Caryl Churchill is one of our most prolific and celebrated contemporary playwrights. She is the author of over 30 plays (including Top Girls and Cloud 9), as well as many adaptations and translations. Her work remains invigorating in how it consistently challenges both societal power structures and theatrical form.
Escaped Alone was written in 2017 and seems to speak directly to the times we are living through: the disjointed and anxious responses to catastrophes in the outside world as well as the fear of strangers and attempts to protect the sanctity and sanity of our homes.
WAM’s Producing Artistic Director Kristen van Ginhoven and actor Candace Barrett-Birk (performing the role of Mrs.J) are returning to Escaped Alone, having worked on it pre-pandemic (Kristen directed WAM’s sold out 2019 Fresh Takes Reading, and Candace directed a reading of the play for PRIME productions in Minneapolis). As they prepare for our upcoming Fresh Takes reading, Kristen and Candace took time to explain their excitement about re-engaging with Churchill’s script.
What initially drew you to Escaped Alone?
Kristen: I am a huge fan of Caryl Churchill and the genre of Theatre of the Absurd. I love that she wrote this play for four women in their 70s. As someone who is just beginning to experience ageism, I was curious to learn more from the play and the artists in it about their experiences growing older in the theatre and in our world. I am also, which is a surprise to some people, naturally a pessimist—the existentialism of Theatre of the Absurd speaks directly to the core of who I am, the whole Myth of Sisyphus thing, so this play drew me in immediately on all those levels.
Candace: I am particularly drawn to this scaffolding of a play because it speaks with such grace, ease, humor, and urgency about so many things that are important right now… It is about the importance of community. Mostly it is about the power of story-telling—and story-listening. It presents the very real notion that our conversations—our stories—affect not only us and the people around us, but also the future of the world.
What is exciting to you about returning to the play in 2022? How does it speak to our current world/time/political moment?
Kristen: While written before this pandemic, Escaped Alone provides a resonant opportunity to use humor and absurdity to look at what’s going on in our world. If we can’t laugh at all we are facing in our inner and outer worlds, then what do we have? The play illustrates the social anxiety we are experiencing, the need for social connection in spite of that anxiety, and how those two live in our bodies. It allows us to examine our lives and where we made an impact or what changes we may need to make now to live our purpose. This balance of joy and grief—all of it is present in the play and in our world.
Candace: It invites the actors and the audience on a journey that is both universal and particular to each of them. And it does it by setting up paradoxes at every turn; it is light, airy, funny and horrifyingly profound. It is an intimate conversation played out into a universal glimpse of the future. It is apparently an innocuous everyday chit-chat that is also Cassandra-esque, apocalyptic warning. It moves effortlessly between the dystopian and the normal. Time is happening—the past, the present and the future all at once—and somehow that feels “normal”.
What is exciting to you about performing at The Mount and with this Company?
Kristen: I am excited to explore how one of our most esteemed contemporary female playwrights defies convention to explore how we navigate catastrophe. I am also excited to be in community with five artists (four actors and a stage manager) who all represent the ‘elders’ and whose life experience can inform the play. I’m happy to be returning to The Mount, which is a beautiful space to be in and only five minutes from my house! Being in community right now is a gift, and with this reading, I get to be in community with the artists for our rehearsal day and then in community with the artists and our WAMily on the performance day. It doesn’t get any better than that.
WAM Theatre’s Fresh Takes Play Reading of Escaped Alone will be performed at The Mount, Edith Wharton’s Home in Lenox, on Sunday, August 7 at 2pm. Tickets are now on sale here.