Blood of the Lamb – 22 September 2024

Blood of the Lamb exposes the impractical nature of enforcing complicated laws about body and autonomy through a dialogue that largely ignores the morality of these laws. By focusing on the practical act of carrying these laws out and who exactly would be making the determinations, Blood of the Lamb made a unique contribution to the abortion debate. Instead of asking, “is this right or wrong?”, the seminal question was “what would you do?”.

The specific situation in this play was a woman who was on a flight from California to New York that was diverted to Texas because she passed out on the plane. Her unborn child died in the process, but she did not go into labor and give birth to the stillborn child. Because the fetus died in Texas, the law made the fetus a citizen of Texas, and the would-have-been mother, Nessa (Meredith Garretson) would be charged with defiling a corpse if she had the baby removed from her body in Texas or illegal transport of a corpse if she left Texas to do so. Both of these would be felony charges, and the state of Texas appointed a lawyer, Val (Kelly McAndrew) to represent Nessa’s unborn child. Val explained that Nessa would have to carry the dead baby to term and give birth to it so that it could get a birth certificate, because a birth certificate is required for a death certificate, and a death certificate is required for the coroner and a coroner is required for a citizen of Texas.

This conundrum sounds funny and absurd—but let me assure you that it isn’t. In practice, this is what abortion bans and laws that criminalize gender-related care actually mean—a convoluted dehumanization that ignores pregnancy-related trauma and the risks for the mother’s body. Playwright Arlene Hutton made an interesting appeal in Blood of the Lamb by asking us to set aside those strong feelings and think about how impractical these laws are, how unwieldy they are to enforce, how inconvenient they are for all involved, how there are no legal precedents, and, most importantly, how nobody benefits from or is affected by these situations except on a personal level. In the same way that Val’s abortion didn’t affect Nessa’s life, whatever Val felt about faith and morality wasn’t going to save Nessa’s baby. The conversation that took place in this show was over for both characters at the end of the interaction, and how Nessa goes forward in life doesn’t effect Val. Val’s involvement is over. She did not choose to help Nessa. She tacitly walked away from a conversation she no longer wanted to have, with the slightest of indications that Nessa could also walk away.

The role reversal of Val as the put together lawyer making firm arguments and Nessa as the exhausted and angry, mistreated woman was masterfully written and executed. Toward the end, while Nessa was making coherent arguments and appeals, Val was decompensating. We saw Val’s many faces throughout the show, particularly through her phone conversations and switching tone depending on who she was allegedly talking to. Toward the end, Val really wanted to leave also. Her very subtle nod toward the door seemed less like helping Nessa and more like Val being ready to walk away from the conversation. Morality was too big a headache for Val, Val was the one who couldn’t understand the seriousness of the law and what it meant for Nessa in real life, and Val was done trying. Val did not break through the glass ceiling—she took the coward’s way out of not setting the legal precedent in this particular type of crime so she wouldn’t have to suffer the burden or the blame or the unfairness of credit going to the men she worked for. 

I was impressed by McAndrew’s subtext. Though the dialogue of the play didn’t include a reaction to Nessa’s sexual orientation, McAndrew made Val’s feelings palpable in the air. Garretson, for her part, brought a degree of compassion that made it clear that Nessa could imagine herself in Val’s shoes, even though Val did not want to see herself in Nessa. These two women gave incredible performances that burned with the kind of intensity that only comes from reality. The show is tight, beautifully written, and philosophically unique. It doesn’t tell you what to think, but asks you to examine what these types of laws mean and what enforcing them would look like. Are they worth the time and taxpayer money? Is this really a problem that should be handled at a government level?

I attended this performance on a press pass from Berlin Rosen.