So yesterday evening it was my duty as volunteer reviewer for NYTheatre.com to attend a theatrical production as part of the “Bad Plays” festival in Greenwich Village, New York.
I wrote the time and date in my calendar. I went online and printed the brochure. I mapquested the address and I left the apartment with 15 minutes of spare time in case of train delays.
On the door outside of the performance space, I see a poster for the festival with a handwritten note, saying “Upstairs, 3D.”
So I go upstairs to 3D. The door is shut, but I open it a teeny crack. A lady steps out and I whisper that I am from NYTheatre.com and I thought the play began at 8:00. I am mortified when she tells me that the show is about halfway through. But she is kind and forgiving and seats me inside. I sit and watch as I try to wonder what on earth I’ve walked into, as I don’t believe that this is the play I was signed up to see. But then again, the brochure was a bit confusing, so…maybe it is.
NYTheatre.com (justifiably) won’t publish a review of a show which the reviewer hasn’t seen all the way through, so here is my personal rave:
The play I saw the second half of is called Birth. It is a series of monologues and scenes written by Karen Brody. Even though I stepped in late, I was instantly drawn in by the stories being depicted through the vignettes on stage. Brody pulls no punches, and gets right into the dirty details of the birth process in a way I’ve never encountered. For all the ‘shocking’ and ‘naughty’ material I’ve seen onstage in similar blackbox performance spaces created and produced by edgy and impetuous young companies, nothing has so completely dropped my jaw as the scenes I witnessed Sunday night at 115 MacDougal Street. It was fantastic.
The cast comprises 8 actresses who play 8 mothers, stepping in on one another’s scenes as family members, doctors, midwives, and doulas. Shelley McPherson, Paula Pizzi, Brigitte Viellieu-Davis, Mary Bacon, Ilyana Kadushin, Laura Taylor, Caroline Clay and Tomoko Miyagi each deliver powerful and hilarious monologues as they describe their unique birthing story while maintaining an ensemble energy. They are fearless in their rendering of a natural process which is currently shrouded in fear. Director Heidi Miami Marshall is beautifully bold in her staging and Suzanne Mulder’s lighting design helps to keep the story flowing as the play moves from scene to scene with nothing but folding chairs to depict the set.
The play was mounted as a benefit for NYC Midwives, and it’s no secret that there’s an agenda to the theatrical production, but what show doesn’t have an agenda? Every story has a moral, and this one sets clearly out to shed light on a topic which is still, even in our post-feminist enlightened age, veiled in taboo mystique.
I stuck around for the panel talkback, and discovered that the majority of the audience was midwives, mothers, doulas, and folks who work closely with the aforementioned. This show deserves a more diverse audience. I urge anyone who is even hypothetically considering the possibility of one day maybe becoming pregnant or considering helping to make a person become pregnant or even exists due to the result of a pregnancy to see this show. Visit the website: http://www.birthonlaborday.com/theplay/play.html
At any rate, I contacted my editor at NYTheatre.com, and it turns out that the “Bad Play” I was scheduled to see was in fact cancelled. So it was completely by serendipity that I stumbled upon this performance, and equally serendipitous (and baffling) is the fact that I rode home on the subway sitting across from the exact same pair of women that I rode into Manhattan sitting across from.
Weird.
