Tragedy in an Aching Stoop

By T.E. Kalem

FEN by Caryl Churchill

Tiny spires of smoke rise from the stage as if the earth were releasing noxious fumes. In the brooding mist on this blasted brown heath, we almost expect Macbeth's three witches to materialize.

The women who do appear are simple farm laborers gathering up a potato crop. In rigid lines and soulless silence, they move forward, whisking loose dirt from the potatoes and tossing them into baskets. They are harrowing illustrations from Edwin Markham's The Man with the Hoe: "Time's tragedy is in that aching stoop."

Currently at Joseph Papp's Public Theater, Fen is the third of British Playwright Caryl Churchill's plays to be presented in New York. "Infinitely distantly" related to Winston, Churchill, 44, is a no-nonsense feminist whose convictions are firm without being strident. She is the mother of three boys, ages 20, 18 and 13, and her barrister husband tended them for stretches so that she could write. She possesses a startling imagination, and her way with words ranges from the stark to the lyrical.

Fen is quite unlike Cloud Nine, Churchill's wickedly ambisextrous foray into the man-woman relationship in the heyday of Victoria's imperial sway, updated in Act II to contemporary Britain. Nor does it remotely resemble Top Girls, her study of the modern career woman's adaptive skills at the Big Business pastime of cat-kills-mouse. The women of Fen seem primordially immune to change, though Churchill would doubtless argue that they have been ensnared in a capitalistic slave pen.

In the east of England, less than 100 miles north of London, the Fens draws its name from the fact that it was swampland reclaimed for farming beginning in the 17th century. This rich earth is gradually falling into the hands of interlocking conglomerates, and the play implies that the Japanese may eventually own it. Against this backdrop Churchill fashions a kind of Under Milk Wood as it might have been seen through the bleak, baleful eyes of Thomas Hardy.

The unifying element is a love story played out against a landscape of doom. Val (Jennie Stoller) falls in love with Frank (Bernard Strother), a farm laborer separated from his wife and children. She leaves her husband and two young daughters. But Val is soon torn by anguish. She cannot live without her children and would die without her man. The lovers are both earthbound and star-crossed.

In between, we meet the villagers: cantankerous, narrowly provincial, soaked in religious zeal and, occasionally, intoxicated with a bizarre humor. The desire to escape a barren, futile existence is grimly repressed. It translates into a lurking violence. Three children taunt a woman said to be a hermaphrodite (Cecily Hobbs) and try to impale her on a hoe as if it were a pitchfork. A sadistic stepmother (Amelda Brown) torments her placidly submissive stepdaughter (Tricia Kelly) in order to "feel something." At one point, Val asks Frank: "What are you frightened of?" Frank replies: "Going mad. Heights. Beauty." Says Val: "Lucky we live in a flat country." Churchill interprets the flat country to be the death of the heart, and with the aid of an absolutely superb cast, she has composed a moving requiem.

--By T.E. Kalem This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.