Sonder Theatre Company’s ensemble of “The Women of Lockerbie” (Photo by Nicole Erb)
Reviewed by Steven Leigh Morris
Sonder Theatre Company at the Covina Theatre
Through May 31
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Top: Lacy Blake-Vetter. Bottom L to R: Nicole Erb, Suzanne Voss, Scott Harris. (Photo by Nicole Erb)
In 1988, Pan American Airlines Flight 103 took off from London en route to New York and exploded in the skies over the village of Lockerbie, Scotland some 40 minutes later, killing all 259 passengers and crew (mostly Americans), plus 11 Scots on the ground.
The cause of the crash was a bomb placed under one seat, for which two Libyan nationalists were charged, and one convicted in a Scottish court. It was later revealed that the bombing was masterminded by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, using Libya as a proxy and as revenge for a U.S. Navy fighter jet flying illegally over Iranian airspace that same year and accidentally shooting down an Iranian passenger aircraft, killing all 290 people on board.
“You Americans, you’re just cowboys galloping through the skies, dropping bombs” rages one Scotswoman who lost family from falling debris, in Deborah Brevoort’s 1992 The Women of Lockerbie. Despite this politicized remark that renders the play more timely than anyone would wish, Women of Lockerbie is as far from a partisan screed as could be imagined. Rather, it’s a kind of anti-war play, a theme-and-variation on The Trojan Women, a tragedy employing chorales, poeticism, and a three-part structure to excavate the many permeations of grief.
Its anchor is a married American couple, Bill and Madeline (Scott Harris and Libby Baker), who have grown estranged losing their 20-year-old son, their only child, who was on Flight 103, on the seat over the bomb, returning home for Christmas on a break from his studies in London. Seven years after the cataclysm, the couple has decided to visit Lockerbie for a vigil. Madeline’s grief emerges as primal; the play opens with her wandering the fields of Lockerbie, semi-crazed, searching for any shred of evidence about her son. Her despair is like that of an ancient Greek Fury, while Bill attempts in vain to return her to her senses, for which she lashes out at him with contempt. He suffers no less than she but exhibits a coping mechanism that would seem, at first glance, to be more rational — certainly more self-contained. And this duality, over the processing of grief, is one of many in a play that traffics in dualities.
“Death is a visitor who pops in and he’s gone. Grief is a guest who stays too long.”
The couple’s sometimes explosive agony is mediated by a local host named Olive (director and lighting/sound designer Christina Harris), who is grappling with her own loss from the incident.
At stake is the issue of the victims’ clothes that have been gathered and stored — clothes that have become toxic from the stains of blood and body parts. The American government, represented locally by George Jones (Michael Klug), has ordered the clothes burned, while the locals — the women of Lockerbie, a kind of expansive Greek chorus led by a local firebrand/cleaning woman (Vanessa Mizzone) — are lobbying to wash (purify) the clothes and return them to the victims’ families — another duality in this exploration of how to cope with grief.
Harris’s production is set on an almost bare stage, broken by a single set piece of wide steps. For the rest, she relies on her very capable ensemble (which also includes Nicole Erb, Luca Nicoletti, Donna Jo Thorndale, and Suzanne Voss); the musicality of the dialogue, punctuated by phrases spoken/sung in unison and sometimes accompanied by mood-enhancing orchestrations; and washes of atmospheric stage lighting made more vivid by fog effects.
There is a smattering of bromides (“Hatred is love that’s been injured”) — not entirely persuasive in light of American voting rights currently being pummeled, and domestic bigotry in general), but Sonder Theatre Company’s production is also as deeply moving as it is probing.
The Covina Theatre, 104 Citrus Ave., Covina. Opens Sat., May 17; check website for schedule; thru May 31. https://www.SonderTheatreCompany.org Running time: 70 minutes, no intermission
