WITCH Chic is in.Witches are now seen in some quarters as priestesses of the mother goddess, unjustly persecuted by patriarchal society for the healing arts and soothing remedies they derive from a oneness with nature.
In Hollywood, this has taken the form of inane fluff like “Practical Magic,” last summer’s Sandra Bullock-Nicole Kidman comedy.
In the bookstores there is a whole genre of pseudohistorical fantasy that features wise sorceresses.
As if to bring the theater up to date spellwise, there now comes “The Book of Wren,” a new play by Bronwen Denton-Davis.
The play’s time and place are Ye Olde Vagueness; it takes place “in an ancient wood” on the Welsh border in “old and treacherous” times.
We open with Dorie Lightly, a village wife undergoing a difficult pregnancy, creeping out into that wood to meet the lame witch Madlin, who ladles out some hot herbal broth.
Madlin’s a Soup Witch who can’t just open up a thriving stand in midtown Cardiff, but is forced to lurk out in the wilds.
Madlin’s illegal soup stand comes to the attention of a powerful local cleric named Abbot Lucien. This Lucien is, let me tell you, one Bad Guy. Just as Madlin is 100 percent Good Witch, so Lucien is one Mean Priest.
We begin to get the picture when he announces to some incredulous monks that it’s his dream to set up a local chapter of the Inquisition, the better to roast these “damned pagans still clinging to their damned practices.”
Soon enough, Madlin is in the abbey dungeon confronting the Abbot, whom she forthrightly, if inelegantly, denounces as “a disease, a serpent and a rat’s a–.” Lucien, twirling his mustache, promises to let Madlin go if she’ll give him her secret Oriental book of “recipes” (the word is actually used).
When a sympathetic monk sneaks into her cell, Madlin explains in detail her theology (“I worship the wind and the rain and the sun”), her racially diverse background (her mother, burnt at the stake years ago by Lucien, was a Persian witch picked up by her crusading father), and her health-care politics.
(“The old gods honored women and held them sacred and would have wanted me to give away my healing recipes to the poor for free, whereas the evil, greedy, macho Church wants to make money from my book” – or words to that effect.)
The thing ends in an orgy of poisoned grog and flaming pyres. But though Madlin may perish, her cookbook lives on in good hands. Phony Walter Scott-like medieval diction (“Be you able”) comes and goes; illiterate coinages like “obstinancy” are heard; there’s no poetry in this soup.
And not only is there no poetry; there’s no light. Scott Poitras’ dim lighting keeps Zeke Leonard’s murky sets virtually, and in a sense mercifully, invisible.
There’s a decent performance by Tracy Sallows as Madlin; her smooth, smug air of omniscient superiority makes a nice contrast to the jerks around her.
Miranda Theater, 259 W. 30th St.; (212) 268-9829