Glass Houses
ONCE UPON A TIME, there lived a girl made of glass. She was not see-through, but sometimes people couldn’t see her. Or rather, they looked and failed to notice. Her brother said it depended on the light. His friend didn’t see her at all—until he did. She lived on a mantelpiece in a sitting room where everything was arranged just so. To her right, a red dog remembered a holiday no one else did; a clock grew smug from the weight of time endured. A vase—silent, mostly—longed for flowers, though it tried to be grateful just to remain upright.
Glass girl did not like being touched. Not for fear of attention, but because attention meant hands, and hands meant risk. Her mother had wrapped her in layers since she was small. Deep mats softened the floor. Bubble wrap muffled her steps. Even so, her arm had been broken once, and later, a foot. She could still feel the splinter where it never quite fused right.
At school, they could see her just fine. The girls who smiled too wide and said too much, who pried with their eyes and said they knew what she felt. That boy liked you, they said, but he wouldn’t touch you. Not someone hard and cold. They teased her about the bubble wrap. They tried to tear it off. One boy was different. He told her things about his father and his plan to leave home. Listening to him, the girl made of glass felt something press its hands around her throat. Then he vanished. She waited for him to come back. Each week she passed a stranger and wondered. Then she heard the news. She imagined him under the wheels and felt her foot ache again.
Time passed. The others on the mantelpiece talked less. Even the clock grew quiet. One day, the girl made of glass went upstairs, opened the window, and sat with her feet dangling in the wind. She leaned forward, and as if to complete a movement she began long ago, toppled out.
I’ve synopsized Caryl Churchill’s play Glass as a fairy tale for a simple reason: the characters go by storybook mononyms like “Glass,” “Red Plastic Dog,” and “Clock,” and they follow a logic that I would call dreamlike if that word was not so etiolated. Unlike fables, though, the play assiduously repels morals. This is true of many of Churchill’s works. You could sooner change a tire on a moving vehicle than pincer out a lesson from her sense- and form-scrambling, insomniac fantasies. Her plays are not devoid of sociopolitical import (one thinks of her controversial play on Gaza, Seven Jewish Children, which was recently turned into a film), but to talk about her oeuvre in such terms is to risk subsiding into orthopedic blandness. Even her admirers have trouble squaring this circle. In a tribute to Churchill, the playwright Lucy Kirkwood reduced Cloud Nine to “a deeply theatrical play about the relationship between sexual and colonial politics” that was “cautiously optimistic about our ability to free ourselves from the repressions visited upon us from above and within.” Reviewing Churchill’s Escaped Alone for The Atlantic, the critic Sophie Gilbert concluded that its characters—a group of four elderly women—“seem to have made it through the end of the world by similar means: simple resilience.” Such assessments are partial at best; at worst, they chloroform complexity.
There’s something about the off-kilter scenarios and stop-start rhythm of her plays that put me in mind of the flash fiction of Diane Williams, whose eclectic stories operate in a range of forms and are laden with the weight of the unsaid. “Stories” is actually too tame a word for Williams’s avant-garde imaginings. Some are metafictional mille-feuilles, others feel like punchlines to jokes told in another language. If you ran her works through a vocoder, you might get something like a Churchill play. Like the British playwright, her near contemporary, she has been credited with creating works that anticipate “our short cultural attention span.” Though short in runtime, several of Churchill’s works enact a new proposition for what a play might be: a Pirandellian puzzle box, an eco-allegory, a Möbius strip, a cracked mirror held up to society. Love and Information, for instance, presented directors with dozens of modular scenes, or fragments, as short and charged as electrical pulses. The script gave no indication of what characters would say which lines of dialogue, inviting reinvention with every staging. In The Skriker, Churchill conjured a shape-shifting creature who spoke in a jagged, Joycean kind of un-language. A similar venturesome spirit animates Glass and companion pieces in a quartet of Churchill’s works recently mounted by the Public Theater. Three of the plays, plus a feminist reworking of Bluebeard’s Castle, were first staged by the Royal Court in 2019. (The show at the Public, directed by Churchill’s longtime collaborator James Macdonald, has swapped out Bluebeard’s Friends for What If If Only.) In just over two hours, the plays make room for ghosts and gods, for imps and impulses, for words that slip their membranes like overripe peaches.
