Glass. Kill. What If If Only. Imp.
Glass. Kill. What If If Only. Imp.
By Caryl Churchill
Directed by James Macdonald
Off Broadway – The Public Theater
Reviewed by Scott Klavan
May 24, 2025
Trauma and magic dominate the four one-act plays by venerated British playwright Caryl Churchill, presented at The Public Theater in downtown Manhattan, and basically they’re the same thing. The fragile characters in the whimsical opener, Glass, exuberant member of the ancient gods in the solo piece Kill, mourning widower in What If If Only, and beleaguered working class couple in the centerpiece closer Imp, are buffeted by the Uncontrollable, including early death and domestic strife. They use wishes and superstition to try to prevent it. This fails, but sometimes it seems to succeed; facts and dreams, plans and results, mix together in the inexplicable miasma we call Life. Churchill, now 86, renowned for plays including Top Girls and Cloud Nine, has the penetrating acerbic wit to carry the pieces, and the acting, directing, and design drive them home with an eerie buoyancy.
Glass features a young female character made of glass whose mother warns her human male suitor to watch out for breakage. We then see that the glass woman sits alongside objects on a shelf, all with varying degrees of delicateness and self-protection. An antique clock resents the glass’s good-looks and promotes his own utilitarianism. The surreal short culminates with the glass woman realizing her human lover is himself vulnerable, perhaps more than she, victimized as he is by an abusive father. The fantastical works better in Glass, and actually says more, than the final harsh reality, as one gets the feeling Churchill merely falls back on a career-long embrace of victim-fetish politicism to finish things off, rather than writing a viable supernatural ending. But there is charm and imaginative surprise here.
The scene shifts to a blowsy, possibly boozy middle-aged woman sitting suspended in the air on a cloud, in Kill. She introduces herself as one of the ancient gods, who, she states caustically, don’t exist; they are merely invented by humans. The god goes through a fast-paced summary of classical legends and stories, from the house of Atreus to Oedipus and on. All the tales are outlandishly bloody and murderous, filled with convoluted family rivalries and lurid betrayals and atrocities, including filial assault and parricide. The god begins ridiculing the overblown horror of the stories, but concludes by roaring with despairing rage over the unnecessary lengths human beings go to destroy and take power over each other. The implication being people blame something outside themselves for evil, instead of taking responsibility for it.
While Kill, not a history after all, ignores the academic research that surmises some ancient Greeks and other BC period types didn’t believe literally in gods and understood the superhuman exploits as reflections of their own needs and desires, and crimes, even back then—the intelligence of people thousands of years past arguably being simple/primitive but simultaneously deeper, more inquiring and open than we closed-minded, smug, mechanized modern dumbbells—Kill scores as a riotous, transgressive theatrical lecture.
What If If Only contains the most palpable emotion of the evening, with a young widower talking to his absent spouse, tormented by the emptiness and mystery surrounding the death, the sheer unbearable pain of not being able to talk to and touch the missing loved one. He wishes for his partner to reappear in some form but gets more than he asked for, as a young ghost enters, but not the one he wanted. Soon after, representatives of various unbidden imagined Futures, and immediately disappearing Nows crowd the room. The play posits: if people can’t control the vagaries of Time and Life and Death, why would they think they could control the metaphysical solution? We didn’t create any of it, so how can we fix it? What If If Only is an unnerving mix of brightly biting spiritual satire and heart-rending pathos.
After intermission, the longest piece, Imp, features homey middle-class pair Dot and Jimmy, seemingly related, living restlessly, essentially cloistered, a sexless couple supported by disability payments for numerous maladies, some or all of which may be psychosomatic. They put parental sentiment into their niece Niamh, a successful office worker originally from Ireland, and her acquaintance Rob, an aimless homeless fellow who has left behind a lover and his child. Dot and Jimmy want happiness for Niamh and Rob, but when the younger two start a romance, they can’t decide if the match is good. Along the way, Dot keeps a wine bottle that contains an “Imp,” a magic sprite who supposedly grants her wishes. Jimmy questions the imp’s validity and secretly opens the bottle, maybe setting the genie free; Dot is incensed. When Rob breaks off with Niamh, returning to his lover and child, Dot angrily tries to get the imp to produce a punishment for him, but doesn’t know if the spirit is even there to help out. Rob and Niamh reunite contentedly; Dot and Jimmy are left to wonder whether it was a magic or real cause and effect, and whether all things have worked for the best.
Imp is a departure for Churchill, more reminiscent of the down-to-earth yet bent seriocomic plays of Brit Alan Ayckbourn, particularly his classic one-act Mother Figure, than her own previous pieces. But the “kitchen sink” realism and offhand remarks of the often muddle-headed characters, their longings for and fear of the chaotic world outside, faltering but persistent attempts to control their own environment and embrace yet push off each other, are moving, funny, and beautifully observed. The crowning heartbreaking moment occurs when Dot, challenged by Jimmy to defend the concept of an Imp, says the spirit’s most important value is as “company.” While there are brief boilerplate political allusions here—as with late fellow British theater stalwart, Harold Pinter, Churchill’s socialistic posturing is more simplistic and less persuasive than her finely fictionalized plays—it is the bewildered kooked-out humanity of the characters, from whom we strive to distance ourselves, but whose kinship we are finally compelled to recognize, that remains.
