Far Away
The story takes place in an unnamed setting at an unknown time. In the first act, ten-year-old Joan tells her aunt, Harper, about a strange shrieking noise she heard outside her aunt and uncle’s home. Harper tries to put a soothing spin on the story–first she says it must have been an owl, then a party thrown by the girl’s uncle. But once it becomes clear that Joan has seen him herding people from a truck into a bloody shed, where he strikes them with an iron rod, Harper swears her to secrecy. “You’re part of a big movement now to make things better. You can be proud of that. You can look at the stars and think here we are in our little bit of space, and I’m on the side of the people who are putting things right.”
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The performances are somewhat problematic, however. In the first act Karen Aldridge as Joan and Wendy Robie as Harper overplay the foreshadowing in their lines–a lighter touch would have made the eventual revelations more shocking. Using Aldridge as both the young and the older Joan is a wise choice, and the actress largely avoids the annoying habits of adults playing children. She also manages to make the grown-up Joan ridiculously self-absorbed but not hateful. Robie, however, rarely delivers a line without first arching her brows, pursing her lips into a rictus of shock, and otherwise Acting when a chirpy, understated tone would have been twice as terrifying. Her performance in the final act is markedly better, as she tries to determine what Todd knows about the world’s changing alliances. Dan Kuhlman’s portrayal of Todd is mostly on the surface, but I think that was Churchill’s intent: in the second act, the play’s most successful, he and Aldridge counterbalance the terror of the parade with their sitcomlike effervescent banter.
