'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

"Far Away"

Last night, we went to an amazing production-- directed by my very good friend Betsy Rudelich Tucker-- of "Far Away", a play written in 2000 by the brilliant British playwright Caryl Churchill.

I don't have time here to write much about it. If any of you gets a chance to see it-- rush to the theater in question! To think that Churchill wrote it before 9/11 is truly amazing. The woman can see into the future!

The future she sees into, and portrays in around 70 mins of very sparse performance time, is one in which two human tendencies-- the desire to paper over or ignore disturbing signs of violence and violation, and the desire to be extremely judgmental about others-- rapidly degerate into what can only be described as a form of dementia.

In the last scene, the entirely believable and fairly sympathetic three characters in the play are earnestly talking to each other about whether "the cats have come down on the side of the Frendch", or "the Chinese, the porcupines, and the gazelles have lined with the Germans and the children under five"... And even whether "the river is for us or against us this week".

Before that scene there is a lengthy, completely silent scene that consists only of a slow parade of individuals, one by one, across the stage. When each reaches a box in the middle of it, s/he stands and holds his hands out and then is "executed" with a flash of light.

After the performance, Betsy talked about it a little. She said that Churchill's own directions for this scene had been very sparse: that there should be a slow parade of "raggedly dressed individuals wearing fantastic hats" across the stage, where each one in turn should be executed. (The hats, and the making of them, were part of an earlier scene.)

Betsy said that Churchill gave no precise number for the number of those doing this, except to write that ten was too few, and it could be 20 or 100 or more... Betsy had 34 of them, but it went so slowly that it took up maybe 25 minutes of the entire performance.

The way Betsy and her costume designer staged this, though, felt like a blow to my solar plexus. I felt literally sick to my stomach. She had each of the condemned persons dressed in ragged canvas pants and dragging a shackle from one foot. The very "fantastic" hats were perched atop a plain black hood that covered the whole face. Then beneath that each prisoner wore a ragged but clearly rectilinear poncho whose shape was clearly revealed as, just before the execution, he held his hands out to the side... Standing on a box...

Not "far away" at all.