2025 Salem Witch Trial
Gretchen Wylder is a nightmare. Well, that is to say, Gretchen Wylder might be a nightmare if you were a narrow-minded bigot determined to maintain absolute control of your enclosed community, making unreasonable demands on your neighbours and threatening them with eviction when they fail to comply to ridiculous expectations designed to promote intolerance and based on extreme interpretations of multiply revised and mistranslated archaic texts: “There really is no love like Christian love.”
Salem, Massachusetts a town with a history of persecution of those who are deemed to be outsiders, in recent years it has reformed to embrace the opportunities presented by the turn of the season towards the end of summer, recreating itself as the Hallowe’en capital of the world, ideal for tarot reader Wylder who for several years set up camp for the month of October to bring guidance and healing, post-pandemic circumstance requiring permanent relocation from New York with a nearby enclave seeming the ideal solution.
Regrettably, as recounted in her one-woman show 2025 Salem Witch Trial, it was not to be, attitudes hidden in the deep forests and period wooden framed houses less than welcoming when despite the carefully constructed plan to win favour of the housing committee Wylder was later unmasked as that unholiest of unholies, a “feminist dyke pagan,” prompting an orchestrated campaign to ostracise and condemn her before she could cast her wicked spell on the tender and impressionable youth of the region.
Not a warning from history but a wake-up call to those who think that “things have got better,” that rights fought for through the last century for minorities to be legally protected as equals who will face no discrimination against cannot be removed more easily than they were won, Wylder is not to be underestimated, for the most part cheerful, upbeat, focused and humorous while occasionally struggling to keep her justified rage under control, a woman who has survived genuine trauma who you would rather have as a dazzling friend than a wrathful and resourceful enemy.
2025 Salem Witch Trial continues at Greenside on George Street until Saturday 23rd August
