And the Pulitzer Prize in Drama goes to… Cigarephemera: A day thread about obscure stuff Cigarette likes! Act II of ♾️: The Skriker. While reading all of the plays that have won the Puiltzer Prize, I mistakenly picked up Caryl Churchill’s The Skriker instead of Joseph Kramm’s 1954 winner The Shrike. A fortuitous mistake! I consider The Skriker to be a towering achievement in western drama, and since the passing of Arthur Miller and August Wilson, I consider Churchill our greatest living playwright. At a breezy 90 minutes, it still has the towering, dreamlike feel of Miller’s After the Fall and the wordy chaos of Tony Kushner’s Hydrotaphia.

The play is both epic and intensely personal. Timeless folklore informs contemporary issues. The Skriker herself is a malevolent shapeshifting, wordplaying faerie, intent on taking the child of pregnant Lily, friend to Josie, who killed her own small child. Feminist concerns permeate Churchill’s works such as Top Girls (widely regarded as one of the greatest modern English language plays), and in The Skriker, motherhood, postpartum depression, guilt and abuse are explored through an ensemble of folkloric figures such as Kelpies, Boggles, Jenny Greenteeth, and Rawheadandbloodybones (whom you may remember from Rawhead Rex).

While it’s not likely to be seen at most commercial theatres, keep your eye out for The Skriker at college theatre programs. According to Cocnord Theatricals, you can see it this fall at Columbia University and Sarah Lawrence in New York and Reed College in Oregon.