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On Caryl Churchill

On Caryl Churchill Julia Jarcho When I teach playwriting, I always put The Skriker on the syllabus. “Do you guys know Caryl Churchill’s work?” I’ll ask. “She’s brilliant; the only thing is, her plays are perfect. Sort of enragingly perfect.” The Skriker is no exception, and in fact that’s why I want them to read it. After all, most of the plays I assign—Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck, Suzan-Lori Parks’s The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, Sibyl Kempson’s Potatoes of August, a ton of Mac Wellman—are full of language at least as wild as what Churchill’s wicked fairy spits. Many of them feature “impossible” stage directions (no such thing! I keep insisting) that easily rival the supernatural antics of the play’s thirty characters (“As she speaks, toads come out of her mouth”; “The KELPIE cuts up the woman’s body.”). Of course, it’s not a contest. I’m just saying: on the one hand, The Skriker is formally outra- geous, especially in the context of big-ticket late-twentieth-century playwriting in English. This outrageousness is likely to feel familiar to those of us who have come up in a downtown milieu and/or who identify with a level of disorienting strangeness that is http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art MIT Press

On Caryl Churchill

Jarcho, Julia
PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art , Volume 41 (2): 2 – May 1, 2019
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Publisher
MIT Press
Copyright
Copyright © MIT Press
ISSN
1520-281X
eISSN
1537-9477
DOI
10.1162/pajj_a_00462
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Abstract

Julia Jarcho When I teach playwriting, I always put The Skriker on the syllabus. “Do you guys know Caryl Churchill’s work?” I’ll ask. “She’s brilliant; the only thing is, her plays are perfect. Sort of enragingly perfect.” The Skriker is no exception, and in fact that’s why I want them to read it. After all, most of the plays I assign—Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck, Suzan-Lori Parks’s The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, Sibyl Kempson’s Potatoes of August, a ton of Mac Wellman—are full of language at least as wild as what Churchill’s wicked fairy spits. Many of them feature “impossible” stage directions (no such thing! I keep insisting) that easily rival the supernatural antics of the play’s thirty characters (“As she speaks, toads come out of her mouth”; “The KELPIE cuts up the woman’s body.”). Of course, it’s not a contest. I’m just saying: on the one hand, The Skriker is formally outra- geous, especially in the context of big-ticket late-twentieth-century playwriting in English. This outrageousness is likely to feel familiar to those of us who have come up in a downtown milieu and/or who identify with a level of disorienting strangeness that is

Journal

PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art – MIT Press

Published: May 1, 2019

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