Becky Nurse (Deirdre O’Connell, left) consults a witch (Candy Buckley) for help getting a job, but buys in to remedies for more than employment.
Becky Nurse of Salem is a showcase for Deirdre O’Connell, long one of the unsung heroines of New York theater. The actress may have won a Tony this year for her performance in Dana H., in which she lip-synched to a recording, but in Sarah Ruhl’s new play the audience is treated to the full O’Connell, including her voice.
A woman’s voice is actually key to Ruhl’s play, which can be as riveting as a car wreck but is sometimes confusing and surreal. Becky is a descendant of Rebecca Nurse, hanged in 1692 in the Massachusetts Bay Colony for witchcraft. Becky is a docent at the Salem Museum of Witchcraft in Salem, Mass. She has a habit of not following the script in her tours, and one day she utters “f---” and “whore” and is reported by the Catholic tour group. Her life spirals downward, although it has not been smooth sailing previously. As her friend Bob (an earnest, likable Bernard White), a bartender who was her high school sweetheart, points out: “You’re always going to shoot yourself in the foot.”
Becky’s granddaughter Gail (Alicia Crowder) is being discharged from rehab after opioid addiction and is coming home. But Gail has become involved with a Goth-leaning young man, Stan (Julian Sanchez), who by chance has snapped up a job as a night clerk at a Marriott that Becky had hoped to rebound with. Meanwhile, Becky is rekindling the relationship with Bob, who is trapped in a loveless marriage. And she is fighting her own drug addiction.
Ruhl’s play tries to weave all these threads together, but the point is often foggy, and the character of Becky is maddening, although O’Connell handles everything, from anger to motherly affection to romantic yearnings, with aplomb.
As a character, Becky is almost doggedly unsympathetic, even though she advises Gail at one point: “If you wish to be loved, first be lovable.” Becky is controlling and quick to anger, but O’Connell is adept at giving anger and frustration a comic spin. Early on, with Bob at his bar (while a Trump rally plays on TV and chants of “Lock her up!” are pointedly heard), she says, “I hate myself because I’m too bitter.” And she is, although McConnell gives her such vivid life that you can’t look away.
Becky welcomes her daughter Gail (Alicia Crowder) home from rehab. Photographs by Kyle Froman.
Some of Becky’s complaints are justified. She’s living paycheck to paycheck, and jobs are hard to find. Her boss Shelby (Tina Benko), a cool blonde, is “cutting jobs and putting in more videos so you don’t need real people to give tours anymore. You just press the button and some creepy voice says: ‘Do you believe in witches? Your ancestors did.’ ”
Such complaints have been commonplace for a long while, though, and apply to everyone, not just women, although Ruhl seems to have created Becky as an avatar for exhibiting the injustices women have faced for centuries as well as the particular challenges of the character. But Becky herself won’t own her bad behavior. Confronting Shelby at her firing, she says, “You act like you care about other women on paper but when it comes to actual women you toss them under the bus.” Shelby’s response is reasonable:
Becky, I don’t believe in people like you and people like me. We need to lift each other up. That’s what this museum should be about, teaching women not to accuse each other, and not to be divided by the patriarchy.
At that, Becky changes the subject.
Becky hangs out with her high school sweetheart, Bob (Bernard White).
Still, it’s a stretch when Becky visits a witch—the character has no other name—for help in finding a job and buys into the notion that she carries an ancestral curse. Candy Buckley plays the seer with a broadly comic Boston accent—oontment for ointment, for example. She wants $400 to remove the kyurse. Becky ends up getting instructions to make Gail and Stan break up, to make Bob fall for her, and to punish Shelby, as well as a potion and crystals. Strangely, they work.
Under Rebecca Taichmann’s direction, the production incorporates flashbacks and dream sequences, accompanied by Tal Yarden’s projections of the trial transcripts and Barbara Samuels’ swirling lights, to the Salem trial of Rebecca Nurse (also played by O’Connell), but they give the story a disjointed feel.
Ultimately, the play seems a gallimaufry of elements that never really cohere and at times challenge credibility. Underneath Becky bubbles a feminist sensibility—“there were no women on the jury [in Salem],” Becky grouses offhandedly—but its many disparate elements fail to cohere.
The Lincoln Center production of Becky Nurse of Salem runs through Dec. 31 at the Mitzi Newhouse Theater (150 West 66th St.). Evening performances are at 8 p.m. Wednesday and Friday and at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday; matinees are at 2 p.m. Wednesday and Saturday, and also on Friday, Dec., 23, and Monday, Dec. 26. For tickets and information, visit, lct.org.
