Sandra Oh as midwife Lizzy Luke (right) checks on a pregnant Peg Carter (Simone Recasner, center) as Ann Harada’s plays Judith Brewer looks on in The Welkin.
In Lucy Kirkwood’s The Welkin, the time is 1759, and the residents of a rural English community have one eye on the sky—welkin is an archaic word for heaven—for the appearance of Halley’s Comet. It’s a rare occurrence that takes their minds off their hardscrabble 18th-century lives.
Kirkwood takes a leaf from Reginald Rose’s Twelve Angry Men in centering the play on a courtroom drama. The guilt of the accused, Sally Poppy (Haley Wong), has been determined, but she claims she is pregnant, which may alter her fate. The setting and the overtly feminist issues of The Welkin mark it as a cousin to Vinegar Tom, Caryl Churchill’s 1976 drama about witchcraft and gender attitudes a century earlier.
From left: Kitty Givens (Tilly Botsford) and Mary Middleton (Susannah Perkins, kneeling) check Sally Poppy (Haley Wong), to determine if she is pregnant.
Bailiff Billy Coombes (Glenn Fitzgerald) interrupts the chores of Elizabeth “Lizzy” Luke (Sandra Oh), a local midwife, to summon her to court. Lizzy resists, partly because the victim was Alice Wax, a daughter of a prominent family, and she bears a grudge against the Waxes:
John Wax has enclosed my sister’s pasture and given her instead a scrubby spit of land a quarter of the size, and he had David Swain hanged under the Black Act.
The midwife also wants to keep a low profile and not attend for another reason. She has lost “twelve babies … in as many months,” she tells Coombes. “I am the very first person they blame. God? No, they don’t blame God. Nobody blames God when there is a woman can be blamed instead.” But she changes her mind when she learns that the convicted killer is Sally (Haley Wong)—her first delivery, when she was only 14. “She is a nasty, stupid, wicked wretch, and I mean to save her life,” Lizzy says—a raised-fist declaration that kick-starts the engaging and often surprising melodrama.
“Nobody blames God when there is a woman can be blamed instead.”
Assembled in a drab room (superbly lighted by Stacey Derosier as if it were a Caravaggio tableau), the other women wait for Lizzy. Each of them comes forward with a sentence or two to identify herself. Says Sarah Smith (a gruff Dale Soules): “I was born in 1676, I have had twenty-one children and three husbands, all very satisfactory. Until last year I could stand on my hands for a full minute.”
The panel’s job is not to determine guilt—the male jury has done that—but to decide whether Sally is “quick with child.” But justice for the accused is already compromised: both Coombes and another juror owe their livelihoods to the Wax family.
All the women in the large, overwhelmingly female cast have opportunities to shine, and all do so, including Ann Harada as a menopausal matron; Mary McCann as an imperious doyenne with a secret; Susannah Perkins as a woman eager to harvest her leeks; and the husky-voiced Nadine Malouf as Emma Jenkins, a part that parallels the unforgiving holdout juror in Twelve Angry Men. Each one establishes a vivid character.
Elizabeth tangles with Coombes (Glenn Fitzgerald, left) as Charlotte Cary (Mary McCann, left) and Sarah Smith (Dale Soules) look on. Photographs by Ahron R. Foster.
Kirkwood invests the action with unexpected twists and turns, and director Sarah Benson never lets the place slacken. Oh is a bold, feisty heroine, willing to battle Coombes, who has been appointed to oversee them but must be silent, which gives the women license to say things they might otherwise not dare to. Still, one might question the likelihood of a woman revealing that “Mary Middleton’s husband’s prick is shaped like a question mark and yet they have five children” (how would the speaker know that?) to a group that includes Mary herself—and in front of Coombes.
Lizzy must also confront her colleagues’ willingness to defer to male superiority, as when the women learn a doctor is available to examine Sally.
Why should the word of a doctor mean more to you than my own? When I brought your children into the world, you trusted me then, did you not?
Mixed in with Kirkwood’s use of archaisms such as caudle and slamkin, and even patches of Scots—“That’s dutty as a byre”—is a modern feminist sensibility. Those moments carry so much truth, even today, that it’s easy to accept them, as in Lizzy’s fiery plea for Sally’s life:
She has been sentenced by men pretending to be certain of things of which they are entirely ignorant, and now we sit here imitating them, trying to make an ungovernable thing governable.
Meanwhile, the comet is coming, as predictable in the heavens as the miseries endured by these women down on earth. Both as a trip back in time and a resonating record of persistent inequality, The Welkin is well worth a visit.
Lucy Kirkwood’s The Welkin plays through July 7 at the Atlantic Theater (336 W. 20th St.). Evening performances are at 7 p.m. Tuesday and Thursday and at 8 p.m. Wednesday, Friday and Saturday; matinees are at 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. For tickets and more information, visit atlantictheater.org.
Playwright: Lucy Kirkwood
Direction: Sarah Benson
Sets: dots
Lighting: Stacey Derosier
Sound: Palmer Hefferan
Fight direction: Sean Griffin & Gerardo Rodriguez
