Women’s Voices and Struggles Take Center Stage

By Lionelle Hamanaka

Two plays, The Meltdown at Theater for a New City, and Blood of the Lamb at 59E59, touched on the women’s movement from different perspectives.

The Meltdown is a slapstick farce with music about Alfie, his wife Janice, and Sasha, a neighborhood mystic. Alfie enters screeching, “Damn it!” His wife suggests he take a nap and sings a lovely lullaby composed by Peter Dizozza. She asks him to go next door and borrow a pot that doesn’t leak. Snoring himself into dreamland, Alfie visits his neighbor to borrow the pot, but it seems Sasha is a powerful seer who leads him through several climate catastrophes.

Fortunately, Janice makes the trip with him. They survive several near death experiences; a flood raises their whole town up to a new level, and a tsunami even soaks her hair. At a White House scene, while the president and his staff are asleep, a climate storm starts, and Alfie and Janice (in disguise) run off to save their skins. It’s announced that the U.S.A. has drowned in the sea. In an interesting interlude, stage assistants dressed in black (puppeteers) carry on small orange seahorses, symbolizing the changes when the ocean floods the world. Elsewhere, a pair of dolphin puppets appear, speaking their own language, as Alfie and Sasha watch. The use of puppets is very imaginative and brings to life the climate predictions of the ocean taking over and flooding the land masses.

The set has a red card table with two red chairs. A third red chair is set at a distance for Alfie’s nap. A two-step staircase serves as the singers’ perch. A very large screen upstage projected TV news, a blurry TV screen, the ocean and a domestic backdrop. Pianist Peter Dizozza accompanied events onstage from a small pit.

In another interlude, using the upstage screen, three ex-presidents’ images appear — George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln. They get into a 20-minute argument about the meaning of U.S. history.

In the last scene, Alfie reconciles himself to the end of the world through climate change and Janice confides that she thought of breaking up with him. She tells him that she went next door, borrowing a pot without leaks. A singer appears impersonating Ella Fitzgerald, scat singing and dressed in a gorgeous blue sparkling gown. Then the puppeteers bring a puppet resembling the singer, sitting her on one of the chairs.

Amidst the sentimental glow of past culture, Alfie and Janice happily kiss and make up. He agrees to vote and Janice climbs the staircase saying, “that’s not enough.” She then sings an improvised aria in a beautiful soprano voice, invoking past feminist heroes like Susan B. Anthony, Ella Fitzgerald and Sojourner Truth, leading a chant, “We’re not going back.” The audience joins in and then Janice and Alfie dance to swing music with the cast.

Mike Roche as Alfie is very flexible, twisting himself into contortions to make the fantastic scene changes believable. As a protagonist he seemed to be completely the victim of the antagonist, climate change. Janice, acted by Beth Griffith, is the emotional anchor and helps provide for the fantastic plot of the farce with her beautiful voice and masterful acting. Sasha, by Holly O’Brien, is believable, as is Debra Khan-Bey, who plays Ella Fitzgerald. The puppeteers, Kevin Peralta, Paola Poucel, Nico Negron and Samantha Sing performed professionally and added an unusual and uplifting cultural dimension.

However, elements of the farce seem unconnected. The scene where three ex-presidents argue does not seem connected to the couple in the throes of climate change catastrophes. At the end, the women’s lib issue and voting erupt unexpectedly. Although Janice has expressed her discontent with a leaking pot, asked her husband to cook and to vote if he’s upset with the world, these themes are submerged during their flight from climate crises. There are not enough transition scenes, and some scenes are overwritten.

Meltdown was written by Toby Armour. It was directed imaginatively by Joan Kane. The Meltdown’s run at Theater for the New City was from October 10-27.

 

The Blood of the Lamb at 59E59, by Arlene Hutton, directed by Margot Bordelon, is a one hour, 15 minute two-hander about a Right to Life attorney interrogating a pregnant woman detained at a Texas airport after Roe v. Wade was overturned. Although she did not know her fetus had died, one of her indictments is ‘abuse of a corpse.’ But ‘Nessa’ (played by Meredith Garretson) is out of luck.

The script has only two characters and each is minutely drawn. Kelly McAndrew as Val, the lawyer with five kids, is a believable middle aged Right-to-Lifer, although lacking religious serenity, and not portraying the dramatic discoveries her character makes about herself (she had an abortion in college, considering it a ‘sin’). But McAndrew provides antagonism and momentum in Nessa’s predicament. Serious indeed, as women carrying dead fetuses can experience complications: infection, blood clots, pain, fever, vomiting, diarrhea, and heavy bleeding and die. Val, a lawyer, is ignorant of medical complications.  The director allowed Nessa to pace nervously a number of times. A woman carrying a dead fetus would most likely feel extreme sadness, fatigue and difficulty in carrying out daily tasks—not pacing around nervously. Nessa expressed the nervous emotionality of the pregnant woman, but lacked command of sense memory, which would have given her more depth. Hutton used more dialogue to cover legal details than psychological parameters, especially of the lawyer, perhaps an attempt to micromanage the situation she created. Blood of the Lamb played at 59e59 from September 27 to October 20.