Theater Review - Mad as hatterS

Far Away’s dark fantasy mirrors reality

“Once upon a time” might as well be the introductory words of Far Away at 7 Stages. British playwright Caryl Churchill begins by taking a page from England’s tradition of children’s tales. Maia Knispel plays Joan, a teddy-bear-holding girl (or girlish woman), who can’t sleep during her first night at the country house of her Aunt Harper (Joanna Daniel). At first we see her beneath a starry sky, perching on a ladder propped against a tree, and we half expect her to find a magic wardrobe or a visitor from Neverneverland.

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Instead of waking up from a nightmare, Joan wakes into one. Far Away’s fairy tale quality takes a chilling turn when Harper starts telling her niece “stories” — in the sense that she tells her lies. In the play, Churchill taps fears and images that seem to belong to our collective subconscious, as if she’s found the same creative spring that nourished Lewis Carroll, Salvador Dali and George Orwell. At barely an hour, Far Away unfolds in three short, devastating scenes, and the final one seems to bubble up from the global zeitgeist’s deepest anxieties.

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For Joan’s every innocent question, Harper offers a benign explanation. Joan heard screaming? It was probably an owl. Joan saw her uncle bundling someone into a shed? They’re just having a party. Joan stepped in a pool of blood in front of the house? That must have come from the dog that was hit by the car earlier that day.

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Like the cloning drama A Number, playing at the Back Space Theatre as part of 7 Stages’ Caryl Churchill Festival, Far Away’s first vignette hinges on a kindly older relative who turns out to be a dissembling authority figure. Daniel’s warm reassurance has an enveloping Englishness that put me in mind of Margaret Thatcher, and implies that no matter what Harper and her husband are up to, the ones in charge are not to be trusted.

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Although Joan appears in all three scenes, the play makes such leaps in time and setting that they’re nearly separate episodes. In the second, she takes a job at what appears to be a massive hat factory, working alongside seasoned designer Todd (Johnell Easter). As they talk about bizarre, fanciful trends in headwear and allude to ominous trials on television, we gradually realize that they’re not creating garments for haute couture but for a parade with ominous overtones.

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Joan and Todd both prove to be passionate artists in a totalitarian country, but Todd turns out to be something of a rabble-rouser: Having caught wind of corrupt practices, he seeks to change the system. When we learn the ghastly true nature of their work, we realize that they’re complicit in a monstrous society. Easter gives Todd a righteous clarity that makes his blindness to the greater evil terrifying in retrospect, and suggests that earnest artists can be co-opted without realizing it.

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If Far Away’s first two-thirds indict despotic regimes, the finale strives for something universal. Todd and Harper discuss the insecurities of life during wartime, but when the older woman says, “The cats have come in on the side of the French,” Churchill constructs a wild, ingenious situation in which not just nationalities, but professions and animal species have formed alliances and attacked each other. Far Away’s account of a world literally at war with itself includes passages of surreal descriptions, frightening dream-logic and nervous laughter.

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When Harper and Todd argue whether one should despise predatory crocodiles and have faith in noble deer — no matter whose side they’re on — the play savagely satirizes wartime paranoia. Joan’s final speech conveys the entire natural order turning in on itself, with even weather and gravity becoming enemy combatants. It’s an ingenious, archetypal piece of writing, but one that seems especially relevant at this moment of the new century. At a time of war, of economic shocks, of seemingly inseparable political and cultural divisions, of tsunamis and hurricanes and earthquakes, Far Away’s dark fantasy feels eerily plausible.

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Perhaps if 7 Stages featured a more cozy, realistic set for Harper’s house, the misleadingly benign setting would set up a more powerful contrast with the sinister reality. Still, the Magritte influence in Katya Lanevskaia’s set pays off in its storybook quality: The sky-blue paint on the walls resembles the wallpaper of a child’s room, while the shroud-shaped hole in the door hints at the bogeyman in the closet.

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Director Melissa Foulger sets a deliberate pace that helps us weigh the character’s words and contemplate the play’s many unanswered questions. She makes a misstep only during the climactic parade of the hat sequence, bringing a self-conscious element of “vogueing” into a spectacle that should feel like a punitive pageant from Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

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The small stumbles don’t hinder Far Away’s greater force, however. Programmed with A Number and several play readings and other events, 7 Stages’ Caryl Churchill Festival makes a high point in the playhouse’s recent history. At times, 7 Stages can produce “difficult” shows as a badge of honor, but Far Away and A Number prove powerful and accessible while keeping the theater’s aesthetic and political integrity intact. (I strongly recommend seeing both shows when they play back-to-back Nov. 5.) Rather than being a forbidding, distant example of the avant-garde, Far Away hits dangerously close to home.