The Public Universal Friend, Object of Diviinity by Calla Wright and SILKRØAD. Fringe 2026. Image provided.
Object of Divinity (Stage 3, Nordic Studio Theatre)
By Liz Nicholls, .ca
Object of Divinity is a strangely timeless and timely story that underpins this enigmatic human/puppet show by actor/playwright Calla Wright, with an electro-industrial score, created and performed live by SILKRØAD.
They have unearthed from the mists of history (misty to me, at least) an amazing real-life 18th century figure, “the Public Universal Friend,” a gender-less nameless pronoun-less preacher, who’d been born female, with Quaker-esque views on slavery, emancipation, and war.
Wright has wrested a sort of beyond-trans story, a mother and child (Wright and Maya Wright), domestic rejection, religious crisis, from this shadowy self-created character who actually lived from 1752 to 1819. And they’ve imagined the trauma of their origins at a time when a female outside social conventions was a vessel awaiting — no, inviting — possession by gathering demonic forces. “Even the faithful are afraid in the end.”
The puppet iconography transforms homely objects; call it a performance installation. The puppets, who “enter” the piece after a long introductory monologue by Wright as a kind of evangelist, are extrapolated, I think, from the story of the Public Universal Friend: outsized chalk-white objects including a hairbrush, a plumed pen that writes in invisible ink on a white sheet, a hand with many fluttering fingers that won’t stay still.
Can I explain this? I’m afraid not. The historical narrative of the Public Universal Friend — a self-reinventing character who puts themself deliberately out of time and possibly this world — is fascinating. But Object of Divinity moves beyond the “story” to unspool theatrically as a challenge so stylized and allusive that meaning seems always, deliberately, always, just beyond the grasp of the fingers (at least mine). It’s more a poetic fantasia than a “play,” by one of our most challenging artists.