‘The Moors’: A vast landscape of sisterhood, violence, and desire

Columbia University Players’ compelling and evocative rendition of Jen Silverman’s dark and cunning play “The Moors” explores the moral bounds of female power. 

Photo provided by Olivia Kuan-Romano

By Abigail Rabbitt 

April 2, 2026

“There is no language for all the things lurking within us.” Agatha (Jasmine Richards, BC ’26) delivers this haunting line moments before she is murdered by her sister in Jen Silverman’s “The Moors.” The play is a story of grappling with what lurks in a woman’s interiority and an exhibition of the various ways that inner power can be expelled into the world.  

Director Molly Greenwold’s (BC ’26) rendition of “The Moors” presented a darkly comedic and uncanny world in which a story of female desire, isolation, and power unfolded within a claustrophobic domestic space. The secluded lives of two adult sisters is questioned and disturbed by the arrival of a governess who had been called to care for a child who did not exist. Staged by the Columbia University Players, Columbia’s premier student-run theater organization, the show ran from March 27 to 28 in Barnard’s Glicker-Milstein Theatre with a small but powerful cast. 

Emilie (Dunia Sarkis, BC ’26), the eager yet wary governess welcomed into the house on the moors, was portrayed with a mix of nervousness and passion. Sarkis’ performance captured a curiosity as Emilie pushed to orient herself within a confusing and uncanny world. Her brief musical performance was especially striking, with careful guitar playing and her strong but shaking voice offering insight into her inner feelings. When Emilie discovered that she has been called to the house, not to be a governess, but to birth an heir for Agatha, Sarkis’ portal was both believable and complex, further adding to the moral ambiguity of her character. Through the progression of her shy and cautious movements into confident and forceful strides across the stage and an expressive delivery of her lines, Sarkis gave Emilie a layered interiority that was compelling to follow throughout the performance. 

Agatha’s presence as the oldest sister and matriarch of the house was commanding and often frightening. Her sternness, dark costuming, and restrained physicality portrayed an aura of control and power. Richards expertly walked the line between fierce, impenetrable anger and flashes of emotional vulnerability, particularly in brief moments of solitude. 

Richards’ and Sarkis’ chemistry as Agatha and Emilie was a highlight of the production as they moved through the development of their relationship from mistress and governess to lovers caught up in a terrible scheme. The actresses transitioned effortlessly from anger and fear to passion and desire, building a strong tension that felt tangible in the theater. Their portrayal of female desire was full of force and moral ambiguity as they came together in a plan to forcefully create an heir with Agatha’s imprisoned elder brother, asking questions of how far female power can go within an oppressive patriarchal system.  

In contrast to Agatha, Barnard first-year Anusha Krishnam’s performance as Huldey, the younger sister of the house, was full of striking, unrestrained emotion. Her playful and unsettling demeanor, characterized through a singsongy voice and frequent anxious monologues, made her both childlike and disturbing. The tension between Huldey’s innocence and immorality was physically marked by the artistic choice to make her murder weapon a sparkly pink ax, creating a humorous but unsettling dissonance. 

The production’s environment of gothic strangeness, reminiscent of a Brontë novel, was developed largely through the set, designed by Juliette Murphy, a visiting student at Columbia, and the lighting design, led by Sebastian Pallais-Aks (CC ’26). The set remained static throughout the play, featuring a couch, a chair, a rock, and a suspended stained-glass window, while tree branches and overgrown moss blurred the boundary between the interior of the house and the exterior of the moors. Scenes within the house were marked by dark and eerie lighting, while scenes outside in the moors were deepened with cold, haunting lighting and booming sound effects designed by Julia Smith (BC ’26), truly evoking an expansive and eerie rolling landscape. The suffocating nature of the house produced through its design became a metaphor for the imprisonment of the characters within their roles as women and their situations in life. 

The production was laugh-out-loud funny, and the audience seemed to enjoy its absurdist humor and gothic strangeness. At times, the humor and absurdity felt dangerously close to coming at the expense of the script’s deeper emotional weight of sadness and horror. Themes of death, love, and isolation could easily feel out of place alongside displays of outrageous humor. However, this was quickly resolved by the actors’ commitment to the emotional stakes beneath the comedy. Krishnam’s climactic ballad at the end of the show was a perfect example of this, drawing in the audience with her nonsensical playfulness and crescendoing into a performance of depth and feeling. 

Within the captivating world of the stage and the strong performances of the actors, the play’s depth and strangeness emerged. The dynamic composition of powerful feelings of love, anger, and desire struggling to be expressed was spoken and felt, pushing at the walls of the house upon the moors.