A Glass Girl, Gods, Ghosts And An Imp. Inside Caryl Churchill’s Universe

This past November when Deirdre O’Connell was sent the script of a quartet of Caryl Churchill’s short plays that would be performed together, there was no question that she had to be a part of the ensemble.

“I knew that my life was about to be swallowed up with the plays. There was the brilliance of the writing. And it’s rare to feel there is only mining and nothing incomplete about it,” says the Tony-winning actor about the mosaic of themes and characters in Churchill’s plays Glass. Kill. What If If Only. IMP. “All I have to do is surrender to it and try to understand how it needs to be done. Because it is perfect.”

All vastly different, yet linked together in subtle ways, the plays feature a girl made of glass who has to navigate her world, a God on a white cloud giving her take on humanity, a bunch of ghosts who have a keen insight on mortality and two kissing cousins, (who don’t kiss), who may have an escaped IMP from a bottle running amok in their living room. Directed by James Macdonald, who often collaborates with Churchill, the four one acts are presented together for the first time and playing at the Public Theater.

Often considered one of the world’s finest playwrights, Caryl Churchill’s work delves into sexual politics, identity, power, human instincts and why we behave the way we do. A pioneering, boundary pushing playwright, she blows the lid off convention and creates her own forms.

Oskar Eustis, the Public Theater’s artistic director calls Churchill the most influential living playwright in the English language. “For over 50 years she has been creating utterly unique, unpredictable plays that combine formal experimentation with deep social engagement. She’s a profoundly political playwright whose work is always aesthetically compelling; she’s a brilliantly innovative artist whose work tackles the deepest and most difficult issues we face,” writes Eustis in the show’s playbill about the Public Theater’s collaboration with Churchill that has spanned nearly five decades.

“She isn’t the most commercially successful writer we have; indeed, she’s never aimed at that kind of success. But her influence on generations of playwrights is unequalled in the Anglo-American theater.”

O’Connell is part of an ensemble featuring Japhet Balaban, Ruby Blaut, John Ellison Conlee, Adelind Horan, Maddox Morfit-Tighe, Cecilia Ann Popp, Sathya Sridharan, Junru Wang, Ayana Workman, Kyle Cameron, Orlagh Cassidy and Anya Whelan-Smith. When asked about why she believes Churchill’s work has endured all these decades O’Connell points to the depths of her writing.

“She has a very clear headed way that she looks at the world combined with this acknowledgement of its mysteries,” says O’Connell of the plays that are running at the Public Theater through May 25. “There is the glee she has as a writer. And she offers that pleasure to the artist making it and, hopefully, to the world watching it.”

Jeryl Brunner: In the one act IMP you play Dot, a former nurse who is nursing her own bad back and stays put in her reclining armchair. While in Kill you take on the role of “Gods” and are perched on a cloud delivering an epic monologue. Both pieces are extremely different. What is that like for you?

Deirdre O’Connell: They are each remarkable in their own way and so utterly different from each other. One kind of earns you the ability to do the other. Kill, in particular, was terribly intimidating. On the page, there is very little punctuation. It’s just four single spaced pages of ferocious writing about death, war, families and cultures. It’s about how the world creates an impossible situation for each generation and tries to move out of it, Yet it’s impossible to do, because you are birthed into a legacy of some kind of violence and revenge fantasy. It seemed very prescient , yet she had written it around six years ago. I guess it will never stop feeling like this is the exact story that needs to be told right now.

I was terrified reading Kill. I thought, Can I just do IMP, the fun British comedy? But of course, no, you can’t. You have to be able to do both things. And the fun British comedy wouldn’t be the same thing without the Gods in Kill, and the Gods wouldn’t be the same thing without the fun British comedy.

Brunner: Were you able to connect with Caryl Churchill at some point?

O’Connell: A little bit. She did some Zoom meetings with us from London as a group when we were beginning rehearsal. Imagine social anxiety. We didn’t know each other yet. There was all of us in a room on one screen, and then there was her and her cat, by herself in London. She was very nice. It was like we all came over for tea and she was such a great hostess to us.

I did not sit down and have in-depth question answer sessions with her. We had our director James, who has worked with her so much and understands her writing so well and had directed these plays before [in the United Kingdom] a few years ago. It was funny because it was long ago enough so when I would ask him very specific questions, like: ‘How did you solve this problem?’ But he would say, ‘I don’t remember.’ So we were starting from scratch, but with someone who had already figured out and knew that worked. It was as if we were working with a magician who solved the tricks but had to teach them to you.

Brunner: How has doing the play impacted you?

O’Connell: It might be something about the nature of the dark and the light of the task, but it makes me feel extremely happy. I don’t always feel that way. Even when I’m in something I really like, feel excited and challenged. This is a particular kind of happiness. And even sometimes when I have the dark moments of the soul, I remember how this makes me incredibly happy. As dark as the play is, it’s also extremely pleasurable to do.

Brunner: Why do you think that is?

O’Connell: I believe that has a lot to do with Carol and James. James is incredibly gentle as a director, but he also puts out breadcrumbs through the forest for you. They are these brilliant, bright breadcrumbs and you just have to follow them. He is so gentle that anytime you start to bite down, he says, ‘No, no, no. You don’t have to freak yourself out about this.’ He has a way of not freaking out as a director, in terms of having faith that the soup will brew up into the thing it needs to be. James trusted us a lot and let us build. But at the same time, he was guiding with such a gentle hand. So I felt very held by him while feeling a lot of freedom inside a very tight structure.