Performing Arts

02:25 PM CDT on Friday, October 14, 2005

By LAWSON TAITTE / The Dallas Morning News

Those Grimm Brothers knew that fairy tales are inherently, well, grim. Caryl Churchill wants to teach us the same lesson.

IRWIN THOMPSON/DMN

SATER's dramatically and technically sharp production marks an important new force on the Dallas theater scene.

The great British playwright's outrageously ambitious The Skriker is enjoying its area premiere in a production by SATER at the Dallas Hub Theater in Deep Ellum. This is one of the most demanding plays, dramatically and technically, of the last decade. SATER's more than capable production far surpasses what the company has done to date. It marks the arrival of an important new force on the Dallas theater scene.

Billed as "a dark urban faerie tale," The Skriker populates London with weird supernatural creatures. It's a huge cast, but most of the action and nearly all dialogue goes to three performers.

Eleanor T. Threatt plays the Skriker. We first see her in a long prologue as a seemingly mad street person, spouting long paragraphs halfway between schizoid word association and Finnegan's Wake. There's method to this madness, though.

Cut to a rural mental hospital where a pregnant young woman, Lily (Christie Shane), is visiting a friend, Josie (Cassandra Steele), who has apparently harmed her own baby. Josie keeps talking about a mysterious creature, hundreds of years old, who has been pursuing her. Enter Ms. Threatt, visible to Josie but not Lily. The Skriker has the typical fairy's power to grant wishes, it seems. Josie wishes her tormentor would follow Lily instead of her – and off the Skriker goes when Lily exits.

The play's genius is to keep us on the knife's edge between belief in the supernatural events taking place right in front our eyes and our – quite natural – skepticism. Is Josie merely mentally ill? Is the Skriker just a succession of random street persons, a woman encountered in a pub, a child in the park?

The show is a tour de force for the three leading actors. Ms. Threatt has the most obviously challenging part: a dazzler. She has done excellent work previously in Fort Worth and at Theatre Three, but nothing that quite prepares us for this. Ms. Shane and Ms. Steele are just as accomplished in a more naturalistic, but still electrifying, vein.

Much credit must go to the director, Robert Neblett, who is new in town. He and his design team have done a good job focusing the swirl of activity around the three leads. No doubt more time and a bigger budget could have made the function of these mysterious figures clearer. But then, mystery is the whole point of The Skriker.

E-mail ltaitte@dallasnews.com

The Skriker, presented by SATER at the Dallas Hub Theater, 2809 Canton Street, through Nov. 5. Runs 115 min. Tickets $15 to $20. Call 214-749-7010, or go to www.dallashubtheater.org.