Review of "Far Away"
Now Playing at Shaking the Tree Theatre
Last night Far Away by Caryl Churchill opened at Shaking the Tree Theatre on SE Stark. Though a relatively short play, it turns a real corner. This work starts off innocently enough, but quickly delves into a chaotic and confusing world where everyone and everything – man and beast and element of nature – is on one side or the other in a mysterious war and fear and do 1d4d ubt run rampant.
On the theater’s small stage an increasingly unsettling story unfolds. Harper, an old lady with a cottage, consoles her young niece Joan, who can’t sleep. But Joan has good reason to feel restless; she snuck out of the house to investigate a scream and discovered her uncle loading bloody people into a truck. Harper claims that he is helping these people, and warns Joan never to reveal this to anyone.
As the play continues on, Joan matures into a woman and finds a job making crazy hats for a parade of prisoners marching to their deaths. We are left to discern from discussions between Harper and Joan’s husband that the world – the entire world – is at war. Crocodiles and elephants are allied with Korea, and the Bolivians are working with gravity, to name a few examples. Joan is overwhelmed and afraid because she can no longer tell what side anything is on.
Far Away sounds like absurdity when you first get into it. The first references to oddities such as the weather being allied with Japan draw laughter from the audience, but that gradually dies away. As Joan continues to describe her fear and doubts about everything’s true colors, the audience sits and listens in stunned silence. We may find it hard to imagine a world of such fear where everyone doubts everyone and everything, but such places have existed before and still do today. Far Away, in its own bizarre way, lets us know the terror of a world without an ounce of trust or certainty.
Far Away runs until September 22nd at Shaking the Tree Theatre.
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