Interludes

VIEWPOINTS – Brief but potent works by master playwrights: Caryl Churchill’s GLASS. KILL. WHAT IF IF ONLY. IMP. and Wole Soyinka’s SWAMP DWELLERS

• By drediman
• April 18, 2025
• No Comments

Currently Off-Broadway, you’ll be able to catch a pair of productions of lesser known works by playwrights of great note that display their master craftsmanship. As per usual, read on below for my thoughts on these thought provoking, pristinely presented plays that are much more than mere curiosities.

GLASS. KILL. WHAT IF IF ONLY. IMP.
The Public Theater
Through May 11

Over at the Public Theater, you’ll find a beguiling collection of four short plays by Caryl Churchill entitled Glass. Kill. What If If Only. Imp. (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED). With her breathtaking catalog of plays (e.g., Cloud 9, Top Girls, Far Away, A Number), few can deny Churchill’s role in furthering the notion of contemporary playwriting as a serious art form. Over the course of her trailblazing career, she’s fearlessly taken on a wide array of humanistic and societal subject matters — among them feminism, sexuality, technology, and the apocalypse — all the while innovating the form. As she’s evolved, her plays have become increasingly crystalized — in a few slicing strokes, she’s able to get to the heart of things with brilliant imagination, poetry, and incisiveness — which takes us to these plays at the Public, which last anywhere between approximately 15 minutes (Glass) to an hour (Imp). These works form a microcosm of Churchill’s diverse output, delving into such seemingly disparate realms as fantasy, mundane life, mythology, and philosophical musings. But look more closely, and you’ll see subtle connections between the pieces, which collectively investigate the fabric of our very existence, albeit at times cryptically — but always with scintillating theatricality. The production has been meticulously directed by James Macdonald, a longtime collaborator of the playwright’s, who gives each play a distinct visual stamp, and performed by a sensational crop of young actors alongside stalwart stage veterans John Ellison Conlee and Deidre O’Connell (the Tony-winner is absolutely stunning in both Kill and Imp). Also worth mentioning are Maddox Morfit-Tighe and Junru Wang, who appear, oddly fittingly, in diverting circus acts during the scene changes between plays.

THE SWAMP DWELLERS
Theatre for a New Audience
Through April 27

Then at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn is Theatre for a New Audience‘s production of The Swamp Dwellers (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED) by Nobel Prize-winning playwright Wole Soyinka. Written in 1958 when Soyinka was only 24 years of age, the play now makes its Off-Broadway debut with these performances. Set during the late 1950s in a quaint home in a swampy backwater over the course of an evening, the play depicts an older couple awaiting the arrival of their son from the city. As they do so, they are visited by a blind beggar searching for work, an arrogant local priest, and finally their son. As with Churchill’s plays, Soyinka’s rarely performed early career work heeds the notion that sometimes less is more. Indeed, with a running time of just over an hour, the playwright elegantly yet potently conveys the unsettling shift that was occurring in Nigeria during the days leading up to the country’s independence. The Swamp Dwellers unfolds with a clear-eyed inevitability that draws you in, contrasting the mythical with the tough realities of life in a country in transition. The play concludes on a hauntingly uncertain note that lingers in memory. The production has been directed by Awoye Timpo with a deep understanding of the play, beautifully balancing its rich symbolism and grounded naturalism. There’s also a patient, ritualistic quality that pervades Timpo’s staging, heightening the pregnant mysteries in the drama. The performances are finely tuned throughout, starting with the magnetic Ato Blankson-Wood as the city-dwelling son with change on his mind. Also quite affecting is Joshua Echebiri, whose otherworldly performance as the blind Muslim beggar is the moral compass of the production. Together, they weave together an engrossing, perfectly calibrated night at the theater.