The production values of Churchill’s one-acts at The Public are excellent, representing the height of Off-Broadway theater. That may sound a modest achievement, but, of course, it’s not. It’s tough to do good theater at any level, but tougher with economic constraints. James MacDonald, the talented Briton who has directed, among others, past Churchill shows, including Top Girls, Cloud Nine, and the more recent Love And Information, does a superb job using the unprepossessing 199-seat Martindale theater—one of six performing spaces at the Public, perhaps the country’ s most successful not-for-profit theater, currently represented on Broadway by Hamilton and Hell’s Kitchen—and its traditional upwardly raked audience and proscenium, giving the production a modernistic vaudeville feel, the stage rectangularly framed by light bulbs reminiscent of a large old show biz dressing room makeup mirror. (Set designer Miriam Buether does crazy-good things with very little actual stuff.) There are two brief circus-style vignettes between the shows, acrobat Junru Wang and juggler Maddox Morfit-Tighe, that play on the floor in front of the stage. These two performers are gifted, or at least I think they are, because this reviewer, sitting in the last high row from a last-minute ticket, could barely see them. (A snotty suggestion: the Public’s vaunted populist philosophy, originated 60 years ago by founder Joseph Papp, today stops at the price of a ticket.) Sightlines aside, the spirit of the whole show, an under-appreciated directorial responsibility, is effervescent and infectious, surrounding the darkness of the plays’ themes with a sense of jollity and fun, a commonly British rather than American theatrical trait. (We’re not as good as they are, so we take ourselves more seriously.)
The cast, a mix of British, American, and Chinese, young and older, is phenomenal, and the relative obscurity of the actors points up not only the difficulty of a theatrical career, but the integrity of performers who are doing an internationally high level of work at low-down salaries. If you are reading this outside of New York—or perhaps if you are not—you have likely barely heard of actors including Tony-nominated Broadway veteran John Ellison Conlee, whose work as Jimmy in Imp has a detailed and believable brilliance; Orlagh Cassidy, who it should be noted, was an understudy performing the role of the god in Kill in place of Deirdre O’Connell the day I saw it, may be familiar from soaps, but her fiercely humorous stage work not so much; Sathya Sridharan, the sensitive insightful young actor playing the widower in What If If Only; Adelind Horan and Japhet Balaban, as Niamh and Rob in Imp. O’Connell, who did play Dot in Imp at this performance, terrifically, is the most celebrated here: highly respected, even beloved, by New York fans, and even won the Tony for Dana H.. But who saw that play? I didn’t. The chance here to have a genuine theatrical experience with pieces by one of the most accomplished playwrights of the last fifty years, with a great director and actors, is a treat.
And, oh, yeah, sorry, but if you haven’t already, you won’t get to have that experience. Glass. Kill. What If If Only. Imp. closed May 25, after a run of about a month and a brief extension. You missed it: you were living somewhere else, or away on vacation; at the park with a child, watching TV, at a funeral; busy in love, or hanging around, alone; reading a horoscope, saying a prayer. Whatever you thought or imagined, wanted or rejected, did or didn’t, like the characters in Caryl Churchill’s plays, it’s out of your hands.
Glass. Kill. What If If Only. Imp. at the Public Theater
Scott Klavan, theatre writer at Escape Into Life, is an actor, director, and playwright in New York. Scott performed on Broadway in Irena’s Vow, with Tovah Feldshuh, in regional theater, and in numerous shows Off Broadway, including two productions of The Joy Luck Club for Pan Asian Rep. His stage adaption of Raymond Carver’s short story “Cathedral” was produced off-Broadway by Theater Breaking Through Barriers (TBTB), and his play Double Murder was published in Best American Short Plays of 2006-2007. For twenty years, Scott was Script and Story Analyst for the legendary actors Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward and for companies including HBO, CAA, and Viacom. In 2015, he was featured in A Soldier’s Notes, an episode of the Web Series Small Miracles, alongside Judd Hirsch, and earned a nomination for Outstanding Actor in the LA Web Series Festival. Scott directed the one-woman show My Stubborn Tongue, written and performed by Anna Fishbeyn, off-Broadway at The New Ohio Theater and at the United Solo Festival; and directed and appeared in the solo play Canada Geese, by George Klas, in the 2016 New York International Fringe Festival. In 2019, he directed a 60-minute version of the Sondheim/Lapine classic Into the Woods, cast solely with senior actors, for Music Theatre International (MTI) and Lenox Hill Neighborhood House; the show was written up in The New York Times. He helped to develop and directed Eleanor and Alice, by Ellen Abrams, about Eleanor Roosevelt and her cousin Alice Longworth, for the Roosevelt Library and Museum in Hyde Park and the Roosevelt House in NYC. He directed Night Shadows, by Lynda Crawford, about the poet Anna Akhmatova, for the On Women Festival at Irondale Center. He is a Lifetime Acting Member of The Actors Studio and a member of the Studio’s Playwright/Directors Workshop (PDW), where his own play The Common Area, was chosen as part of the PDW’s Festival of New Works in 2019. During the pandemic, Scott figured out how to direct on Zoom! Scott teaches at the JCCManhattan and other arts organizations.
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