Review: "Far Away" Puts You Up Close to Churchill's Dystopia

Far Away

Written by Caryl Churchill

Directed by Sam Gibbs

Presented by Stairwell Theater at Box of Moonlight

17 Saratoga Ave, Brooklyn, NYC

November 6-23, 2025

L to R: Joel Watson, Avalina Ortiz, Maude Mitchell, Rebecca Tyree Gibbs. Photo by Ellie Gravitte.




Caryl Churchill's 2000 play Far Away, which marries the haunting and the absurd in evoking the conflict-riven reality that its characters inhabit, has previously received perhaps only one in-person professional production in New York City, receiving its American premiere at the New York Theatre Workshop in 2002. Now, Stairwell Theater has brought Far Away to Brooklyn's Box of Moonlight, a converted warehouse space in Bushwick, giving audiences a chance to see a rarely staged work from an inimitable playwright in an immersive, site-specific staging. Making superb use of this immersiveness, Stairwell's marvelous production delivers a memorable experience of a play that has lost none of its power and prescience over the past quarter century.

In Churchill's introduction to the fourth volume of her collected plays (Nick Hern Books, 2008), she describes Far Away as "three parts [that] can seem disconnected, linked only by the girl who goes through them and widening hostilities, but I think they are also linked by the characters' desire to be on the side of what's right" (p. 4). That girl is Joan, played when young by Avalina Ortiz, who has some very funny moments amidst the disquiet that permeates the scene, and as an adult by a terrific Rebecca Tyree Gibbs, who also performs a sort of opening title sequence using shadow puppetry. Young Joan is staying with her aunt Harper (Obie Award winner Maude Mitchell) in an unspecified part of an unspecified England, and her report that she heard a human shriek and climbed out of her bedroom window to investigate leads to an escalating series of revelations as to what Joan witnessed. Her uncle is involved in these events, and her aunt, at least for awhile, attempts to justify them, including violence against children who are on the 'wrong' side by parentage or behavior, a stance that could probably get Harper a good job with the U.S. government. Mitchell brings wonderful nuance to Harper, expressing her convictions with genuineness such that the audience is kept fittingly off balance as to how far we should be persuaded by her perspective.
L to R: Rebecca Tyree Gibbs, Avalina Ortiz, Maude Mitchell, Joel Watson. Photo by Ellie Gravitte.
The second scene finds Joan, no longer a child, working as a hat-maker for an organization that provides hats for a seemingly government-run parade. We watch the hats grow in size and elaborateness as she works alongside a man named Todd (Joel Watson) over the course of several days, as they bond, disagree, and bond again. Todd, a veteran of this work and played by Watson as perceptive, unobtrusively supportive, and committed to his values, complains of corruption in management and is a stickler for artistic standards; but while the pair even talk about going to the press about the crookedness in their workplace, they seem unbothered by their complicity–and that of their art–in inhumane, oppressive practices, as we see when the parade itself takes place. In the third and final scene, capped by a brief moment linking back to the young Joan at that now long-ago window, we learn, as Todd converses with Harper, that he, like perhaps everyone, has been drawn into a conflict that satirically takes the idea of a war of all against all beyond a logical extreme. The battered-looking pair's eventual reunion with Joan climaxes with a mesmerizing monologue from Tyree Gibbs, the absurd elements of which negate neither its horrors nor its final touch of beauty.

Throughout the play, the all-too plausible (televised trials as nightly entertainment, for example) is thrown into relief by its blending with the implausible (deer, for instance, choosing and changing sides in a war involving human nations). However much the characters believe they are fighting for the good, the sense of tribalism's poisonousness always lingers. "Crocodiles," Harper intones to Todd, "are evil and it is always right to be opposed to crocodiles." Of course, crocodiles are part of a different side and different "alliance" than they are. The admixture of the realistic and absurd is reflected in some aspects of the staging, such as the way that the proscenium arch and red curtain which frames the mundanity of Harper's sitting room calls to mind the unreality of a puppet theater. The show does not confine itself to this raised stage but makes tremendous use of its atypical space. Spectators seat themselves on small stools and are encouraged to move as they feel necessary as the actions shifts to various areas. At times, there is no choice but to do so, as in the incredible, chills-inducing parade scene, during which shackled characters in numbered burlap sacks and fantastical hats (designed by Karen Boyer and Maria Camila) process, amidst a smoky haze and accompanied by a live snare drum and a dirge-like arrangement of John Tams's war-and-king-focused version of "Over the Hills and Far Away." Similarly, in the play's final monologue, which ends with the image of stepping into a river, Tyree Gibbs parts the audience like water as she moves through the space. Throughout, shifts in space, time, and mood are signaled or enhanced by Emmanuel Delgado's color-rich lighting design. Far Away works to undermine easy certainties of "what's right," but Stairwell Theater's spectacular production leaves us with one certitude intact: don't miss this show.

-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards

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