Post by Pei Qin on Feb 18, 2017 15:58:17 GMT 8
An inspiration on our show based on "petty concerns"/ fears?
Review: In ‘Escaped Alone’ Fears Small (Cats) and Large (Apocalypse) by The New York Times
Fear festers, burrows and blooms in Caryl Churchill’s “Escaped Alone,” a short and wondrous play that plumbs the depths of 21st-century terrors, large and small. These range from the eccentrically personal (as in being uncomfortable around cats) to the sweepingly historic — as in, well, the end of the world as we know it.
Now if you yourself are in an apprehensive state of mind these days (and I’d wager, somehow, that you are), you might think a show about what scares people would be the last thing you’d want as entertainment. Yet this British import, which runs through Feb. 26 at the Harvey Theater of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, has the effect of a restorative tonic, and you may find a new bounce in your step as you leave it.
That’s what happens when a work is as perfectly executed and as playfully and purposefully intelligent as this one, directed with luminous subtlety by James Macdonald and featuring a cast of four fine actresses portraying women in the evening of their lives. Then there’s the ever-mutating language, which finds a natural poetry in everyday speech, which in turn grows and warps into Swiftian accounts of an apocalyptic future.
The premise of “Escaped Alone” is both simple and confounding. It begins with a certain Mrs. Jarrett (Linda Bassett) peeking through a wooden wall; a voice invites her to step on in, and so she does, a bit like Alice making the leap into Wonderland.
Photo
From left, Linda Bassett, Deborah Findlay, Kika Markham and June Watson in “Escaped Alone” by Caryl Churchill at the BAM Harvey Theater. Credit Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
What lies behind would hardly appear to be the stuff of Lewis Carroll fantasies. Within a walled-in, sun-soaked backyard (designed with bright storybook lushness by Miriam Buether) sit four grandmotherly types, basking and chatting in the idle, free-associating way of people of long acquaintance with time on their hands.
Their names are Sally (Deborah Findlay), Lena (Kika Markham) and Vi (June Watson). They swap descriptions of grandchildren, hobbies, former jobs and the many changes their little neighborhood has seen. Occasionally, they bruise one another’s feelings, not always accidentally; and at one blissful point, they erupt into a spontaneous version of the girl-group classic “Da Doo Ron Ron.”
But shadows stir within the mellow afternoon light. Christopher Shutt’s subliminal sound design lends a foreboding edge to the commonplace noises of traffic and children at play. And as you listen to the women — and with these actresses you can’t help but hang on everything they say — you sense a specific, isolating unease in each.
Before the show, which runs under an hour, has concluded, the individual sources of their anxiety will be revealed, in three exquisite monologues that seem to occur in an interior eternity. (Though the scene doesn’t change here, Peter Mumford’s uncannily precise lighting defines each woman as apart at such moments, utterly alone among others.)
But wait. There’s more to “Escaped Alone” than this sustained backyard idyll. At regular intervals, the stage goes black, and when the light returns it’s in the form of two vast, illuminated red rectangles, one within the other, crackling and burning in the dark. Mrs. Jarrett stands before them, all by herself, delivering reports of a future in which nature, poisoned beyond endurance, has run amok.
Review: In ‘Escaped Alone’ Fears Small (Cats) and Large (Apocalypse) by The New York Times
Fear festers, burrows and blooms in Caryl Churchill’s “Escaped Alone,” a short and wondrous play that plumbs the depths of 21st-century terrors, large and small. These range from the eccentrically personal (as in being uncomfortable around cats) to the sweepingly historic — as in, well, the end of the world as we know it.
Now if you yourself are in an apprehensive state of mind these days (and I’d wager, somehow, that you are), you might think a show about what scares people would be the last thing you’d want as entertainment. Yet this British import, which runs through Feb. 26 at the Harvey Theater of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, has the effect of a restorative tonic, and you may find a new bounce in your step as you leave it.
That’s what happens when a work is as perfectly executed and as playfully and purposefully intelligent as this one, directed with luminous subtlety by James Macdonald and featuring a cast of four fine actresses portraying women in the evening of their lives. Then there’s the ever-mutating language, which finds a natural poetry in everyday speech, which in turn grows and warps into Swiftian accounts of an apocalyptic future.
The premise of “Escaped Alone” is both simple and confounding. It begins with a certain Mrs. Jarrett (Linda Bassett) peeking through a wooden wall; a voice invites her to step on in, and so she does, a bit like Alice making the leap into Wonderland.
Photo
From left, Linda Bassett, Deborah Findlay, Kika Markham and June Watson in “Escaped Alone” by Caryl Churchill at the BAM Harvey Theater. Credit Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
What lies behind would hardly appear to be the stuff of Lewis Carroll fantasies. Within a walled-in, sun-soaked backyard (designed with bright storybook lushness by Miriam Buether) sit four grandmotherly types, basking and chatting in the idle, free-associating way of people of long acquaintance with time on their hands.
Their names are Sally (Deborah Findlay), Lena (Kika Markham) and Vi (June Watson). They swap descriptions of grandchildren, hobbies, former jobs and the many changes their little neighborhood has seen. Occasionally, they bruise one another’s feelings, not always accidentally; and at one blissful point, they erupt into a spontaneous version of the girl-group classic “Da Doo Ron Ron.”
But shadows stir within the mellow afternoon light. Christopher Shutt’s subliminal sound design lends a foreboding edge to the commonplace noises of traffic and children at play. And as you listen to the women — and with these actresses you can’t help but hang on everything they say — you sense a specific, isolating unease in each.
Before the show, which runs under an hour, has concluded, the individual sources of their anxiety will be revealed, in three exquisite monologues that seem to occur in an interior eternity. (Though the scene doesn’t change here, Peter Mumford’s uncannily precise lighting defines each woman as apart at such moments, utterly alone among others.)
But wait. There’s more to “Escaped Alone” than this sustained backyard idyll. At regular intervals, the stage goes black, and when the light returns it’s in the form of two vast, illuminated red rectangles, one within the other, crackling and burning in the dark. Mrs. Jarrett stands before them, all by herself, delivering reports of a future in which nature, poisoned beyond endurance, has run amok.