by Darleen Ortega, arts columnist

Profile Theater’s current production of “Witch” deserves the critical praise it is receiving.  The performances are all fantastic, Josh Hecht’s direction mines Jen Silverman’s witty, sharp play for all the shrewdness tucked into its humor, and a nimble design team helps us imagine the play’s particular world set in the 17th century but resolutely planted in today’s vernacular.  Each interaction between the various characters crackles with energy—fury, ambition, revenge, anguish.  And each of the players channels that energy fantastically, culminating in Charles Grant’s furious dance choreographed by Adin Walker. 

But what I loved most are the play’s central insights about where untapped hope and power reside.  Elizabeth, the most isolated character, deemed a witch by the community and the person who apparently has the least to lose, is the one hardest to persuade to sell her soul and the one most capable of the sort of reframe that might pull the rest of the players–including the devil himself–out of their endless conflicts.  

The scruples of each of the other characters fall easily; the devil Scratch (a canny Joshua J. Weinstein) deftly spots their vulnerabilities, always linked to self-interest and their sense of who or what stands between them and their due. Not Elizabeth.  As brilliantly embodied by the always fantastic Lauren Modica-Soloway, Elizabeth is the one capable of spotting the emptiness of Scratch’s logic and the collective trap in which everyone else is caught.  She is the only person capable of moving Scratch to question his purpose, to compel him toward the bigger questions that he otherwise wouldn’t see.  And without the energy that persuades people to abandon their scruples, what might be possible?  Of course it is the outcast who would be capable of such imagination; when will we learn to examine the pattern of wisdom discarded?  Who are we throwing away and why are we doing so?  What does the outcast see that others miss?  Silverman’s play—offered with consummate skill in this production—lifts up such questions.