The great disparity in the critical reaction to Caryl Churchill's Far Away, now playing Off Broadway, serves to remind us that opinions are just that--neither right nor wrong, but rather well argued or not. However, if one mark of the true artist is the willingness to take risks and to venture into uncharted territory, then Churchill is the genuine article. For more than two decades, almost every offering by this fiercely political British playwright has been innovative and intellectually stimulating.

Churchill quickly established herself more than twenty years ago with Cloud Nine. In this early work, the characters age just twenty-five years between Acts One and Two, even though the first is set in British colonial Africa in the 1880s and the second in a London park a century later. To add that Cloud 9 calls for its cast members to cross-dress should begin to suggest one of the play's implicit messages: that in spite of our self-proclaimed sexual liberation, our generation is every bit as confused about gender issues and sexuality as the Victorians were.

Churchill's theatrical imagination took even greater historical leaps in her subsequent play, Top Girls (1982). By bringing together a fantastic assortment of significant figures at the same dinner table (including a thirteenth-century Japanese courtesan, a Victorian female explorer, the ninth-century Pope Joan and a very contemporary woman who relinquished nearly everything worthwhile in her climb up the corporate ladder), the provocative Churchill got to have her feminist cake and criticize it too.

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