Available Light returns in fine form with a punch-in-the-gut production of Jen Silverman’s dark comedy Witch, directed by Whitney Thomas-Eads.
Elizabeth (Michelle Schroeder-Lowery) – the ostracized woman, best by rumors that paint her in the light of the play’s title, in an unnamed town – opens the play, addressing the audience directly that, “If you don’t [have hope things will get better], maybe this is where we begin.” Soon, she’s visited by a low-level devil, Scratch (David Glover), making the rounds with his never-fail pitch and intrigued by her quick and firm “No.”
Scratch has better luck with two other marks, both taken under the wing of Sir Arthur Banks (Ian Short): Banks’ son by birth, Cuddy (Jacob V. Uhlman), and the well-liked Frank Thorney (Alan Tyson), who’s worked his way up from poverty through intellect, charm and confidence to sit at the ruler’s right hand. Winnifred (Dakota Thorn), Thorney’s secret wife, took a job as a servant in the palace to be closer to Thorney, even as the position gives her a close look at the human costs of his ambition.
Eads’ direction stuns throughout, balancing the juggling-knives quality of the repartee with the negative space of silence, letting moments feel artfully tossed off to reveal themselves as emotional landmines later. The aisle set up for the proceedings, audience members on either side, with Elizabeth’s simple cabin and the main chambers of Sir Arthur’s castle facing one another, usually with one in darkness but occasionally with light spilling over, highlights the back and forth and the crushing disparity; the way everything can feel like an intricate, strategic sporting event to the people with the most power and like a series of tragic traps to the people with the least.
Schroeder-Lowery’s Elizabeth brings an earned cynicism to human nature, delivering jabs that get knowing, real laughs without ever feeling like one-liners. She also embodies an inner strength and sense of self that lets the character turn Glover’s devil down while seeing a vulnerability in him, something behind the charm, that lends an uncommon poignancy to their developing relationship. Their later scenes together are as scorching and intense as anything I’ve seen, weighted as though we’ve known them for years instead of the 1 hour and 45 minute length of the play.
Ian Short brings an interesting combination of strength and haplessness to his Sir Arthur, making the character personally appealing but always shaded by the terrifying consequences of that charm in a leader. His earnest affection for Cuddy and the way he speaks about his late wife – who hangs over the chamber in a knife-wielding portrait – give the character a warmth you don’t normally see from a classical monarch, as when he delivers a speech where every sentence breaks down into a broad physical gesture. But there’s no doubt that – whether through station, obliviousness, or impulsivity – he is someone who has and will hurt people and won’t think much of it after.
The cracked-mirror reflections of Uhlman’s Cuddy and Tyson’s Frank light the play up. Uhlman gives a balletic performance – appropriate for his character’s Morris Dancer aspirations – of manic, barely restrained energy, glee and disappointment, and terror and rage playing right across his face with seemingly no filter; it’s like watching a live wire dance on a cobblestone street. Tyson understands the control Frank has had to learn to rise above his station and the ruthlessness he needs – or at least thinks he needs – to continue the rise. The moments when that hunger rises to the surface are all the more terrifying for the smooth transitions, for the subtle reminders that this isn’t someone losing himself; this is the same person all along.
Thorn’s Winnifred underscores many of Witch‘s most fundamental themes with nuance and grace that never makes it feel like she’s underlining a theme. Her wrenching request of the devil and the two impossible choices we see her character make ripped my heart out just as she lends some hysterical slapstick comedy in immediately adjoining scenes.
Glover gives us a tour de force, his Scratch summing up everything we know from earlier sell-your-soul tales with an easygoing charm, the combination of a true believer and winking smart-ass that makes every good salesman. And he does it so brilliantly that when we start to see that facade crack, the audience is moved without any sense that we should let the character off the hook for the ravage we watched him wreak for the last two hours. The scene described above with Schroeder-Lowery and another scene where she forces him to see her in a way society, especially men, steadfastly refused to see her for the character’s entire life and change his sales pitch completely, left me chewing over them through dinner after the show and waking up this morning.
Adapting a play from the 1600s, Silverman sets Witch in a specific time and place that just doesn’t exactly correlate to anywhere in the real world. She swirls contemporary idioms into dialogue and modern ways of relating to one another, so they don’t let us easily put this into a “historical” box and get under the audience’s skin. The cast handles that stitched together language as naturally as if it were extemporaneous, and Baylee Sheets’ costumes, Lonelle Yoder’s props, and Jaclyn Curtis’s sets immeasurably add to that out-of-time-but-rock-solid sense of place.
Silverman slips intriguing truths about intersections, the way classism, sexism, and capitalism all feed one another, into the barbed dialogue. The sense that class comes with knowing how to ask for something recurs in the play in subtle, sometimes hilariously cringey, and sometimes heartbreaking ways. For something that plays loose with the plot, there are dazzling callbacks I was talking about for the next hour over dinner with my partner.
That subtlety and intricacy of the writing made the handful of slips feel more glaring to me than they would have in a less assured play. There are multiple endings that I felt blunted the impact of the play, especially a monologue by Glover – that’s brilliantly acted – that restates everything we just spent 90 minutes absorbing in a way that made me think, “I thought this work thought better of me as an audience member.”
Those couple of sour notes notwithstanding, Witch is a towering example of exactly what I’m going to the theater for and an incandescent reminder of what Available Light brings to the Columbus theater community.
Witch runs through October 14 with performances at 8 p.m. Thursday through Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday. For tickets and more information, visit avltheatre.com.