My previous experience with British playwright Lucy Kirkwood is the three-person drama
The Children, an intimate, personal, and political story about the fallout of a nuclear disaster, which
Jungle Theater produced in 2019 shortly after it premiered on Broadway. Her 2020 play
The Welkin is quite the opposite in scale, featuring a cast of 16 and set in the 18th Century. But it's similar in the way it deals with thorny issues that are both personal and political, and I can't think of a better theater company to bring us the regional premiere than Frank Theatre. It's epic in scale and length (nearly three hours) and in the way that it depicts the arduous life of women in 18th Century England, with parallels to the here and now. The cast is a veritable Who's Who of #TCTheater female actors, and watching them tell this story on Gremlin's intimate stage under Wendy Knox's expert direction is a thrill, if a bit of a dark and depressing one. So take a nap, have an afternoon coffee, and go see this astounding regional premiere production of
The Welkin (continuing through March 29).
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the accused Sally (Elizabeth Efteland) with the jury
(photo by Tony Nelson) |
The play is centered around the historical English legal practice of "
pleading the belly." In olden days, if a woman was convicted of a crime and sentenced to hang, she could not be executed if she was pregnant. (Because in this, and other, societies, the life of the unborn child is deemed more important than the life of the mother, or in this case, the death of the mother.) A "
Jury of Matrons" was convened to decide if the woman was indeed "with quick child," consisting of 12 women, a rare and surprising power given to women in a legal system where they had little. In our story, a woman named Sally is quickly convicted, along with her lover, of the gruesome murder of a child, the daughter of a wealthy family. Spoiler alert: she fully admits to the crime, so that's not the issue here, it's only the matter of the pregnancy. Twelve women of differing backgrounds, ages, and experiences are requested or forced into service, and most of the play is one long scene (interrupted by intermission) of the deliberation. It's almost like
Twelve Angry Men, where the 12 jurors argue amongst themselves and try to convince each other, unable to leave the room until a consensus is obtained. Except that they're arguing about a woman's body, and whether or not she deserves to live. The deliberation goes places I did not expect, as the personal comes into play with some past secrets revealed.
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midwife Lizzie (Tracey Maloney) takes the floor
(photo by Tony Nelson) |
Elizabeth Efteland plays Sally, and thanks to her fully committed performance the character is both maddening (in her callousness about her crime) and extremely sympathetic (in her humanity). Tracey Maloney, who had several strong performances last year (
one of which earned her a TCTB Award nomination), gives another one here as the village midwife Lizzie who delivered many of the women in the room (including Sally) and/or their many children. She's a trusted and necessary member of their society, yet her sympathy for and opinions about Sally are not trusted by all of the women, and her story turns out to be more complicated than it seems. The other 11 jurors are played by Charla Marie Bailey, Kirby Bennett, Isa Condo-Olvera, Georgia Doolittle, Dona Werner Freeman, Wini Froelich, Eva Gemlo, Grace Hillmyer, Jicarra N. Hollman, Suzie Juul, and Kathleen Winters, each one of them creating a unique character with a unique story, beginning from their introduction as they're sworn in, through their varying reasons for being there and opinions on the matter, to their ultimate verdict. The two lone men in the cast are Jonathan Feld as Sally's (not so sympathetic) husband and the (surprisingly sympathetic) doctor called on to examine her, and Patrick Bailey as Mr. Coombes, who's required to be in the room but not speak, making sure the women don't break any of the rules, doing a lot of great silent acting. Rounding out the cast is young Willa Buchanan as Lizzie's daughter, very present in her few scenes and holding her own amongst the pros.
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| the women gather (photo by Tony Nelson) |
This number of actors and characters on a small stage could feel chaotic or crowded, but it never does thanks to Wendy Knox's direction, with the dialogue flowing smoothly at a good pace that makes the nearly three hours fly by. In scenic designer Joe Stanley's realistic 18th Century English room, dominated by a huge stone fireplace (crucial to the plot), a couple of benches and crates are all the furniture that's needed. The small thrust stage does not feel crowded even through for most of the play there are 14 people scattered around, clustered in groups, sitting or standing in the corners, moving around so as not to make this one long scene feel stagnant. The cast is always on, even if they don't have lines for long stretches. They're dressed in authentic 18th Century garb with layers upon layers - petticoats and skirts and aprons and bodices and shawls and bonnets (costume design by Katy Kohl). And thanks to dialect coach Patrick Bailey they all speak in charming and varied English accents, highlighted by Isa's thick Scottish brogue.
This play is epic and a lot to process, despite its seemingly straight-forward and singularly-focused plot. Particularly in this staging, that opens with 18th Century women performing "women's work" and ends with modern women performing "women's work" that hasn't changed all that much, except for the technology. It's fundamentally a play about women, throughout history and today, and the dangers of simply existing in this world in a woman's body. Dangers that come from our bodies themselves (as the queens say in
House of the Dragon, the childbed is our battlefield), from men - strangers or family members, from the justice system itself that, as Lizzie points out, does not due them any favors. It's about women supporting each other, and also not. It's about how, throughout much of history, women's fates are inextricably tied to our reproductive systems. This play takes place in 1759, with the women awaiting the appearance of
Halley's Comet in its first predicted return. The comet has made three returns to earth on its nearly 80-year cycle since the events of this play, and while much has changed for women, much also has not. We still don't have control over our bodies and our fates, we still get paid less, our opinions are still not valued as much as men's. What will our lives look like in another 35 years when Halley comes around again?
