Review: A mostly bewitching ‘Becky Nurse of Salem’ at Berkeley Rep (2024)

The witchcraft is real in “Becky Nurse of Salem.”

It helps its title character (Pamela Reed) finally claim the heart of Bob (Adrian Roberts), her bartender and lifelong love. It helps her ward off the malevolent external forces preying on her granddaughter, Gail (Naian González Norvind). It helps her get revenge on her former employer, Shelby (Elissa Beth Stebbins), at a museum about the Salem witch trials in Salem, Mass. It helps her get a new job. It helps her with legal trouble. Maybe it can even help her break a centuries-old family curse?

Skeptical of magic? Inclined to argue that natural forces can explain away purportedly supernatural phenomena? The unnamed professional witch (Ruibo Qian) in Sarah Ruhl’s world premiere at Berkeley Repertory Theatre might just sigh at you and look away or crack a knowing smile in one corner of her mouth. She has exhausting work to get back to, work that doesn’t heed your disbelief — seeing others’ pain out of her third eye, helping them communicate with their dead loved ones and devising potions or sachets of crystals to cure their ills.

Just because you’re a stickler for the empirical, the play posits, doesn’t mean witchcraft hasn’t been shaping our country’s history from the shadows, dating to the time Becky’s ancestor, Rebecca Nurse, was one of 14 women convicted of witchcraft and hanged, and running all the way to the 2016 election, with its “Lock her up!” chant, a refrain echoed in Becky’s wayward quest to achieve her ends.

“Becky Nurse of Salem,” which opened Thursday, Dec. 19, seeks to move those shadows to the light, offering a mischievous, sprightly alternative narrative to the patriarchal one handed down by American history books, by Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible,” by the way men still talk about and treat women. If the show, directed by Anne Kauffman, suffers from a few cheesy lines, some boilerplate exposition, occasional flat acting and a few underdeveloped plot threads, it nonetheless might send you out of Berkeley Rep ready to summon your own coven, cast your own spells or simply find your own power outside of what society allots you.

For that invigorating feeling, we can thank the one-of-a-kind voice and vision of Ruhl, author of “In the Next Room (or the Vibrator Play)” and “Eurydice,” among many other entries in the contemporary American canon. She writes with sweeping imagination and puckish glee, yet at a twinkly remove, like a fairy godmother who bops you on the head with a wand then shuffles away, chuckling. She can see a witch’s hat in an overturned ice cream cone, the potential for a feminist epilogue in “The Crucible,” the transcendent goodness in a totally creepy 17-year-old boy, Stan (Owen Campbell), who wears eyeliner and strikes dramatic poses in his front-desk job at the local Marriott.

Kauffman’s direction makes everything in Becky’s Salem, even the nondescript Walgreens and Dunkin’ Donuts that now rest on witch trial sites, wield totemic power. The wax figures in her museum, whose ghoulish recorded voices you hear, before the show even begins, seem to lord over the whole play, conjuring it into existence. Mikaal Sulaiman’s sound design, all eerie whistles, fraidy-cat meows and ironically chosen jazz and pop standards, makes it seem like every desk drawer or cash register might release a few spirits into the ether if you opened it.

This production’s real superpower is its lead character and actor. Reed’s Becky is the kind of role women don’t often get to play. She’s a big talker, and the world keeps letting her bungle her way through it and forgiving her, loving her anyway, for the pleasure of hearing what she comes up with next. She gets to have sexual desire, be sexually desired and have a charged, breathless make-out scene even though, God forbid, she’s a grandma.

Reed has the chops to communicate a full character from her first entrance as a museum docent. You can imagine her Becky thinking to herself, “Guess I’ll give these field trip kids the ol’ razzle-dazzle,” with a little slosh, a little swashbuckling in her step, but prepared to affect innocence and walk it all back should she be accused of crossing the line of propriety, which she promptly does, several times.

She’s a jester, a ham, one who so delights in her own perfect ripostes that she might need to sway a little in victory, keep toying with the sound of her voice on the tip of her tongue, extending her line into the silence after it, puckering a moment. When she takes some weird drugs and hallucinates, imagining herself as I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter!, her face seems to melt and then coagulate again, an expression as liquid with possibility as the substance she’s picturing.

It’s a bewitching performance — one that might shake even magic’s most stalwart nonbelievers.

M“Becky Nurse of Salem”: Written by Sarah Ruhl. Directed by Anne Kauffman. Through Jan. 26. Two hours, 45 minutes. $30-$97, subject to change. Berkeley Repertory Theatre, 2025 Addison St., Berkeley. 510-647-2949. www.berkeleyrep.org