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Caryl Churchill, Acrobatically, at the Public
Four short plays by the master of knotty stage language.
Now 86, Churchill has been writing formally audacious plays since the late 1950s, though her career really began to shake and shape the field 20 years later — some of her most-produced work keeps resonating partly because of its intrinsic revolt against Thatcherism, a political ethos that retains such a death grip on our own reality. Imp, which comes after the show’s intermission and takes up its whole second act, is a heavier, craggier slab of rock, with more of the usual things (narrative, character) and just as much mystery and menace pressing up beneath the surface — a subterranean river threatening to burst its earthen crust. In Kill, the marvelous Deirdre O’Connell hovers suspended inside the blackness of the set’s frame — barefoot and clad in a sparkly, befeathered white suit that looks like it’s seen better days, she perches on a single fluffy cloud that could have drifted straight out of a child’s drawing.
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