Escaped Alone
Yale Repertory Theatre
1120 Chapel St.
Through March 30, 2024
A group of women are talking together in a garden, under the shade of a tree. In the patterns of their speech, their ability to finish one another’s sentences, it’s clear they’ve been friends for years. But their conversation is about nothing serious. It’s just a way to spend an afternoon. Suddenly there’s a piercing sound, a blinding light, and the stage is plunged in darkness, the tree suddenly a stark silhouette against a roiling background. From one of the women, we get a report of calamity, of mass death, utter mayhem. The lights blind again, and we return to the sunlit garden, the four women still just talking as though nothing has changed. But something has changed.
Caryl Churchill’s Escaped Alone is a by turns hilarious and harrowing, exploratory, and utterly relevant play by a modern playwriting master that, under the direction of Liz Diamond, is given a fleet, brilliant staging at the Rep’s Chapel Street theater.
