of the women’s escape referenced in the play’s title.
“We create these little Edenic escape places in our lives,” she said.
While there is the potential sense of freedom, Diamond said other aspects of the design, achieved with “a shiny, mirror-like black epoxy,” are meant to denote “an image of bottomlessness. It’s a short platform floating on a larger platform in this black void.”
The staging concept came to her when the general idea of gardens led her to think of terrariums.
“It’s a way of trying to control your world. Without getting into the weeds, that can be a good or bad thing,” she said.
Due to its 55-minute length, “Escaped Alone” has sometimes been paired with other short Churchill works, but Diamond didn’t want to dilute its power. “I’m not sure it wants to be in conversation with another play, even though it could be,” she said. “It’s not even one hour long but it packs such a substantial punch. It gives you the opportunity to leave the theater and discuss it with a friend.”
“Escaped Alone” by Caryl Churchill, directed by Liz Diamond, will be performed May 8-30 at the Yale Repertory Theatre, 1120 Chapel St., New Haven. Performances are Tuesdays through Fridays at 8 p.m. and Saturdays at 2 and 8 p.m. $15-$65. yalerep.org.