🍷 The Rat Slips on Shards of Glass…
Welcome back to The Stage Rat—your theatre-obsessed rodent scuttling through the cracks of New York’s stages, where the strange stuff grows.
This week, I scurried into a broken fairy tale. At The Public, Caryl Churchill’s Glass. Kill. WHAT IF IF ONLY. Imp. plays like theatre in a dream—fractured, unsettling, and a little bit wicked.
A girl made of glass. Gods and murders. Ghosts. A secret in a bottle.
These four short plays, staged together for the first time by James Macdonald, are core Churchill: elliptical, eerie, and full of bite. She doesn’t give answers—she gives you something to nibble on in the dark.
Sadly not cheese ☹
THE RAT’S RECOMMENDATION:
“GLASS. KILL. WHAT IF IF ONLY. IMP.”
Cheese Score: 🧀🧀🧀 (3/5)
Description: A haunting collage of fractured fables, Glass. Kill. WHAT IF IF ONLY. Imp. is Caryl Churchill’s eerie meditation on innocence, violence, and the strange creatures lurking just beneath the surface of everyday life.
Why You Should Care:
Poetic, Strange, Vulnerable. Churchill isn’t here to comfort you. Her writing is provocative, fragmented, and often pitch black. A girl made of glass, gods who kill, ghosts who linger, an imp maybe—it’s myth and metaphor colliding in slow motion. The plays lurch toward abstraction and bring you along too.
Floating Design. The suspended set pieces are magical—beds hovering, furniture dangling in the void—create a world that’s literally and emotionally unstable. Scenes melt, logic bends, and you’re left drifting between stories.
Then Suddenly, They’re in the Air. Surprise acrobatic interludes break the plays up—giving an unexpected carnival/ circus theme. Mysterious.
And It’s Four Plays, Not Just One. In a single evening, you get a kaleidoscope of themes, tones, and textures—each short play bending time and meaning in its own way, with actors shifting roles across wildly different worlds.
Where - The Public
How long is this? - 2 hour 15 mins including intermission.
Who to Bring – Your friend who once wrote a ten-page paper on Beckett and hasn’t stopped referencing it since. The director who stages Hamlet in a bathtub and calls it “site-specific.” That one dramaturg who insists you’re not supposed to understand it. Someone who thinks Black Mirror is high art, and someone else who’s haunted by their childhood fairy tales.
Have you seen it? What's your rating?
Overall Cheese rating: 3/5
Tickets: To get free tickets to GLASS. KILL. WHAT IF IF ONLY. IMP. 👀 enter this week’s ticket lottery below.
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Until next week, keep it dramatic, keep it ratty, and always aim for center stage! 🐀✨.
P.S. Thanks for being part of this weird rat family. Please reply to this email and let us rats know how we are doing?
With lots of Ratitude,
The Stage Rat