Glass. Kill. What If If Only. Imp. – 12 April 2025

The Public Theater’s presentation of four of Caryl Churchill’s short works carefully curated into one production baring all of their names really captures the essence of what it means to explore violent death from unusual perspectives. The first act, consisting of Glass, Kill, and What If If Only asks three emotionally charged questions with spellbinding dance interludes between them. The second act is only Imp, a longer work that explores the same questions but in a more mundane, realistic circumstance in a continuous story that touches lightly upon how these big questions are condensed and suppressed into everyday life.

The first tale, Glass, examines the notion of suicide. In Glass, a little glass doll (Ayana Workman) on the mantelpiece falls in love with a vase (Japhet Balaban), and shatters herself when he is unable to be with her. Thematically, it explores the idea of what it’s like when someone can just look at you and know everything you are feeling. It’s hard to lose the figure who interprets you correctly. World shattering, in fact. After Glass, there is a dance interlude that is a slow, hypnotic, and mesmerizing acrobatic piece by Junru Wang that cleanses the pallet and prepares the audience for something new. Kill immediately follows, a monologue by Deirdre O’Connell sitting on a cloud going through ancient Greek history from the perspective of the gods, emphasizing over and over again that the gods do not like killing for killing’s sake and giving a macro picture of how bloody humanity is. In every generation people get murdered over something ridiculous. After Kill comes another dance interlude—this one by Maddox Morfit-Tighe who juggles (and dances with) pins in a high energy performance that is equally hypnotic and spellbinding as the one before. The first act ends with What If If Only, a heartbreaking piece where a man (Sathya Sridharan) talks to his dead lover and has to confront personified manifestations of potential futures that could have been or still could be. When act one concludes, we’ve examined violent death by one’s own hand, how ingrained violent death is in humanity, and what the aftermath of violent death feels like for the living.

Act two is only Imp, a story about a girl (Adelind Horan) who has lost her parents coming to live with an aunt (Deirdre O’Connell) and uncle (John Ellison Conlee) who are related to each other who comes to fall in love with the homeless man (Japhet Balaban) they are helping. In the wake of her parents’ violent death, there is life. Yet there is also mental illness. Like the girl in Glass, she is very transparent and unable to keep secrets. Many morbid thoughts about killing float around the household, particularly regarding the aunt’s secret imp in a bottle, who she believes might have the power to grant or destroy wishes. The imp is nonexistent, but the aunt is ready to kill the uncle over opening the bottle anyway. She is hindered by her disabilities, and at the end the girl’s what if’s manifest in her ending up with the homeless man, perhaps because the uncle wished him a rich life, or perhaps because the lovebirds created one for themselves. This second act takes the questions about death and violence and shows nuance—is sincere desire to hurt someone different from actually doing it? Does sharing your feelings and being shattered by rejection mean you should quit? Once someone is gone from your life, does it mean your life has to be over to? Might there be a path back, in some cases? These thoughtful juxtapositions of Caryl Churchill’s poignant questions result in a truly magnificent philosophical tapestry of life, death, and what to do when we’re struggling to fully embrace one or the other.

Though beautiful, I’m not sure that the dance interludes were necessary. The proscenium theatre setting with lightbulbs all around the proscenium arch looked tacky and detracted from the performance, as the performance was not about performing in any way, shape, or form. The sets (Miriam Buether) for each piece had characters appearing to hover in midair—on the mantelpiece, on a cloud, in a light box, and on a skewed magic carpet; these sets were magnificent looking but limited in function as they limited the actors’ space to physically move in. Lighting (Isabella Byrd)  was gorgeous, and sound design (Bray Poor) did a really excellent job of guiding the flow of these fragile pieces being put together into one show. The costumes (Enver Chakartash) were perfectly utilitarian, except for in Kill, when the stylized costuming and scenic collaboration were truly otherworldly.

Initially upon seeing this piece, I wondered what it would be like to see it in a different order: Imp first as act one, showing the mundane example with the other three pieces coming along to ask the more stylized, bold questions in act two, which I would have curated as human beings are murderers (Kill), human beings are fragile destroyers of ourselves (Glass), and death has consequences for those left behind on the plain of the living (What If If Only). Though still thinking about the order of presentation, I’ve come to realize this curation is designed to show the clear boundaries between the pieces to keep the questions and answers in each piece easy to grasp and keep pondering.

Each of these stories is truly fantastic in its own right, showing human power and human weakness through our inability to grasp our own worth. Glass. Kill. What If If Only. Imp. takes us on a journey through brokenness and pain causing unnecessary violence and loss. It is a breathtaking journey, and Churchill is so prolific in approaching these questions in such esoteric ways. James Macdonald’s discerning direction of these works at The Public Theater sparks profoundly necessary dialogue and discourse about what it means to engage in the act of breaking.

I attended this performance on a press pass from The Public Theater Press Team.