Beaver Hills | Culture & Community | Southern Connecticut State University | Arts & Culture
Khabyra Alston Kennie as Miriam. Lucy Gellman Photo.
Miriam’s body is somewhere between the town’s water pump and the main square, her mind a tangle of blood and bone. Her mouth twists into a thin, buckling line, and a viewer can feel it in their chest. Her feet find the ground beneath them, but barely. “I wanted to help,” she persists, turning toward another woman who is already a ghost.
“Yes,” the woman says, and her voice comes from outside of her body. Around them, the ground is soaked with human blood, and still somehow bone dry. The olive grove on a nearby hill, so lush and full of life, seems far away. “You wanted to. You could have.”
A delicate, devastating lyricism—and the opening it creates—hums through A Skin of Veils, which ran at the John Lyman Center for the Performing Arts at Southern Connecticut State University last Thursday through Saturday night. Written by Emma Joy Hill and directed by Gracy Brown, the play explores occupation, colonialism, and the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war.
In doing so, it asks a viewer to encounter, reckon with, and answer to the twin horrors of violence and patriarchy, whether they are a world away, or lingering just down the street. It’s now on New Haven to give the show an afterlife.
“This is a play about cycles of war and violence that uses mythology to tell the story,” said Hill, who is also the interim director of marketing and communications at Long Wharf Theatre, before a final run-through last week. “I’m really trying to explore violence onstage … and also to get people to take action [after the show]. The world’s on fucking fire and we need to do something.”
Set in an unidentified war zone, A Skin of Veils tells the story of Miriam (Khabyra Alston Kennie) and her neighbor (Nexxus Ortiz), young women who are coming of age in the midst of an occupation that has turned fear into a form of obedience. As the play opens, Miriam has just married Joe (Cristian Montanez), who is three times her senior but has a soft, pensive side that suggests there is a deeper story there. Neighbor is heartsick and resolved all at once, with a steely demeanor that cracks only in the privacy of those the character trusts.
Around them, violence against women has become an everyday occurrence, with soldiers (Edward Santiago, Davin Garamella, and a chilling Johnathan Christiano) who announce themselves with maniacal laughter, pocket knives and long weapons drawn, ready to strike for the sake of striking. None among them is crueller than Panther (Jade McGovern), a leader whose cold, calculating edge is hard to watch, and harder still to stomach.
That Miriam and Neighbor try to find joy in this place, that her parents (both played by a shape-shifting Mia Cruz) have kept her safe for this long, that her Aunt Elizabeth (Kira Kelly, who also plays an unnamed woman) is shepherding new life into the world—all of these feel like miracles in this universe, and in ours too. And all of them, Hill asserts in the course of 90 minutes, are breakable in this world of man-made borders and equally man-made conflicts.
Jade McGovern as Panther.
Take, for instance, an early scene in which soldiers barge their way into the town, setting every nerve on edge. The women, who before had been going about their lives, stop in their tracks. One screams and drops a bucket that she’s been filling. Panther, delighted at this havoc, begins to peel an apple, likening it to a woman’s flesh.
“Oh, what men will do when they realize a woman’s heart is a pincushion,” Panther says, and there’s a cool edge that turns to something sickly. “Their skin, you can fold it in your hands.”
Or consider another, in which Miriam and her father are debating what constitutes violence without ever splitting hairs over the term itself. He breathes a sigh of relief because her body is untouched by occupying forces, and she pushes back—“But it was me. It was every woman there!”—in a way that is so fundamental about how women see the need to protect each other. It is both timely and timeless, because violence has existed as long as men have existed.
Hill is a master storyteller, and her ability to weave myth and metaphor (and sacred text, including the Madonna story) into very real, cyclical histories of violence makes her characters feel robust and alive. In every iteration of Miriam, and every breath that Alston Kennie takes on stage, there is a reminder that patriarchy, whiteness and colonialism are all intimate bedfellows; that the chaos, confusion and fear that they breed are part of the point.
Alston Kennie doesn’t do any of it alone. As Neighbor, Ortiz is a revelation, fearless until the facade crumbles, and the audience remembers how deeply human the act of love itself can be. Ortiz crosses the stage, feet ensconced in the soft tan fabric of dance slippers, and becomes a whole library of emotion, everything snugly packed and shelved in order. The actor moves to the front of the stage, face tilted toward the light, and there’s something bold and pugnacious there, rumbling just beneath the surface.
Some of the show’s strongest scenes place Ortiz alongside Alston Kennie, including a pugnacious interchange with Panther and a dance-like sequence that casts their slender, slow-moving shadows against the creamy, thick curtain of a tent. Neighbor pours a cup of water over Miriam’s arched back, and we in the audience remember what it is to hold another human being.
