VINEGAR TOM
We don’t burn our witches anymore, but sex and satanism still make for a good political bonfire. What tends to get overlooked is the question of why some people are, in fact, drawn to satanism. Some scholarship has clarified the processes by which pagan gods and goddesses were distorted and transformed by the Christian patriarchy into images of evil: for example, the fertility god Dionysus, with his sacred serpents, cloven-hoofed satyr sidekicks, and cult of frenzied female bacchantes, became the witch-seducing devil of medieval Christianity, while the significant role of woman as the vessel through which Satan operates has roots in ancient man’s efforts to stamp out mother-goddess worship.
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In her 1976 play Vinegar Tom, having its midwest premiere at the hands of the Trinity Square Ensemble, British writer Caryl Churchill focuses on a more earthly aspect of satanism. Churchill’s theme is the sexual and economic politics that fueled the mid-17th-century persecution of alleged witches, at the height of which an estimated 3,000 to 4,000 people were executed in one 20-year period. Rather than basing her script on a specific incident (as, say, Arthur Miller did in The Crucible), Churchill paints a composite portrait of how different women’s responses to their difficult lives was branded as witchcraft by the male-dominated establishment. If that description sounds like a prototype of feminist rhetoric, so it should: Churchill’s play was commissioned by the British women’s theatrical collective Monstrous Regiment, and it makes no bones about stating the case for women’s righteous anger at unfair practices of the past and the present.
Unfortunately, as if she wasn’t sure she’d made her point, Churchill interrupts her drama’s action with a series of songs, sung by actresses who have doffed their 17th-century costumes for modern dress. The songs themselves–with music in a Celtic folk style by Helen Glavin, arranged for this production by Michael O’Toole–are excellent, beautifully harmonized and superbly sung. But they drive home points that have already been driven home; they don’t add new levels of understanding as do, say, Kurt Weill’s songs in The Threepenny Opera (an obvious inspiration for Churchill). And as the drama grows progressively more gripping, the songs seem increasingly insipid, undermining rather than reinforcing the playwright’s thesis that the prejudices facing 17th-century women were not that different from those facing contemporary women.
