Small Words, Big Ideas: Knives In Hens

“What’s in your head?” It’s the question raised time and again in David Harrower’s Knives In Hens, now playing at 59E59 Theaters. What’s in your head, who are you, how do you think? In a play where the main character is never named out loud, it’s a stunning and poignant question. It’s a search for meaning in a life spent bound to a small farm, to a small village, to a small man. And when event take a small turn, that wobble throws her whole life off balance.

Director Paul Takacs has sliced the performance space into a thin sliver of stage onto which Robyn Kerr, Shane Taylor and Devin E. Haqq pour out with furious intensity Harrower’s almost musical staccato dialogue. In the few feet between the audience and the rough wooden plank backdrop that serves as the scenery, the tension between the actors is palpable. It may be winter in the story, but these three performers create intense heat.

Robyn Kerr and Devin E. Haqq

Knives In Hens is a fairly recent play, having premiered in Edinburgh in 1995, but it doesn’t belong to a specific time or place. As such it can belong to any time or place where superstitions and mistrust of outsiders run rampant. In that it’s quite relevant perhaps that it comes to our shores now.

That main character, the unnamed Young Woman, is likened by her brutish plowman husband to a field—and what is a plowman’s job but to tear fields apart, to force them into submission? Likewise, she faces the miller, a man who takes the fruit of the field and grinds it to refinement, but in doing so makes it suitable for more elevated purposes.

This Young Woman is a fascinating character who starts out seeming so simple and naïve. She talks of God and His creations, His will, His intentions. There seems to be little to her other than her preoccupation with the natural world surrounding her, a youthful innocence, but every so often a streak of something a little more adult emerges to suggest a depth of intelligence. She begins to understand that there is more to everything than what she can see. “I look at a tree and say tree then walk on. But there is more of the tree that is God which I have no names for. Each day I want to know more.”

Devin E. Haqq, Shane Taylor and Robyn Kerr

What we learn of her and her capabilities over the course of 90 minutes is fascinating. She’s a uniquely wrought character responding to her situations with creativity and astuteness. But it also happens, at least in this telling, with unnatural speed. The characters forge intense connections with one another, but the Young Woman’s transformation is astonishing in the short period over which the story takes place.

At first she wants to be told the names of everything around her. She wants to be told a lot of things. By the end, she’s the one making decisions. Kerr is a fierce presence on the stage, willowy but strong and vital. Shane Taylor as Pony William and Devin Haqq as Gilbert Horn are both powerful men, though William uses a sharp voice of intimidation to control ‘his woman’ whereas Gilbert forces with enticements. Between these two forces she cracks, and the crack is how her new ideas get in.

With two men there are two possible futures. William is a man who grew up in the same little town thinking the same little thoughts as the other villagers who go about their little lives. Gilbert represents what’s different and unusual; he has books to take him away from the village. As she’s so utterly taken with how everything must have a name and every action a word, it is a temptation to get lost in the ink and paper. Caught between the two worlds, the Young Woman makes a choice with life-changing consequences. The surprise is how she chooses.

Photos by Carol Rosegg
Top photo: Robyn Kerr and Shane Taylor

Knives In Hens
59E59 Theaters
59 East 59th Street
Through November 12, 2017