Judith & Vinegar Tom
Opening Night: July 7, 2015
Closing: August 9, 2015
Theater: Atlantic Stage Two
JUDITH: A PARTING FROM THE BODY – The story of Judith is one of the great tales of female heroism and sexuality that has inspired artists in nearly every generation. In Barker’s telling, the fatal encounter between Judith and Holofernes becomes a complex duel of seduction and deception and a compelling study of intense desire and the sometimes terrifying nature of love. VINEGAR TOM – A haunting play with seriously subversive intent – misogny, torture + songs. In a village in 17th century England three women are threatened with death for the practice of witchcraft. “Vinegar Tom” is a cabaret about hanging witches, with no witches.
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July 17, 2015
Woman, says the woman dressed as a man in a bowler hat, is “an imperfect animal.” That’s because, as her vaudevillian partner points out, the female of the species “was formed from a bent rib.” This jocund pair, who show up in the final scene of Caryl Churchill’s “Vinegar Tom” at Atlantic Stage 2, go on to catalog the many frailties of the so-called fairer sex. That ultimate authority, the Bible, sums it up best, it would seem, when it says (in the Book of Ecclesiasticus from the Apocrypha) that “All wickedness is but little to the wickedness of a woman.” The dialogue in the music hall turn that concludes “Vinegar Tom” — part of an earnestly playful double bill of one-acts from the Potomac Theater Project — was not written, for the most part, by Ms. Churchill. It was taken instead from a book published in Germany in the 15th century, the “Malleus Maleficarum,” which explains why women are more likely than men to become tools of the Devil.
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