THEATER REVIEW;A Land of Fairy Tales Creepily Come True

That fairy tales really do come true in the land of "The Skriker," Caryl Churchill's astonishing new play at the Joseph Papp Public Theater, is hardly a source of comfort. This portrait of a London haunted by unhappy gremlins bears roughly the same relationship to urban living that "Psycho" does to taking a shower, turning the familiar into a hall of terrors.

Afterward, you'll be even more intent than usual on avoiding the eyes of people on the streets, wondering what demons lurk inside. You'll even think twice before sitting on your sofa.

Be afraid; be very afraid. (Or to borrow from the play's phrase-fracturing title character, an ailing, shape-shifting fairy, "Whatever you do don't open the do don't open the door.") Ms. Churchill, the author of "Fen" and "Top Girls," has delivered her most unsettling indictment yet of an incurably diseased world. While it is also her most densely cerebral, difficult work, its enveloping chill isn't just intellectual.

Given a dazzling technical production under the director Mark Wing-Davey, "The Skriker" is, on one level, a toxic variation on "A Midsummer Night's Dream," with its feeling of parallel disharmony between the natural and supernatural. But Ms. Churchill isn't about to let her bewildered mortals awaken into reassuring daylight.

Indeed, the play's most disturbing element lies in its presenting itself not as a hallucination but as a slice of an everyday reality, bleeding at the edges. Everything in "The Skriker," even language, seems to be mutating. A well-dressed stranger has horse's hooves beneath his trousers; a couch has a face and a mobile upholstered arm.

No one appears to be in charge, not even the ubiquitous Skriker (Jayne Atkinson, in a spectacular performance), an ageless creature who assumes forms ranging from petulant little girl to American barfly. She is forever asking, in utter consternation, how things like television and dreams work. Lucid explanations are not forthcoming.

Drawing from British folklore (which often recalls the Brothers Grimm), Ms. Churchill tells of the Skriker's pursuit of two young women, the credulous Lily (Angie Phillips) and the wilier Josie (Caroline Seymour), who have come to contemporary London.

Neither innocence nor shrewdness is much of a defense. But then the Skriker herself seems strangely vulnerable. "Nobody loves me and the sun's going to kill me," she says, describing the unhinging of the seasons.

As in the revolutionary Romania of her "Mad Forest," Ms. Churchill intelligently keeps the line between victim and predator cloudy. The Skriker is a natural force corrupted by a denaturized world. And though she is known to feed on infants, it is Josie who has killed her 10-day-old child before the play starts.

Images of babies and children in jeopardy abound. A little girl sings of being murdered and eaten by her parents. Lily, who is pregnant when the play begins, speaks of motherhood after her child's birth in a sad, telling speech. "Everything's shifted so she's in the middle," she says of her daughter. "I never minded things. But everything's dangerous, seems it might get her. . . . If she wasn't all right, it'd be a waste, wouldn't it?"

Realized by a crack design team, Lily's world is a stunningly grotesque wasteland. Marina Draghici, set and costume designer, has created mind-warping effects. A London pub scene, for example, uses two sets: one showing a commonplace bar; another, behind, a distorted reflection of the same thing, replete with a funhouse mirror and a dwarf bartender.

The shabby London streets are populated by a host of otherworldly creatures, framed in cubicles that slide on and off stage, including an angel with soot-blackened wings and a man with a face like ground meat. A woman walking with typical urban purposefulness suddenly starts dancing and never stops. A herd of bowler-wearing businessmen also wear giant cockroach-like creatures.

In the most splendidly perverse scene, Josie visits the Skriker's underworld. Set against an illuminated waterfall, the scene presents a corps of singing, dancing fairies (the haunting music and choreography are by Judith Weir and Sara Rudner) who at first look as elegant as anything from a Cocteau movie. Closer inspection reveals the rot beneath.

The same sense of sickly metamorphosis pervades Ms. Churchill's daring language. The Skriker, who first appears with a ranting monologue poised between Joyce and Beckett, speaks in cliches that turn on themselves: "Meet me after the show me what you've got." Or: "Moby dictated the outcome into the garden maudlin."

In Ms. Atkinson's superb interpretation, as notable for its command of a difficult language as for its amazing character changes, the Skriker seems to be choking on and vomiting words. (When Lily and Josie find themselves spewing frogs and coins, it's a perfect metaphor for the play's contaminated language.)

Ms. Phillips and Ms. Seymour are excellent, giving bracingly unsentimental life to wounded prototypes. They never seem very surprised by the things that happen to them; reality is strange enough as it is. And Mr. Wing-Davey wisely never winks at what's occurring on stage. Demons and mortals coexist almost casually

"The Skriker" is an unwieldy work. The technical stagecraft, impressive as it is, can weigh down its flow. And for all its obscurity, it can often seem more shrill than subtle.

But like the best fairy tales, it directly addresses the darker passages of the unconscious. Unlike classic fairy tales, it provides no sense of release. For Ms. Churchill, there is no clearing beyond the dark enchanted woods into which she leads us.

THE SKRIKER

By Caryl Churchill; directed by Mark Wing-Davey; sets and costumes by Marina Draghici; lighting by Christopher Akerlind; sound by John Gromada; composer, Judith Weir; additional music, Mr. Gromada; musical director, Martin Goldray; choreography by Sara Rudner; production stage manager, James Latus. Associate producer, Wiley Hausam; artistic associate, Kevin Kline; production manager, Bonnie Metzgar. Presented by the Joseph Papp Public Theater/New York Shakespeare Festival, George C. Wolfe, producer; Rosemarie Tichler, artistic producer; Joey Parnes, executive producer; Laurie Beckelman, executive director. At 425 Lafayette Street, East Village.

WITH: Jayne Atkinson (the Skriker), Angie Phillips (Lily), Caroline Seymour (Josie), Philip Seymour Hoffman (Raw Head and Bloody Bones), Jodi Melnick (Passer-by) and Diana Rice (Dead Child).

Photo: Jayne Atkinson, in three manifestations of the Skriker, anageless creature who can assume any mortal shape and who is forever asking how things work. (Photographs by Sara Krulwich/The New York Times)