Caryl Churchill, Acrobatically, at the Public

Photo: Joan Marcus

The English-speaking theater world doesn’t have that many living saints, but Caryl Churchill is unquestionably one of them. Now 86, Churchill has been writing formally audacious plays since the late 1950s, though her career really began to shake and shape the field 20 years later — some of her most-produced work keeps resonating partly because of its intrinsic revolt against Thatcherism, a political ethos that retains such a death grip on our own reality. Like many a canonized mystic, she’s not easy.