Owners

Through November 16 at the Yale Repertory Theatre, corner of York and Chapel streets, New Haven. (203) 432-1234, www.yalerep.org.

 

By Caryl Churchill. Directed by Evan Yionoulis. Scenic Designer: Carmen Martinez. Costume Designer: Seth Bodie. Lighting Design: Benjamin Ehrenreich. Sound Design: Joel Abbott. Production Dramaturg: Hugh Farrell. Vocal and Dialect Coach: Beth McGuire. Fight Director: Rick Sordelet. Casting Director: Tara Rubin. Stage Manager: Sonja Thorson. Cast: Brenda Meaney (Marion), Anthony Cochrane (Clegg), Sarah Manton (Lisa), Tommy Schrider (Alec), Alex Trow (Alec’s Mum, Mrs. Arlington).

 

(A review, by me, of this show will appear in this week’s New Haven Advocate. Here are other thoughts.)

 

Owners is an allegory and a political cartoon about capitalism and its captives. There’s no getting around that fact. So the onus on any production of Owners is to be entertaining and vibrant beyond those boundaries.

I love Caryl Churchill’s work, and I love that her plays always have a specific time and place and governmental threat. We need American playwrights who are like her, and who might explain how our own empire has gotten in such dire straits.

 

It’s no surprise that a show about the housing market, domination of spouses and employees, unethical business contracts and spectacularly awful modern relationships would hold up well these days despite having been written 30 years ago. But who knew that Caryl Churchill’s Owners—her breakthrough stage play, the commissioned full-length piece which brought her serious attention after years of penning one-acts and radio plays—would inspire such inventive new designs and staging ideas?

 

A revolving, detailed, multi-location set. Actors freezing in position at the starts and ends of scenes. Clanging blackout sounds.

 

Some theatergoers hate that stuff. “Cinematic,” they say. Yet this Owners is definitely, defiantly, a stage drama. It’s also bonafide black comedy, with suicide jokes and bad-sex jokes and unsafe-children jokes. This show challenges you. It lives and breathes right in front of you. In plays better on a stage than it ever could in film. It bleeds sociopolitical statements and modern-world allegories while unfurling frantic, fraught character-based dialogue. It’s nasty and unpredictable, yet has a clear and focused idea of the ultimate points it wants to make.

 

This is a sleek, stylish, sensational production that brings raw human nature and impersonal architecture together. This is something the Yale Rep has gotten good at in recent years, with Robert Woodruff’s high tech yet visceral, vulnerable productions and with a succession of blown-apart relationship dramas set in grand environments. This one lurches from butcher’s shops to seedy apartments to realty offices. The glory of Carmen Martinez’s set design isn’t just that these settings are ably and fully created; they genuinely inform the play by being so large and present and overlapping.

 

Likewise, director Evan Yionoulis’ concept of having scenes suddenly erupt into being with a thunder-and-lightning immediacy isn’t a techniques born out of any continuity or transition problems. It totally fits the strip-cartoon nature of Churchill’s writing. She writes self-aware plays with grand messages, then amuses and enlightens with snappy dialogues that illustrates these themes. The method used here isn’t one I’ve seen done so strongly with a Churchill script before. It works marvelously. These thunderclap scene-starts aren’t just arresting; they’re threatening, as dangerous as the dialogue.

Owners is about having stuff, and about suffering sudden changes in fortune. The look and sound of this production enforces that strongly.

 

It’s hardly worth going into plot. It’s all there in the title. This is a play about ownership—of property, of affections, of the souls of milder people. It might get tedious if Churchill hadn’t arranged for the most spiteful, greedy, horrific character—a woman, tilting patriarchal clichés on their head—to be holding a torch for a man who simply doesn’t care about possessions, or much else for that matter.

 

The acting is big and brisk, but considering how much more over the top this could get, you have to call it restrained. There’s bite and edge, but nobody’s frothing at the mouth or getting unnecessarily naked or indulging in sweaty physical work-outs. It’s angry, but not shouty; intense but not overbearing. Martinez’s magnificent set design, and Joel Abbott’s equally impressive sound design, helps keep everything under control. So does the remarkable restraint of the actors. Brenda Meaney, whom I’ve seen overact a number of times, and whom I couldn’t have imagined in this role based on the half-dozen shows I saw her in while she was a Yale School of Drama student, is a revelation—cocky and cool and lethal, without having to breathe fire or get shrill. Sarah Manton, who shifts to Caryl Churchill world after surviving the hysterical highly choreographed ‘60s-set updated-Goldoni slapstick of One Man Two Guv’nors on Broadway, maintains her cool even when slapped down to the point of unstoppable sobbing. Anthony Cochrane, who’s worked for years with the Aquila Theatre Company and has extensive classical theater experience, gets down and dirty. Tommy Schrider plays unconcerned so well that he can on a bed and have people scream all around him and not have you feel it’s an unbelievable situation. Joby Earle, who’s been handed such an underwritten comic-relief role that he can’t help but deliver it in a laconic, disaffected Dudley Moore/Peter Cook drawl, finds ways to strengthen the part through physical shtick, a hangdog expression and just being a good listener. Finally, Alex Trow makes the most of two small and very different roles, one of which she turns into a masterful moment of silent Greek tragedy.

 

If you’re ever scared of modern sociopolitical plays, this is the kind you should be seeing so you won’t be scared of them anymore. It’s funny, engrossing and gritty. It’s about capitalism but it’s also about a intriguing group of scumbags and victims getting along because they live together in the only world they know.

 

For longtime Caryl Churchill fans, Owners is a fascinating exercise is how this major international playwright got where she is. But this early work isn’t a minor work—it’s a fully formed expression that has just been overshadowed over the years by Churchill’s more topical and feminist scripts.

 

Kudos to Evan Yionoulis for realizing that it’s time for Owners now, and for bringing such cool new concepts to the staging of it. She makes it her own, while making sure it’s still Caryl Churchill’s too.