“This is a very cool play,” says actor Katherine Catmull about Witch, onstage now at Hyde Park Theatre. “You know, there’s some famous person [who] said that there are two kinds of stories. One is a hero goes on a journey and the other is a stranger comes to town. And this is a real a stranger comes to town play. And [he] like disrupts everybody’s lives and gets his own life kind of disrupted. But I mean, my character’s life was completely miserable and isolated. So in her case, it gets better. But maybe not good enough. She’s on the fence.”
Catmull plays the sort-of-titular character in Witch, a lonely woman suspected (incorrectly) by the residents of her town of being a witch. Her life and the lives of the other characters in the play are changed when a stranger, namely the devil, comes to town.
“I’m a big fan of this playwright Jen Silverman,” says Hyde Park artistic director Ken Webster. “We did her play The Moors back in 2017. I loved [Witch] because there’s such great roles. You’ve got somebody who plays Old Scratch, a woman who’s accused and thought of as a witch, and she’s not a witch – she’s just a woman who’s had a rough life. [And] there’s this great other plot besides the non-witch and Old Scratch who kind of hit it off. There’s some strange goings on in the castle… yeah, it’s just a really lovely play. It’s funny and sad and scary.”
Webster raves about his cast, which includes Catmull (Webster’s wife and, he points out at least twice, ‘the most decorated actress in the history of Austin theater’), Rupert Reyes, Jon Edward Cook, Steve Guntli, Amara (Mars) Johnson, and Chase Brewer as Scratch.
“Yeah, as someone who’s always kind of been a contrarian anyways, it’s really fun getting to play kind of the biggest contrarian of them all,” Brewer says of the role. “You know, someone who’s always trying to maybe follow their own instincts over what’s good for other people. But yeah, it’s just such a fun role to get to dive into.”
Catmull says she finds some common ground with her character, Elizabeth, as well. Despite being the town pariah, “she’s also really smart and really funny,” Catmull says. “She has a beautiful speech about why she’s on the fence about selling her soul – because she says ‘that thing that everybody hates about me, the thing that people are so afraid to look at or to listen to – what if that’s my soul? And that’s the only thing I have. And if I sell it, if I give it away, they’ll win.’ Yeah, I love her, actually.”
Like Silverman’s earlier play The Moors, Witch takes place in an indeterminate era that’s before now but not exactly set in time. “It takes place long ago, in Edmonton, England,” Webster explains, “but there’s a lot of anachronisms and modern language in the play. Like they talk about potlucks and hand wipes. There’s a lot of modern language in the play, and [Silverman] says, even though it takes place in England, no accents, please.”
The play is running now, but when we spoke, it was just about to open and the cast and crew were excited to get the show up in front of an audience. “Yeah, it’s going to be exciting having people,” Catmull says. “It’s a comedy, for the most part. I mean, there’s a lot of laughs in the play and it’s always exciting and scary to find out where people are going to laugh.”