Churchill downs Zeitgeist takes on Armageddon BY IRIS FANGER
	Far Away By Caryl Churchill. Directed by David J. Miller. Set by Miller. Lighting by Jeff Adelberg. Costumes by Loann West. Sound by Walter Eduardo. With Renee Miller, Nicole Brathwaite or Natanjah Driscoll, Naeemah A. White-Peppers, and Paul Rorie. Presented by Zeitgeist Stage Company at Boston Center for the Arts’ Black Box Theater through January 24.

Imagine, if you will, a trio of theatrical parables that begins in a bucolic country home. A small child is visiting her aunt for a sleepover, but the things that she sees go bump in the night are streaked with blood and letting out screams in a first scene that takes its subtext from Hannah Arendt’s writings on the banality of evil. This unspoken message follows through to scene two of British playwright Caryl Churchill’s Far Away. Set several years later, it depicts two workers making hats and talking about the difficult conditions of the shop, avoiding mention, however, of the terrifying purpose for which the headwear is intended.

By the third scene, when further years have passed, events have escalated into a war that’s engulfed all living and inanimate inhabitants of the planet. The conflagration affects not only men, women, and children but also animals and plants, as well as such forces of nature as rivers and winds. Churchill paints a world where no living thing can be trusted: not the innocent, brown-eyed does that descend in mad packs to assault the patrons of shopping malls; not family members, who might expel one of their number into the fearsome darkness; not even children under five, who could be in league with the enemy. Moreover, the playwright unfurls her vision of Armageddon in less than an hour.

The author of Cloud Nine and Top Girls among other works, Churchill has penned a spare and prophetic one-act that holds too many allusions to current headlines and the roll call of 20th/21st-century atrocities to be shrugged off as fantasy. Taking cues for obliqueness of dialogue from David Mamet and Harold Pinter and intimations of a political system run amok from Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale and George Orwell’s 1984, the playwright brings us into a cosmos of evasions, lies, and the ultimate debasement of the principles of decency and morality, not to mention the demise of democracy and the Bill of Rights. For a reality check, try following the escalation of the powers ascribed to our own Department of Homeland Security.

Far Away (the title itself is an exercise in irony) had its premiere in 2000 at London’s Royal Court Theatre and an Off Broadway mounting in 2002 by the New York Theatre Workshop that was followed by a number of other productions. It’s a three-character play (for four actors, since the character of Joan appears first as the child of scene one) that uses a large number of supernumeraries who set the tone of horror. The members of the audience are made accomplices when they enter, being given seats behind railings that suggest the confines of the witness box in a courtroom.

Although credit is due Zeitgeist Stage Company for staging Far Away’s New England premiere, director David J. Miller has staged the play in a realistic manner, without the surreal effect that Churchill’s paring down of visible emotion creates. Also, in the Boston Center for the Arts’ tiny Black Box Theater, the distance between viewer and actor is not sufficient to hide the bare theatrics. Apart from child actor Natanjah Driscoll, who’s dead-on correct in her suspicious questioning of her aunt, the performers seldom project, beneath the straightforward delivery of lines, any knowledge of their characters’ bondage. Renee Miller as Harper transforms from a cozy auntie into a militaristic martinet without letting us see that she understands her actions as a power grab. Naeemah A. White-Peppers as the adult Joan is too accepting of her fate; Paul Rorie is simply bland in the face of chaos. The recitations by the actors in the final scene, in which they relate alliances of flora and fauna as if these were a Biblical list of begats, fail to enhance the poetic nature of the playwright’s language. And though Miller has staged the scene-two "coup de théâtre" with all the smoke, bodies, and props at his disposal, he lacks the imagination to take us beyond the obvious historical references. Rather than an echo of the horrors of times past, we need a warning about the bleak future that current behavior might bring about.