Sandra Oh stars as an eighteenth-century midwife and moral lodestone.
Early in “The Welkin,” the British playwright Lucy Kirkwood’s period thriller, now at the Linda Gross Theatre, a dozen women appear in something like an eighteenth-century diorama: they are arranged in bas-relief against a black curtain, each obsessively performing a single task. Whump, whump, whump goes a carpet beater; scrape, scrape, scrape grinds a brush against the floor. It’s a cliché, of course, that “women’s work” is backbreaking and soul-crushing, but Kirkwood, who also wrote the Tony-nominated play “The Children”—in which retired nuclear scientists consider sacrificing themselves to shut down a damaged reactor— is interested in what follows the cliché. If work can crush a soul, who’s to blame for the monstrous thing that takes that poor soul’s place?
In Kirkwood’s play, directed for the Atlantic Theatre Company by Sarah Benson, a court has already condemned a young married woman, Sally Poppy (Haley Wong), to hang, for helping her lover murder a little girl. We’re pretty sure she did it: the play starts with a candlelit prologue, in which Sally visits her abandoned husband raving and covered in the child’s blood. But Sally has sworn to the judge that she’s pregnant, and, under English common law in 1759, “pleading the belly” could commute the sentence. The judge presses twelve women—a “jury of matrons”— into service to evaluate Sally, sequestering them “without meat, drink, fire and candle,” to hasten their examination along.
This story is from the June 24, 2024 edition of The New Yorker.
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This story is from the June 24, 2024 edition of The New Yorker.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
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ANTIHERO
“The Boys,” on Prime Video.
HOW THE WEST WAS LONG
“Horizon: An American Saga—Chapter 1.”
WHEEL OF FORTUNE
Taffy Brodesser-Akner weighs the cost of generational wealth.
TWICE-TOLD TALES
The seditious writers who unravel their own stories.
CASTING A LINE
The hard-bitten genius of Norman Maclean.
TEARDROPS ON MY GUITAR
Four years ago, when Ivan Cornejo was a junior in high school, he had a meeting with his family to announce that he was dropping out. His parents were alarmed, of course, but his older sister, Pamela, had a more sympathetic reaction, because she also happened to be his manager, and she knew that he wasn’t bluffing when he said that he had to focus on his career.
THE HADAL ZONE
Arwen Rasmont waits hours at Keflavík International for his flight; they call it as he leaves the men’s room. He walks past the mirrored wall and is assaulted, as usual, by his dead father’s handsome image: high-arched nose, yellow hair.
OPENING THEORY
Ivan is standing on his own in the corner while the men from the chess club move the chairs and tables around.
THE LAST RAVE
Remembering a summer of estrangement.
КАНО
I’ve dated all kinds of women in my life,” the man said, “but I have to say I’ve never seen one as ugly as you.”