The final word of “The Welkin” — a soft “oh” of realization that left the theater breathless — is more of an utterance, the coo of an innocent young babe. But the speaker isn’t a child; she’s a grown woman.
And she’s accused of murder.
It’s England in 1759, just around the time everyone is buzzing about the arrival of Halley’s comet. This woman, Sally Poppy (played by Haley Wong), and her lover are accused of the murder and dismemberment of the young daughter of the rich family for which Sally worked. She’s set to hang, but there’s a hitch: Sally claims she’s pregnant.
“The Welkin” is a kind of courtroom drama or, rather, a clever perversion of such; technically we don’t see the courtroom, just a dim, dungeonlike room nearby where a forum of 12 matrons has been convened. They’re not Sally’s final adjudicators (that job is for the men, after all), but the jury ruling on the women’s issue in this case: whether Sally’s actually pregnant.
A little bit “The Crucible” and a lot bit the 2022 film “Women Talking,” in all the best ways, “The Welkin,” which opened on Wednesday at Atlantic Theater Company’s Linda Gross Theater, is a somber yet witty examination of how women labor — with housework, with children and with a society of men that doesn’t serve them — and how they negotiate their assumed responsibilities with their desires.
“The Welkin” successfully depicts these women as unique individuals, representing women from different strata of society, and with different prejudices and viewpoints. Each one is memorable, from the stately outsider, Charlotte Cary (Mary McCann), a colonel’s widow in a stylish crown of a hat, to Mary Middleton (Susannah Perkins), an awkward, superstitious young woman who is worried only about getting home to her crop of leeks.
The impressive script, by Lucy Kirkwood, and likewise direction, by Sarah Benson, snap to life in the form of a robust ensemble cast led by Sandra Oh as Elizabeth Luke, the local midwife who intends to see that Sally isn’t the victim of an unfair verdict. Oh offers a grounded, sympathetic heroine who is, despite her reasoning and moralizing, still fallible. Wong also gives an entrancing performance as Sally, who reads like a living, breathing provocation: in turns vicious, scornful, irreverent and wild. Other standouts include Nadine Malouf as the petty Emma Jenkins; Dale Soules as Sarah Smith, the wise veteran matron with nearly two dozen children; and Jennifer Nikki Kidwell’s mature and levelheaded Ann Lavender.
Much like Kirkwood’s other work, which includes “The Children” and “Chimerica,” “The Welkin” is full of language that playfully shifts from bleak to comic, formal to casual; from obscuring its characters’ motivations to revealing them at just the right moment of dramatic tension. Kirkwood’s poetic turns relate earnest emotion, as when the convicted murderess rhapsodizes about a romance in which “the wanting rose up around me like milk boiling,” or brutal irony, as when a male doctor who examines her speaks of the “dark depths” of her anatomy. (The lighting design, by Stacey Derosier, also plays off these contrasts, making subtle shifts between warm and cold accents to meet the shifts in tone, while the set design, by dots, appropriately evokes the grim, claustrophobic feeling these women have, trapped in the space.)
The play does occasionally drag in its two-and-a-half-hour running time, sometimes overstating its points, as it does in Elizabeth’s more preachy monologues on gender and justice. But the twists and turns in this well-composed, self-contained drama make even the slower bits engaging.
“Welkin” is an archaic term meaning the heavens or the firmament. Though many of the characters in the play discuss the comet, the sky still seems an unfathomable notion for these confined women, who would likely be too consumed with their lives to take a moment to gaze upward. “I never look up at the sky,” one of the younger matrons says. “Not unless I’ve washing on the line.”
“The Welkin” doesn’t need to make a case for its modern-day relevance, but a few surprising anachronisms and the characters’ idle musings about how things may or may not change by the next appearance of Halley’s comet do just that.
“I do think it very queer that we know more about the movement of a comet that is thousands of miles away than the workings of a woman’s body,” Ann Lavender says, in 1759. In 2024 our cultural confusion and misconceptions about women’s bodies remain. As does our discomfort with talking about women’s bodies, especially when they tell stories of aging or decline or loss.
The next time Halley’s comet takes the stage will be 2061. “The Welkin” poses the question — what will women see in the sky then? And what will we see in women?
The Welkin
Through June 30 at the Linda Gross Theater, Manhattan; atlantictheater.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes.