In Kill, a god—or perhaps several gods speaking through a single vessel—lounges on a cloud and ravels out a cosmic fugue of murder. A woman slays her husband in a bath. Her son kills her. Blood cries out for more blood. The tale, drawing liberally from Greek myths, unfurls backward and sideways through generations of divine vengeance and human sacrifice. The language is hypnotically plain, a torrent of declarative sentences etched with fatigue. “We don’t exist,” insists the god, played with wonderful understatement by Deirdre O’Connell. And yet: She floats before us on Miriam Buether’s denuded set. Interestingly, the original script calls for—and the London production of the play featured—a child to play the part of “People,” subsumed into one being and planted somewhere below the entity called God. Churchill provided a list of stock phrases for People to choose from, including “I have a right,” “It’s the right thing,” “It’s a joy,” “I have to,” and “I hate him,” but in this version, People is unseen and unheard. Unless, of course, People is us. Do we exist?
This duality of presence and absence—or rather, the synapse between the two states—is explored with equally startling economy in What If If Only. In a large white cube exposed on one side, a man (Sathya Sridharan) sits alone at a table, scrolling his phone. He speaks into the void left by someone he seems to have lost to suicide. Gradually, then suddenly, potential futures materialize. First, a woman (Ayana Workman) crawls into the cube and introduces herself as the “ghost of a future that never happened” and entreats the man, who has never seen her before in his life, to “make me happen.” She speaks as if there were no contradiction between her ability to make her wishes heard and her incipient existence. Her wishes become a waterfall: “I’ve been glimpsed I’ve been died for in China and Russia and South America people wanted me they want me over and over and fifty sixty years ago I had friends I really nearly and my enemies say I’m utopia a nowhere place and I’m not I needn’t be perfect but better better than what and I never happen and if I’d happened this nasty death wouldn’t have I’m the one where it wouldn’t I promise and you’ve got to make me real, you’ve got to make me a real life.” Picking up on the man’s desire to be reunited with his partner, more “futures” join them in the cube. They taunt him (“you lost the war”), scold him (“if only you hadn’t driven and guzzled and poisoned”), warn him (“look out I’m the nuclear”). When he rejects them in a furious outburst, they scuttle away from the stage, leaving only an older man (John Ellison Conlee), who calls himself “Now,” the “Present,” and the “only Future that didn’t die.” Sridharan’s man in mourning can’t be bothered to summon much interest—not even when “a small child future” (Ruby Blaut) shows up. “I don’t care what happens, not without—” he says tonelessly. Like Wallace Stevens’s “Snow Man,” he seems to behold “nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”
Imp, the final and lengthiest work, is the most earthbound play, at least at first glance. Dot (O’Connell) and Jimmy (Conlee) are cousins who live together in a kind of sullen truce. O’Connell’s face, usually full of open warmth, settles here into something more pinched and fatigued. Jimmy has taken up jogging to stave off depression, and Dot, a former nurse, has declined into a patient herself. Their days are punctuated by teas, quarrels over medication, and the occasional drop-in: their sharp, luminous younger relative Niamh (Adelind Horan), whom they call their niece, and Rob (Japhet Balaban), a soft-spoken drifter and ex-addict whom Dot invites in for tea but not to stay. “You might want to kill us,” she says, not unkindly, more as if stating a policy. A vaudevillian rhythm emerges, reminiscent of Edward Albee’s Counting the Ways, with short, sharp scenes punctuated by blackouts. The tone remains light even as the strangeness accrues. Jimmy offhandedly shares faits divers that lightly rework King Lear, Hamlet, Oedipus Rex, and other classic tales. Dot insists there’s an imp living in a wine bottle behind her chair, a creature discussed but never seen, like the imaginary child in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Whether it’s real or a projection of her waning agency, Dot’s belief certainly casts a spell.
In all the plays, characters fumble toward one another in phrases warped by repetition, clipped by grief, or blunted by habit. Against these broken utterances, the circus acts that fall between the plays feel almost utopian: An acrobat (Junru Wang) lifts herself into a handstand on wooden pegs and scissors the air with her feet, and a juggler (Maddox Morfit-Tighe) sends Indian clubs aloft in perfect parabolas. They perform with the grace of Kleist’s marionettes, unburdened by doubt, irony, or self-regard. The contrast is poignant—even impish, when you consider that the wordless acts were neither scripted nor choreographed by Churchill.
Glass. Kill. What If If Only. Imp. runs at the Public Theater, New York, from April 3 to May 25, 2025.
