Escaped Alone

Caryl Churchill's brilliant, bizarre, puzzling, horrifying, and strangely sweet Escaped Alone packs the punch of a major dystopia into its lean 55 minutes. It also allows us to meet, enjoy, and maybe understand four 70-something women sitting and chatting in a cozy, distinctly non-dystopian, backyard.

Linda Bassett, Deborah Findlay, Kika Markham, June Watson
Photo: Richard Termine

Part of the play is easily comprehended. Mrs. Jarrett (Linda Bassett) peeks into a backyard through a slightly open door in the fence and ends up spending the afternoon (or perhaps multiple afternoons) with Sally (Deborah Findlay), who suffers from an extreme fear of cats; Lena (Kika Markham), depressed almost into paralysis; and Vi (June Watson), who spent six years behind bars for killing her husband, perhaps accidentally, perhaps in self-defense, perhaps neither. Their conversation is presented as unfinished sentences and half-expressed thoughts that somehow paint fully dimensional portraits. It's verbal pointillism. Each woman also gets a monologue, unheard by the others, in which she expresses some of her deepest emotions.

Cloud Nine

Cloud Nine, Caryl Churchill's brilliant riff on sexual politics, colonialism, identity, and love, is receiving an excellent revival at the Atlantic, directed with a sure hand by James Macdonald. As the Playbill explains, "Act I takes place in a British Colony in Africa in Victorian Times. Act II takes place in London in 1979. But for the characters, it is 25 years later." This is not the only device that Churchill utilizes. Women are played by men, and vice versa; a doll plays a baby; a white man plays a black man. Years before people wrote about "performing gender," Churchill made the concept unmistakably vivid.

Chris Perfetti as Betty, Izzie Steele as Ellen
Photo: Doug Hamilton

In Act I, Betty, the mother, Clive, the father, Edward, the son, Victoria, the daughter, and Maud, Betty's mother, live in Africa, where Clive happily and pompously takes on the "white man's burden." He sees himself as the adult in all situations, and the others, including Clive's "boy," Joshua, seem to agree. But Betty chafes under her limitations; Joshua is not what he seems; and Edward wants to play with dolls. Enter Harry Bagley, the dashing, and omnisexual, explorer, along with a "native uprising," and all assumptions start to fray.