'The Skriker': Fairy Tale With a Scrambled Picture and Sound

Caryl Churchill's "The Skriker" is a wickedly difficult play, the kind -- or so it seems at the Warehouse Theater just now -- that eats theater companies for lunch. It's a beast linguistically, with Jabberwocky-wild lines spinning toward infinity and words all but growing warts.

"Light this candle -- light the scandal," murmurs the Skriker, a grim supernatural being at large in a modern London crawling with mythical figures and physical rot. Is it really illumination she craves? Is she sounding a cosmic warning in this eco-fairy tale as she stalks a grieving young mother and her pregnant friend? Or is this wild-eyed ghoul out for blood?

The story's as dense as the verbiage, and Churchill being Churchill -- the semi-reclusive author of brilliant, unorthodox dramas (time-traveling feminism in "Top Girls," cloning in "A Number") -- you want to keep up and puzzle it out.

But the dauntingly flat Forum Theatre and Dance production doesn't put much allure in the enigma, and isn't very deft at dropping clues. "The Skriker" cries out for design solutions: How do you render such characters as Piglike Man, Deformed Child, Rawheadandbloodybones? How will this phantasmagoric allegory sweep from bog to pub, from terra firma to dreamy realms?

The answers ought to help amplify (or, for starters, clarify) Churchill's atmosphere of unseen menace and theme of environmental decay. But imagination doesn't flower in Michael Dove's deliberately trashy gray box of a set, blandly lighted by Denman C. Anderson; if this is London's fog melting into a grim shadow land, the idea's stuck on the drawing board. And Pei Lee's costumes -- a muslin-masked figure in a bowler and an asparagus-like green-clad thing with a box head, for example -- have a ha'penny weirdness that earned nervous giggles Friday night.

Not the mood you want when a needy pixie's on the loose and a playwright's raging about our dirty planet. So it's up to director Kathleen Akerley's actors to set a weightier tone -- particularly the actresses playing the Skriker and the girls, since everyone else is largely silent.

As the desperate, fretting Josie and Lily, Katie Atkinson and Lindsay Haynes at least get generally straightforward mortal prose, even if coins and frogs occasionally drip out of their characters' mouths as they speak. But the relationships don't thicken much, even as the characters make mysteriously granted (and often dark) wishes and sink into a vaguely vampire-like arrangement with the shape-shifting, continually seducing Skriker.

Nanna Ingvarsson is a verbal dervish in the title role, laying out complex sentences and absurd, rapid-fire compound phrases with Shakespearean aplomb. She's a witchy picture to boot, with her long blond hair and bright, sinful smile promising irresistible mischief.

As a shape-shifter, though -- an American pub crawler, a bawling kid and more -- Ingvarsson's less assured, or perhaps simply unable to carry so much of Churchill's layered theatrics and meaning on her own.

The Skriker's purpose blurs, and even a capable lead performance stumbles into the watery quicksand that swallows the rest of the show.

The Skriker, by Caryl Churchill. Directed by Kathleen Akerley. Sound design, Neil McFadden. About 1 hour 45 minutes. With Cliff Williams III, Denman C. Anderson, Dan VanHoozer, Katie Clemmons, Stephanie Roswell, Ashley DeMain and Abby Wood. Through Dec. 23 at the Warehouse Theatre, 1021 Seventh St. NW. Call 800-494-8497or visit http://www.forumtd.org.