On Caryl Churchill

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 outrageous, 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 sometimes called “modernism.” But, on the other hand it is also, still, a Caryl Churchill play.