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Berkeley’s Shotgun Players opened an intriguing and often mystifying production of English feminist playwright Caryl Churchill’s dark, dense, difficult, and at times gruesome play “The Skriker” Saturday at Julia Morgan Theater. 

“The Skriker” is a very bizarre play, and it’s not easy to say exactly what it is about. Many people leaving the theater after Sunday’s performance seemed uncertain as to what they had just seen. 

“The Skriker” is set in the context of an ancient and mythic world of “dark fairies,” spirits who are hundreds of years old, and who interact surreptitiously and malevolently in the lives of present-day humans. 

These dark fairies take over the lives of humans in order to nourish themselves, so in a general sense, “The Skriker” is a vampire story. 

Playwright Churchill describes the central character of her play, the Skriker (Gillian Chadsey), as a “shape shifter and death portent, ancient and damaged.” 

Director Patrick Dooley, choreographer Andrea Weber and the rest of Shotgun’s talented production team have created a fluid, symbolic, and often non-linear staging, where traditional theater scenes alternate with shorter impressionistic tableaus. 

Churchill, who is not known as a realistic playwright, is most famous for her play “Cloud Nine,” a cross-gender send-up of English colonial politics and its relationship to present-day dysfunctional London family politics. 

“The Skriker” runs about 100 minutes with no intermission. Employing a cast of more than 15 actors, many of them playing multiple roles, it follows a series of 30 or 40 loosely structured scenes in which the dark fairy and her cohorts invest and haunt the lives of two young working class English women, Josie (Jennifer Taggart) and Lily (Beth Donohue). 

The Skriker causes Lily to vomit coins. Josie has recently given birth, and something bad seems to have happened. Lily also is about to give birth. Since dark fairies steal human babies to nurse their spirits, these children are at risk. 

In fact, a malevolent theme of childbirth and infancy runs through the play. In part, “The Skriker” seems to be about the violent, painful and tragic karmic implications of a child being born – an event that is usually romanticized as beautiful. 

Churchill also appears to be interested in negative and destructive female forces of nature, in pointed contrast to forces of female spirituality which are seen traditionally as positive. 

As a character, the Skriker takes many forms. She is a fairy, then a blonde American with a Texas accent, then an old woman, or a child playing hopscotch, or a smooth operating romantic lesbian hustler.  

At one point she is the hostess at a dinner party in hell, or wherever it is that platters of food are served up containing a baby’s head and other human organs. 

Near the end of the play, the Skriker’s assault on the two human women takes the form of a malignant love story. On one level, the play can be seen as a long seduction of Lily and Josie by the Skriker. 

The acting in this production is very good. Chadsey’s Skriker is multi-faceted and quite impressive. Beth Donohue is fascinating as an alternately trusting and frightened, and not too bright Lily. Jennifer Taggart’s tough, angry Josie is a wake-up call. 

Lighting designer Alex Lopez has created a variety of distinct spaces on the stage with the use of minimal lighting instruments. Sound designer Jake Rodriguez’s appropriately jarring musical tracks effectively punctuate scene transitions. 

Take fair warning: This complex, esoteric and flat-out weird story is a difficult and demanding evening of theater, and not for everyone. You will very likely leave the theater feeling there were parts of the play you didn’t understand. 

After opening weekend at Julia Morgan, the show now moves to San Francisco for five weeks. 

“The Skriker,” presented by Shotgun Players, now runs Friday-Sunday at the Warehouse Performance Space, 1850 Cesar Chavez, San Francisco. 

For reservations and information, call 510-655-0813, or check out Shotgun’s web site (www.shotgunplayers.com).