urban excavations

Blood of the Lamb
Featuring Meredith Garretson and Kelly McAndrew
Harbor Stage Company | 59E59 Theaters
September 14, 2024 – October 20, 2024
production site

We think we know where an abortion play is headed as soon as we clock that plot point. Oh, we think, this will be a thinly veiled screed against the patriarchy and a stand off, cowboy showdown style, Choice versus life — but whose life we ponder? Arlene Hutton in her new work Blood of the Lamb that arrives in New York after successful trips to Fringe Festivals on other continents, contemplates the decision making rights, the agency, the authority, of a mother’s right to choose from a perspective of our new authoritarian reality.

This two hander takes place, as so many of our contemporary terrors, in the modern supersonic highway, the land with no boundaries, a modern airport. Framed by the believably cheap furniture and overbright florescent lights of an airport’s administrative area (one of those backstage places that the average traveler never sees but staff and detainees know all too well), two women meet. Nessa (Meredith Garretson) is our weary and disoriented traveler. On a cross country flight she has passed out, we learn, and woke up in a hospital to discover that the fetus she has been carrying, her wanted child, has died and she needs a further procedure to remove it. In our new byzantine, draconian, righteous set of rigid laws curtailing a women and their doctors from dealing with reproductive health, where you land affects the choices you have in such situations. Nessa has found herself in one of those locations.

Nessa is met by another woman who has entered the spare office not quite thoroughly introducing herself but claiming she is there to assist. Val (Kelly McAndrew) is not a medical professional but a lawyer, who presents herself not to assist Nessa but, so Val claims, to represent the rights of the lifeless child in Val’s womb. And the interrogation that ensues, questions that could re-emerge as legal charges, pulsates with quiet power.

Tight, potent, 70 minutes stretch to encompass some of the most essential policy questions of the day in an exquisitely crafted theatrical gem — the struggle we live with these characters is Inherit the Wind pared to its essence, Nuts filed to a nub, Twelve Angry Men honed with a laser to two voices reflecting multitudes in a legal framework. Here the law shows itself to be malleable but not as a journey to the light and right, but here viewed midstream, with a lawyer checking in with associates for clues on how to manage the real life ramifications of rigid lawmaking without thinking through consequences. This lawyer has appeared to represent the child’s interests without protocols in place, and no one has a clue about how to proceed.

Hutton has crafted a theatrical screed that illustrates the canard we see repeatedly in our new political reality: the dog caught the car. The policy makers have the power and are flailing with pronouncements. This volunteer lawyer who wants to impose her beliefs along with the regime she represents to protect the rights of a fetus while ignoring the rights of the woman before her, stumbles through her protocols, checks in to investigate next steps with distant collaborators, and in the end faces her own choice: serve the machine or serve her gut sense of the humane next step.

Hutton keeps us captive in the discomfort of one of the most important issues of the day, and quietly explodes the world of essential questions they contain.

© Martha Wade Steketee (September 25, 2024)

Playwright | Arlene Hutton
Director | Margot Bordelon
Set Design | Andrew Boyce
Costume Design | Sarita Fellows
Lighting Design | Amith Chandrashaker
Sound | Uptownworks (Bailey Trierweiler, Daniella Hart, Noel Nichols)
Dramaturg | Christa Scott-Reed