The what? According to the dictionary, a “welkin” is “the celestial abode of God or the gods”–in short, a long way away from the God or godsforsaken England of 1759, where Lucy Kirkwood, a 2018 Tony nominee for The Children, has set her latest play. A courtroom drama minus the courtroom, The Welkin has a group of matrons judging one of their own in the wake of a sensational murder. Or at least that’s the main strand of this shaggy, occasionally dazzling, and ultimately frustrating piece, now Off Broadway at the Atlantic Theater Company.
Much of the piece transpires in sooty darkness, including the unsettling opening scene, with Sally Poppy (Haley Wong), naked and bloody, brandishing a hammer. She’d gone missing for four months, and returns to her laborer husband, Frederick (Danny Wolohan, one of just two men in the cast), with dreadful news: her lover had killed a young girl, and she helped cut up and hide the remains. Worse, she’s pregnant, and she demands her husband pay the midwife for the impending arrival.
The black curtains then open, revealing Lizzie Luke (Sandra Oh), the town’s most eminent midwife. Like all the female characters in the show Lizzie is forever churning butter or engaged in “women’s work,” and along comes bailiff Billy Coombes (Glenn Fitzpatrick) to add a new and unwelcome task. According to the law a twelve-women jury must decide if Sally, who isn’t showing, is indeed with child–if she is, she can’t be hanged for murder, and will instead be sent to Australia. The widowed Lizzie, who in just one of many accommodations that need be made for menfolk is involved with the married Billy, reluctantly agrees.
The swearing-in ceremony, held in a prison-like room where the women are denied basic amenities until a verdict is reached, introduce us to the rest of the cast, as Sally herself warily (and profanely) watches. (Billy is forbidden to have contact with them.) They range from young Helen (Emily Cass McDonnell), who has had twelve miscarriages in eight years and is unsympathetic to the defendant to the enigmatic, well-born Charlotte (Mary McCann) and the 83-year-old Sarah, who’s still spry despite having 21 children with three husbands. With no sonograms available the women are obliged to deduce Sarah’s pregnancy through various tests; to Lizzie’s consternation, several would prefer a male doctor determine the matter. This is just one of the flashpoints that detonate throughout the drama, one quite literal, as these “twelve angry women” (who are more often resigned, disappointed, or befuddled by their lot in life despite occasional joys) congregate, while a mob braying for Sarah’s blood is heard outside and Halley’s Comet approaches.
That’s where the welkin business comes in, as the comet, a source of mystery and mischief, takes a play that is one part The Crucible, one part Women Talking (though that Oscar-winning film came out two years after the play bowed in London), and maybe one part an anguished horror story like The Nightingale (sympathetic to women but unable to do much more than observe their plight given male dominance) in a different, flippant direction. The central mystery is resolved early in the second act as the relationship between Lizzie and Sally comes into sharper focus, then what had been a period play with some delightful turns of phrase (perhaps made up) transforms into a river of “shitstorms” and “fucks,” with anachronistic references and an unlikely group sing. The comet becomes a capital “M” metaphor, as if Kirkwood doesn’t trust us to see the contemporary parallels regarding inequality, abortion, and feminism. Sarah Benson’s initially sure-handed direction falters and the play, simply but satisfyingly designed, dawdles, stranding a strong cast who have to punch through the material rather than work with and embroider it. (That said Oh, her usual steely empathy tested by a tricky situation, and the maddened Wong, a live wire on the order of Jennifer Lawrence at her most impassioned, do a fine job leading the ensemble into uncertain terrain.) By the bitter end a show the begins as an imaginative historical construct wears out its…welkin.
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