Quintessence Theatre Group presents Jen Silverman’s Witch

Director Maura Krause marshals an all-star cast and design team to bring Then-ish and its misguided inhabitants to life. Silverman writes in American vernacular, so the play’s language is very accessible and its characters’ frustrations, limitations, and desires feel recognizable.

A cottage, a castle, and in between

For this production, Quintessence’s black-box theater is smartly designed by Isy Kessler with the stage set in the middle of the space, and the audience sitting on either side (with no bad views). Krause’s choice of staging gives us an intimate window into two homes: on one side, a rather dilapidated cottage where dried flowers hang and an apothecary holds glass jars and vials; on the other side is a long banquet table, replete with goblets and a stuffed pig. Kudos to props designer Liz McDonald whose sparse but detailed choices—a mortar and pestle, a platter of untouched grapes, a stained-glass portrait of a dead wife hanging overhead—evoke this strange yet familiar world.

The cottage belongs to Elizabeth Sawyer (the mesmerizing Suli Holum), the town’s shunned woman, and the latter is the dark castle of a wealthy nobleman, Sir Arthur Banks (Steven Rishard). This design allows us to feel present in both settings all at once (and Krause enhances that feeling by having actors freeze in place on the dark side of the stage when not being used). At times, the middle of the stage becomes a local tavern, where a smooth-talking underling devil named Scratch (Frank Jimenez) tries to lure townspeople into selling their souls in exchange for taking revenge and granting desires. The lives of the six people in Then-ish are intricately connected, and if any of them take Scratch up on his offer, it will have consequences for all.

Sizzling dialogue

Silverman’s dialogue is sharp, insightful, and funny, and this cast makes it sizzle. Each actor finds truth and depth playing flawed people who rarely exhibit empathy. In addition to the characters of Scratch, Elizabeth, and Banks, we meet Banks’s closeted and jealous son Cuddy (Trevor William Fayle), the hard-working and cutthroat son of a poor farmer Frank Thomas, (Abdul Sesay) and the self-sacrificing and naive Winnifred (Imani Lee Williams), who is secretly married to Frank and believes he will stay loyal to her. This ensemble never misses a beat, whether in their comic timing or the more dramatic revelations set throughout the play.

I was transfixed by Holum’s performance; her Elizabeth, the supposed witch, is strong and sensual, not self-pitying and ultimately not revenge-seeking. She has found a way to make a life for herself out of the dregs she’s been given: her little cottage in the woods turns out to be a much cozier and more truthful place than Banks’s cold castle.

A different world that is also the same

As women in our culture age, we become dismissed and disposable; this is true in the world of theater as well as film and so many other industries. Silverman has written a dynamic, searing older female character in Elizabeth Sawyer and Holum’s performance of her is gripping and electric. This version of Sawyer feels like a correction for the real woman the character was based on, who was accused of being a witch as so many healers and herbalists in the 14th-17th centuries were. But we watch the play knowing that history’s cycles of hope and despair continue, more so now than we might have expected.

“I’m not arguing for the end of the world—but then again, maybe I am,” Elizabeth Sawyer tells us in her opening monologue. Can the world as it is be fixed in some way or do we need to burn it all down to create something new, an equitable world where everyone’s humanity is valued?

Witch offers no easy answers, but brings us into an entertaining and engaging world to hold that question; a world that is both different and the same as our own.