Arts

Two women on the edge, taken to the edge, and fighting to survive on the most serrated parts of the edge: Suzan-Lori Parks’ play Fucking A, first performed in 2000, is being performed alongside the Pulitzer Prize winner’s 1999 play In The Blood.

Both have as their source material Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, and both feature lead characters named Hester. And they are both at New York City’s Signature Theatre, intended to be seen “in dialogue.”

In the recognizably modern In The Blood, Hester (Saycon Sengbloh) is a mother of five children, all with different fathers. She draws the letter “A” on the surfaces of the underside of a bridge beneath which she and her family live. According to the play’s notes, the setting is “here” and the time is “now.”

In the less recognizably any-era Fucking A, directed by Jo Bonney, Hester (Christine Lahti) is an abortionist, branded with an A on her chest, and carrying out her activities in her own home. She looks like a careworn Mother Courage, and her best friend is a prostitute, Canary Mary (Joaquina Kalukango). Both want so much more than they have.

The only accoutrements to the surgeries she performs are a pair of forceps and a bucket for cleaning, containing dirty water, which is poured down an inner drain. Rocco Disanti’s staging is spare, with Jeff Croiter’s lighting animating different settings rather than furnishings and scene changes.

This isn’t an impassioned play about abortion, or about access to abortion, or the rights and wrongs of a woman’s right to choose, but rather about power, hypocrisy, and parenting.

For while Hester helps to terminate pregnancies, her own child is missing, and the play itself is a strange mix of the literal and fantastical, with the play itself feeling like a nightmare fairytale. The mayor of the town (Marc Kudisch) is a philandering, abusive power addict; his wife (Elizabeth Stanley) is a fusebox of nerves and flinty coping mechanisms.

Hester hates her, as it was she reporting her son for a petty crime that led him to go to jail, and now to being alive or dead. Monster (Brandon Victor Dixon) is her son’s name, and we do not know what has become of him. We think we do, but do we?

The best speech in Parks’ dark play is a comic one, delivered by Raphael Nash Thompson’s Butcher as he lists, in a juicily standout monologue, the many faults and transgressions of his child—some serious, some not. This speech, beautifully delivered, goes on and on, will make you laugh, perhaps even roar, and it is truly worth the price of your ticket.

There are hunters pursuing Monster, and a general air of menace, only exacerbated when Hester is tricked by a former cell-mate of her son’s. Written many years ago, Fucking A nevertheless feels contemporary: the banal evil of a powerbroker; the easily stirred mob; the condemned abortionist.

Fucking A is a shrunken version of a society riven by prejudice and pettiness. Hester and Canary Mary want something, anything, to ameliorate their pain and hardship, and the price for both is high and relentless.

In The Blood, directed by Sarah Benson, is staged very differently. Louisa Thompson’s scenic design incorporates a massive ramp—the curve of the underside of the bridge, maybe—on which Hester’s five children slide joyously down. They live in unseen darkness beneath the ground.

A massive disposal chute sees objects thrown away by the outside world become furniture, clothes, and playthings for Hester’s five children. Nothing is beyond being thrown or used as a sliding device.

If Hester in Fucking A is branded with an A, so Hester in In The Blood is branded just as viciously by people’s judgments and condemnation.

We see them at the beginning and end of the play behind her spitting a Greek chorus of malevolency about Hester’s perceived fecklessness and uselessness.

She is as trapped and socially codified as the Hester in the other play, but she does her best to bring her children up as warmly and lovingly as possible. But the forces that would seek to stop her from doing so are always close. She is also losing her sight.

The adult actors playing her children double up as adult figures from the outside world, and as in Fucking A, they have type/professional names as opposed to real ones, giving—as in Fucking A, the sense of a mythical or magical-realist world running in tandem with the real one.

Jocelyn Bioh is both Hester’s child, Bully, and The Welfare Lady. As her child, she is far from a bully, being both solicitous of her siblings and her mother’s biggest protector, but as The Welfare Lady she precisely a bully.

She makes Hester feel her clean, shiny hair, and give her a shoulder massage. She gives her material to make a gorgeous dress from and then gives her a paltry dollar for her services. And, as it turns out, she has happily participated in the sexual exploitation of Hester, too.

She is not a welfare professional as one would hope to recognize her, but a white-collar tyrant, happy to have found someone so low on the social ladder that she can belittle and exploit.

Michael Braun plays both Jabber, Hester’s oldest child, and his absent father, Chilli, who visits later in the play to propose marriage. But a dreamy wedding dress-proffering proposal is destined not to lead to the altar.

Russell G. Jones plays both Baby and his father, Reverend D. As the former Jones rolls around happy; as the latter he is utterly in retreat from responsibilities and a hypocrite of the highest order as he lectures passersby on how to lead their lives morally correctly.

Like The Welfare Lady, Reverend D. is a poisonous villain dressed in the deceptive drag of human compassion.

Just as Hester enjoyed the salve of a close female relationship in Fucking A, so in In The Blood, Hester has a friend in Amiga Gringa (Ana Reeder, who also plays her daughter Beauty), who wants to both help her and be with her more intimately. Frank Wood is both son Trouble and a doctor who diagnoses Hester’s illness, and says she must have a hysterectomy.

Women’s reproductive choices are subtly at the heart of both plays, then; they are not pro-choice plays by design, but by implication. Both Hesters find themselves against the social current by their exercising of choice. The shape of both plays sees their choices and rooms for maneuver narrowing, in In The Blood Hester’s case made that much more acute by being a black single mother.

In both plays too a horrific incident involving children adds an especial Greek tragedy element to the theme of the cost of mothering. Both women end up with the blood of children literally smeared on their hands.

Society doesn’t know to place and include both women, and both women—living outside society—struggle to find a place and reason to live.
Hester in the second play is an easier character to root for, and the play itself a more exuberant and involving piece of theatre, with Benson’s direction breaking up the thematic heaviness with scenes of childish play and levity.

It also indicts the audience more; that Greek chorus of proscription and condemnation at beginning and end underscores the voices in all our heads, and our complicity with with the rejection and rush to judgment when it comes to women like Hester.

Sengbloh’s performance is as searing as Lahti’s and her desperate defiance that much more tragic as she struggles to keep her family together.

Very literally at the end of In The Blood, Hester’s world is narrowing and soon her vision and ownership of it, in every way, may be entirely obliterated. Her struggle becomes the most elemental one: to own and assert her own self.