Joan Marcus Photos
Rosato, Shipley, Wolf, Borsay in the new play at Yale Rep.
A group of women are talking together in a garden, under the shade of a tree. In the patterns of their speech, their ability to finish one another’s sentences, it’s clear they’ve been friends for years. But their conversation is about nothing serious. It’s just a way to spend an afternoon. Suddenly there’s a piercing sound, a blinding light, and the stage is plunged in darkness, the tree suddenly a stark silhouette against a roiling background. From one of the women, we get a report of calamity, of mass death, utter mayhem. The lights blind again, and we return to the sunlit garden, the four women still just talking as though nothing has changed. But something has changed.
Caryl Churchill’s Escaped Alone is a by turns hilarious and harrowing, exploratory, and utterly relevant play by a modern playwriting master that, under the direction of Liz Diamond, is given a fleet, brilliant staging at the Rep’s Chapel Street theater. Under an hour in total, it covers more conceptual and emotional ground that most plays do in half again that time. It’s also a deep lesson in what the unique conditions of live theater can do in transforming spaces and creating temporal ambiguities that serve the play’s deft ideas and loudly beating heart.
Escaped Alone calls attention to its staginess from the outset, as Mrs. Jarrett (LaTonya Borsay) introduces herself to us and the other three women in the garden: Vi (Mary Lou Rosato), Sally (Sandra Shipley), and Lena (Rita Wolf). Mrs. Jarrett easily ingratiates herself with the trio, who make her a part of the group without a fuss. But she is also our go-between; when the scene breaks and another report about a calamity of apocalyptic proportions rolls in — a city buried under a mountain after an earthquake, another city flooded, still another visited by pestilence, an entire country burned to a cinder — she is the one who delivers it to us, her face illuminated while everyone else is reduced to shadows. When the play snaps out of its cataclysmic mode and we return to the garden scene, the air of devastation is impossible to remove.
Part of the reason for this is that both the ongoing garden conversation and the reports of calamities are floating rather freely in time. Are the calamities happening at the same time as the garden conversation, or are they glimpses into the future? Are the calamities all happening at the same time as one another? Or in tandem? Or are they alternate realities, parallel universes, an array of horrific possibilities? Just as fundamentally, are we observing a single conversation among the four women in the garden, or snippets of a series of conversations happening over a much longer period of time?
Churchill’s keen writing gets to have it all ways. It’s possible to read the play as four women sitting in a garden amusing one another while the world outside the garden wall destroys itself around them. It’s possible also to imagine that this is a moment of serenity before everything collapses. Either way, the tension works, and perhaps works better because the fundamental relationship between the two elements of the play is so disorienting.
Despite this structural cleverness, after the first couple shifts, it may be tempting to understand Escaped Alone as a dramatization of the easy idea of the four women fiddling while the world burns. That is, on some level, the general dynamic that Churchill establishes in the play’s opening scenes. But she’s just getting started.
As the visions of doom escalate around them, so the women reveal — with an escalating sense of seriousness — that they have personal troubles as well. One is terrified of cats, a phobia that is first played for laughs and eventually isn’t. Another one, it turns out, killed her husband many years ago, under circumstances that first seem clear and become less so as the play goes on. Each of the women has something they have difficulty talking about. But in time, they each address us directly — just as Mrs. Jarrett reports on global environmental calamity — with the same intense sense of excoriating clarity.
The point that Churchill makes in the structure of the play, quite movingly, is that while the women cannot seem to recognize at all the looming destruction in the world, they can also barely talk about their personal pains with one another. When they come up in conversation, they are brushed aside as jokes, or spiral into awkward half-apologies for breaking the pleasant mood. Or they don’t come up at all. But that doesn’t make the personal catastrophes any less real than the burying of a city under a hillside’s worth of stone.
That the play’s structural, thematic, and emotional ambitions land is due to a production firing on all cylinders. Borsay, Rosato, Shipley, and Wolf disappear into their characters. When they converse with one another, they hit the jokes, nail the cadences of old friends talking, and bring out the subtle shifts in tone that steer the discussions away from any of them having to confront one another or something in themselves. When those time snaps happen, and they address the audience directly, on a dime, they succumb, letting those darker emotions come out. Each actor is given her time to dig deep into the character she’s playing, and each actor makes full use of it.
Yale Rep’s production values are always through the roof, which can sometimes feel like they’re showing off. In Escaped Alone, they’re integral to delivering the themes. Music (Liam Bellman-Sharpe, music director), projections (Shawn Lovell Boyle, projection designer), lighting (Stephen Strawbridge, lighting designer), and scenic elements (Lia Tubiana, scenic designer) move in lockstep to create the temporal dislocations the play demands. They’re disorienting in the best sense; you grow to dread the next one the way you dread the killer’s arrival in a horror movie, even while laughing at the latest turn in the conversation.
It all adds up to a thoroughly engrossing night of theater, somehow both fun and wrenching. And in the end it asks several provocative and moving questions. How do we talk about the overwhelming problems we face as a species when we have trouble talking even about our own personal struggles? Do the two go hand in hand? If we learned to speak more openly and honestly about ourselves, and learned as listeners to be open and accepting of people when they talk that way, would we then perhaps be better equipped to take on the planetary problems that threaten us?
Escaped Alone doesn’t answer these questions, and in the process, makes a case for the vital importance of art — and theater in particular — in helping us understand and feel the weight of what’s at stake. At the end of the play, each of the friends may or may not know the depths of their comrades’ pain, or what destruction might await them all beyond the garden walls. But we do.
Great observation Brian Slattery. I like this review! For me it married apocalypse with ordinary life. I like this kind of stuff... Is it past? Future? Present day? Relationships ---especially intimate relationships make people afraid of vulnerabilities. The same can be said of pending doom and gloom! We know we need to deal with climate change and we sorta don't, just as we know we need to deal with fears of (cats, germs, truths) and sorta don't.That's what I liked about this play the mundane alongside catastrophe.
Plus the setting was perfect! I felt the garden and I felt the apocalypse! Equally believable and jarring!
And all this mental dragging in under an hour! Whoa!