LABOR PAINS

Lucy Kirkwood's "The Welkin" assesses women's work.

- HELEN SHAW

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.