Review: ESCAPED ALONE Serves Up Afternoon Tea and Anxiety, at Shaking the Tree

Three older women -- Sally, Lena, and Vi -- sit in a garden. A neighbor, Mrs. Jarrett, joins them, and the four spend the afternoon talking about things you'd expect women to talk about over tea in a garden: their families, how the town has changed, and so on. They never actually drink the tea, which is perhaps the first indication that this seemingly bucolic scene in Caryl Churchill's 2016 play ESCAPED ALONE is anything but.

Then Mrs. Jarrett stands up and puts all doubt to rest. The lights dim, abstract digital projections appear in the background, and the heretofore friendly neighbor starts either predicting or recounting apocalyptic horrors. After a few minutes, she sits down, the lights come back up, and the four women resume their conversation.

Over the course of the short play, this pattern repeats with both the women's conversation and Mrs. Jarrett's apocalyptic visions taking increasingly darker turns. In the garden, Sally, Lena, and Vi move from singing "You've Lost That Loving Feeling" to giving voice their deepest fears and anxieties. Meanwhile in the alternate reality, Mrs. Jarrett's visions become both more menacing and more fantastical -- viruses, catastrophic climate events, famine, technology-caused doomsday scenarios. Eventually, Mrs. Jarrett leaves and the play is over.

Throughout ESCAPED ALONE, and perhaps for a long time after, you'll likely find yourself wondering what it all means. It's probably best not to worry too much about answering that question and instead focus on how it makes you feel. For me, those feelings ranged from confused to anxious to terrified, which happens to also describe fairly accurately how I feel when I read the news. By juxtaposing personal horrors with apocalyptic ones, ESCAPED ALONE captures our current societal unease and also seems to reprimand us for sitting around lamenting our personal problems when much, much larger troubles are threatening.

Churchill's play is unique not only in its craftsmanship, but in that it has four parts for older women. Shaking the Tree's production stars Jane Bement Geesman, JoAnn Johnson, Lorraine Bahr, and Jacklyn Maddux, providing a rare opportunity to watch these masters at work in a play that's not about age. They are all excellent, but Bahr stands out with her quietly heartbreaking performance as Lena, a woman suffering with crippling depression and anxiety.

ESCAPED ALONE is not an easy play. If you're looking for nothing more than an evening's entertainment, then it's not for you. If you're okay with ambiguity and a lack of closure, and you're willing to let the play lurk around in your subconscious for a while, occasionally tossing out small revelations, then I recommend you give it a whirl.

ESCAPED ALONE runs through June 1. More details and tickets here.

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