Shattered Globe Theatre’s “Becky Nurse of Salem,” with Linda Reiter and Rebecca Jordan/Photo: Liz Lauren
It’s hard to imagine a more Halloween-appropriate theatrical offering than “Becky Nurse of Salem,” now enjoying its Midwest premiere courtesy of Shattered Globe Theatre. Written by highly esteemed, Chicago-bred playwright Sarah Ruhl (creator of such works as “Eurydice,” “The Clean House” and “Dead Man’s Cell Phone”) and directed by longtime Ruhl collaborator Polly Noonan, who helmed Ruhl’s “Melancholy Play” at Evanston’s Piven Theatre Workshop in 2015, “Becky Nurse” is about America’s first great real-life horror story, the Salem witch trials. But while it starts spookily, it ends more soapily, as a fairly conventional melodrama with an ending that verges on the saccharine.
The disappointment is keen because the show begins so promisingly. Seated on either side of Jack Magaw’s pared-down, no-nonsense set, breathing in the fake fog of the self-consciously eerie atmosphere, viewers are transformed into visitors to the Salem Museum of Witchcraft, where we are captive listeners to the noticeably cranky narration provided by the title character. Becky Nurse is not only a longtime museum tour guide, but also a descendant of Rebecca Nurse, one of the falsely accused and condemned Salem “witches,” as well as a self-declared expert in all things relating to the horrific events of 1692.
As played by the terrific Linda Reiter, whose Bay State accent is dead-on (kudos to dialect coach Eva Breneman), Becky is a salt-of-the-earth New Englander of a certain age who manages to radiate all kinds of things, ranging from the pain of old wounds and old guilt, to a winning vulnerability, to a chronic, stubborn pugnacity. We’re immediately thrust into Becky’s precarious existence in a town that feels like a family curse, yet which she cannot leave, as it contains the only things that matter to her: her motherless granddaughter, Gail (Isabella Maria Valdés) and her high-school classmate, Bob (Ramón Camín), who is married now but was once—and may still be—the apple of her eye.
Shattered Globe Theatre’s “Becky Nurse of Salem,” with Linda Reiter/Photo: Liz Lauren
Having strayed from the approved museum script once too often, Becky is fired by her officious, much-younger boss Shelby (played by Hilary Williams, who gives a sharp edge to a small part), who proclaims a feminist bond with Becky, then mocks her for presuming to know something about her own family history despite her lack of a college degree. Lonely, broke and hooked on pain pills, Becky makes the fateful decision to consult the town witch—a good witch, who “doesn’t do revenge.” The plot thickens, as the twenty-first-century story begins to converge with the seventeenth-century background. Both are framed against the 2016 election, featuring the fervently woman-hating Donald Trump leading his rabid supporters in the vicious anti-Hillary chant, “Lock her up!”
The meeting between Becky and the witch-for-hire—from whom she asks for supernatural aid in obtaining love, a job and some sense of control—is the play’s high point. The fiery Rebecca Jordan is a sultry diva of an enchantress, her lithe hands and malleable face always in rhythmic, expressive motion. Her erotically tinged, star-power energy—in stark contrast to Becky’s testy gracelessness—suggests that what Becky needs isn’t so much a change of luck as a dose of drama in her drab, airless life.
It’s after this scene that the play loses its drive. The problem isn’t in the acting or directing—Shattered Globe’s ensemble work is as strong as ever, and director Noonan seamlessly connects the modern-day story with the dream sequences set in colonial times—but rather in the writing, which gets tangled among its too-numerous plot points and messages. By the end, it’s by no means clear how the many themes—including, for a start, family dysfunction, opioid addiction, feminine non-solidarity, the lingering trauma of past injustice and the frustrations of aging in a youth-centered culture—relate to each other or to the general topic of witchcraft. Moreover, the play’s two romances fail to add spice to the mix, because the two male parts—Becky’s once and future beau Bob and young Gail’s wicca-loving, post-rehab boyfriend Stan (Diego Rivera-Rodriguez)—are more moveable props than three-dimensional characters. The play slows down dramatically over its two-hour-plus length, lumbering toward a too-neat resolution that’s less Halloween treat than Hollywood contrivance.
Shattered Globe Theatre’s “Becky Nurse of Salem,” with Linda Reiter and Adam Schulmerich/Photo: Liz Lauren
It’s only by reading Ruhl’s lengthy afterword, inserted in the program, that one comes to understand what “Becky Nurse” really is: a rebuttal of Arthur Miller’s 1953 play, “The Crucible,” with its focus on male witch-trial victim John Proctor and—as persuasively argued by Ruhl—his nonexistent adulterous affair with witchery “victim” and accuser Abigail Williams. As Ruhl notes, the made-up Proctor-Williams relationship (she was actually a child of eleven at the time, not seventeen, as in Miller’s play) had more to do with the married Miller’s simmering feelings toward the much younger Marilyn Monroe than with Salem history. The problem is that Ruhl’s essay is more cogent than her play, and the negative impulse behind “Becky Nurse” throws the work off-balance, turning what could have been an absorbing character study into an overloaded, less-than-cohesive diatribe that ends on an implausible happy-ever-after note.
At least Miller’s play, for all its flaws, is clearly and courageously about something: the implacable cruelty of the McCarthyite red-baiting, which was at its height when “The Crucible” opened on Broadway. “Becky Nurse” would be a better play if it had taken off from Miller’s clear-eyed critique of the witch-hunt dynamics of the American far right. Instead she makes Miller the enemy, tarring him with the accusation of misogyny for what seems to me the forgivable offense of giving dramatic vigor to a long-ago, still-murky episode by adding a psychosexual motivation to the mix.
Miller at least pushes his characters and dramatic concept to their logical, tragic conclusion. “Becky Nurse”—well-played and well-staged as it is—hangs back in the second act, as though unsure of just what it wants to say about women and class and ageism and state power and the too many other topics the playwright has bitten off. It’s a play that negates itself, and the feeling it leaves behind isn’t catharsis, but rather frustration.
Shattered Globe Theatre’s “Becky Nurse of Salem” runs through November 16 at Theater Wit, 1229 West Belmont. Tickets are $15-$52, available at SGTheatre.org or by calling the Theater Wit box office at (773)975-8150.