Kelly, who plays Miriam’s aunt Elizabeth, has mastered this same kind of calm, but with a quirky kind of energy that has her talking a mile a minute until she’s suddenly too quiet. When she is giving counsel to Miriam, she brings a lightness to the play that lifts it up, a reminder not that she is funny or flippant, but that she is strong. At one point, she approaches the town’s water pump with a swishing skirt and a brightness in her laugh, and for a moment it’s possible to forget the violence that exists just paces away. At another, she sinks her feet into the soil, and it feels like a form of prayer.
But it is Hill’s soldiers, a knot of cackling, interchangeable bodies, who are perhaps the most interesting part of this show, in part because they are so very hard to watch. McGovern is frightening, with a kind of vacancy where the general’s face used to be (just imagine John Cameron Mitchell’s Hedwig, but possessed by Satan). Around him, soldiers fall into line, with a transformation of a baby-faced, still-tender recruit (Connor Doughney) that is particularly hard to watch. When Panther turns to him, blade extended, we in the audience know that this can’t end well, and that the precipitous spiral of violence that follows is inevitable.
Christiano, who speaks almost no words at all, is even more unnerving as he walks through the space, an eerie grin plastered onto his face, mask-like in the half-light of the stage. When he laughs, it is the kind of laugh of a yes man, a laugh of someone who is only half-alive.
The result is a play that is nowhere, and therefore everywhere at once. In one world, Miriam could be New Haven’s own very real and very loved Azhar Ahmed, whose parents fled the Nuba Mountains before she was born, hoping that it was enough to keep her safe.
In another, maybe she is Nancy Martinez, who was arrested and detained by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement Agents earlier this year, while dropping her kids off to school in the city’s Hill neighborhood. Or maybe she is one of the 60 women hunger striking in Umm al Khair earlier this year, in anguish over the murder of peace activist Awdah Al Hathaleen at the hands of settlers in the West Bank.
If there are references to other texts here, from the Bible to Lisa Peterson and Denis O’ Hare’s An Iliad to Orlan’s L'origine de la guerre, Hill has also created something that is distinctly in her voice. There’s no setting, but it is impossible to watch and not think of Gaza and the West Bank, where war, starvation and disease, all aided and abetted by American dollars, have upended the very facts of survival and the preservation of cultural heritage. It is equally hard to watch and not think of Ukraine, where rape has been used over and over again as a weapon of war and of control.
Top: Alston Kennie and Nexxus Ortiz. Bottom: Brown and Hill.
But the play is also Sudan, where 13 million people have been displaced by civil war, many fleeing their homes on foot because they know that to stay will be a death sentence. It is Myanmar, where for eight years the country’s Rohingya minority has been forced to flee in the hundreds of thousands, and women and girls are among the most vulnerable. It is this country, where women are dying in emergency rooms after they are denied routine reproductive care.
And it is also New Haven, where a woman was allegedly kidnapped by ICE in broad daylight from the corner of Broadway Avenue and Park Street on Thursday, just hours before the play opened. “In an earlier draft of the play, the setting was ‘war zones or everywhere,’” Hill recalled at Wednesday’s tech rehearsal, and that broad approach feels both gutting and totally right.
While the cast does much of the heavy lifting, the set, with stunning shadow work and projections, helps build this world into a physical space. In the Drama Lab’s intimate black box, there are two backlit tents that open into homes, a simple, erratic pump for fresh water, a town square and an Eden-esque olive grove. In the square are bags of red sand, which become a hard-to-watch (and surprisingly compelling) stand in for people as soldiers slash them violently open.
The result, thanks to a 12-student construction crew and scenic designer Douglas Macur, is a place that seems both jarringly real—who among us has not seen footage from tents, some of them reduced to ruins, in the last year?—and fantastical. From the audience, it gives us a sense of stepping into the world of the play, made all the more more urgent by the actors onstage and the writer and director in the wings.
“Every day, they want to keep us—” Brown started to say before rehearsal Wednesday.
“Contained. Silent. Obedient,” Hill finished her sentence. The play, presented with resources on New Haven’s rich and polyphonic community, is intended to push the audience to action.
“It’s what feeds my soul,” Brown said of the challenge she and Hill present to the audience, to take action or remain complicit in a history of violence. “It really is. I feel like I have a true responsibility … the main thing that I want to do is literally a call to action.”
That approach has already gotten the attention of actors. After a long rehearsal Wednesday, Alston Kennie said she is proud to play Miriam, because she feels like she’s helping spark dialogue that needs to happen.
When she sat down with the script weeks ago, her mind first went to Riverbend’s 2005 Baghdad Burning, which tells the story of life in Iraq in the early 2000s, during the first years of the Iraq War. She’s currently reading it for one of the Women' s Studies courses that she’s taking.
“It’s very surreal,” she said of playing the character. “I don’t know how to feel, but I’m honored to play such an important character. For me, it’s [the play is] about having an understanding that when you allow negative cycles to continue to prosper, things never get better.”