In this, the season of Halloween, and Day of the Dead, Shattered Globe Theatre offers a discovery of witches.
With “Becky Nurse of Salem,” acclaimed playwright and Wilmette native Sarah Ruhl’s drama flies between the Salem, Massachusetts of 2016-2017 and the Salem of 1692. Although he’s never mentioned, the later dates are embedded in the context of Donald Trump taking control of the White House. The earlier date? That was when 19 people, mostly women, were hanged on Salem’s Gallows Hill for being witches.
Directed by Ruhl’s collaborator of over 20 years (and fellow alum of Evanston’s Piven Theatre Workshop) Polly Noonan, “Becky Nurse” initially seems like an acidic, ruthlessly timely and relentlessly factual corrective to the lore that’s sprung up like a forest of romanticized, poisonous mushrooms around the 17th century Salem witch frenzy.
But to its detriment, “Becky Nurse of Salem” tackles more than the enduring damage caused by a fear of women so deep it led to their state-sanctioned murder on trumped-up charges. Ruhl also digs into the opioid crisis, a pair of multi-generational love stories, near-death experiences, economic insecurity, the fraught relationships among mothers and daughters and the machinations of a good, old-fashioned court-room drama. There is a lot going on here, often at the cost of streamlined, taut narrative.
Ruhl’s style is uneven — some scenes play almost as farcical, a jarring aesthetic when they’re jumbled up against moments of utter pathos and tragedy. Dramas can contain multitudes, obviously, but they aren’t contained here so much as scattered.
That said, the history “Becky Nurse” conjures is eye-opening. So is Becky Nurse’s take on Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible,” wherein the entire witch-hunt frenzy is ultimately traced back to Abigail Williams, a 17-year-old “whore” (so she’s called in the script) who is driven to witchiness by her lust for the tale’s hero, farmer John Proctor.
Becky Nurse (Linda Reiter), who works as a guide at the Salem Museum of Witchcraft, doesn’t stick to the official museum script, and has no patience for the tacky, a historical ooky-spooky atmospherics the town traffics in. She has even less patience for Miller. “The Crucible” is about one heroic man, Becky Nurse dryly notes, but the real Salem witch trials were about 14 murdered women.
In Ruhl’s play, modern-day Becky Nurse’s troubles spiral after she visits A Witch (Rebecca Jordan), an otherwise unnamed character whose ability to “see” into Becky’s life is just specific enough to be uncanny but also vague enough to make you wonder if she’s also actually a charlatan. Love potions and darker enchantments follow, fire and ash and crystals all coming into play as Becky attempts to fix all that’s wrong with her life and history’s treatment of Salem’s “witches.”
The glue holding the occasionally frayed threads of the story together is Reiter’s all-in depiction of Becky Nurse and her ancestor, Rebecca Nurse. The role demands a range from cuddly pillow-talk to screaming terror and most points in between. It’s a showcase worthy of Reiter’s formidable skills. A pillar of Shattered Globe’s ensemble since its formation more than 30 years ago, Reiter’s powers have only grown over the decades.
As A Witch, Jordan provides the production’s supernatural (maybe) flashpoint. She channels a mix of Stevie Nicks and one of the weird sisters from “Macbeth,” rendering both with a glamorous eeriness that’s pretty spell-binding, her grin flickering from crocodilian to empathetic in the space of a firing synapse.
The supporting cast — including Isabella Maria Valdes as Becky’s granddaughter Gail, Ramon Camin as her cringe-y love interest, Bob and Hilary Williams as commerce-focused the museum director — does mostly adequate work on Jack Magaw’s minimalistic, flexible set.
It wasn’t until 2022 that the last of the Salem “witches” were officially pardoned, a rather shocking fact pointed out in Noonan’s must-read program notes. Airing the history that led to their murders and centuries of official condemnation is a trenchant, seasonally marketable idea.
But “Becky Nurse” waters down its impact by taking on so many plot points, it starts to feel like an overstuffed soap opera where there are too many stakes, none of them honed to an actual point.