At a little after 5 p.m. last Thursday, a jury in New York found former president Donald Trump guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. Immediately, my phone was flooded with messages about the court’s ruling—from news apps, my family, friends, and coworkers. Some cheered. Others wondered if a guilty verdict really meant anything for someone like Trump. Others still expressed concern for the safety of the jurors.
I received these alerts en route to see the Atlantic Theater Company’s production of The Welkin by playwright Lucy Kirkwood. (This staging marks the work’s American debut after premiering at London’s National Theatre in 2020.) Inside the Linda Gross Theater, housed within a former church in Chelsea, the cast was warming up before their 7 p.m. curtain when the production manager rushed in to tell them the news.
“There are aware and concerned citizens in our cast,” says Sandra Oh, who appears in the play as Lizzy Luke, a defiant midwife. “There’s no way that we are not influenced by everything that is going on in the world.” And indeed as many theatergoers noted during intermission, The Welkin made for richly apt viewing while a real-world trial unfolded.
Described as a feminist take on Twelve Angry Men, the play is set in rural England in 1759, where Sally Poppy (Haley Wong), a downtrodden young woman with a history of infidelity and theft, is sentenced to death.
Sally has been accused of murdering a child, and her guilt hinges on the testimony of her distressed husband. Complicating matters, however, is her claim that she is pregnant, a condition that would commute her sentence and spare her being hanged before an angry mob. (In other words, while Sally’s own life is not deemed worth saving, the life of her unborn child is.) To help determine whether Sally is telling the truth, a jury of 12 women, including Lizzy, is summoned and locked in a room at the courthouse, accompanied by a bailiff named Mr. Coombes (Glenn Fitzgerald).
As tends to be the case in contemporary theater productions set in the distant past, the cast of jurors in The Welkin is markedly diverse. Though the play takes place in England, this is an international company of actors who speak in no cohesive accent, a fact that is initially distracting but becomes less so as the narrative progresses into thornier territory. Likewise, the dialogue, written in 18th-century parlance, takes a moment for the ear to adjust to—especially given the many florid euphemisms used to describe a woman’s reproductive functions.
There is something unusual, perhaps even intimidating, about seeing 13 women onstage together—a conceit that the play leans into, asking us to consider what it means when a decision-making body is made up entirely of women. Do they fare any better than men?
In an interview on Vanity Fair’s Little Gold Men podcast earlier this year, Oh talked about the freedom—and the responsibility—that she has earned in her career to be discerning about the roles she takes on. (She also appears this year as Ms. Sofia Mori on HBO’s The Sympathizer.) And a few things drew Oh to Lizzy, as she tells me in a phone call: Besides the chance to work with 12 other female actors, she was attracted to the idea of playing a midwife, or, as she puts it, “the person who helps the transition between life and death.”
Although there are only two men in the play’s ensemble and both have relatively few lines, the power and omnipresence of men as a class weighs heavily on The Welkin. Still, the jurors are undeterred from vividly discussing and puzzling over feminine bodily functions—periods, the woes of menopause, miscarriage—and sometimes appear to forget that Mr. Coombes is in the room.
And the expected recurrence of Halley’s Comet in the play adds to the community’s disquiet. “I do think it very queer that we know more about the movement of a comet that is thousands of miles away than the workings of a woman’s body,” states Ann Lavender (Jennifer Nikki Kidwell), one of the more prudent jurors. The line may be a little on the nose, but even now, in the era of modern medicine, Ann’s sentiment rings true.
All the while, Wong plays the defendant Sally with animalistic rage. Though she is bound by handcuffs for most of her time on stage, her fury is physical, her voice pained. She laughs maniacally and cries out with the anguish of a woman who is, in a sense, a child herself and has only ever known conditional love.
In some ways, The Welkin is a story about disparate individuals reconciling their differences to reach a unanimous decision—something that can only happen by speaking, and listening, to one another. It’s an important lesson for our fractured and disaffected political moment, though Oh resists reading the play’s mission too narrowly.
“There are many things that happen in this play that have happened to half the audience,” she says. “But I’d say the actual act of coming into a theater and sitting with a group of people you might not know and communing in a dark room to see this is an act of faith and hope.”
The Welkin is now in previews, with an opening set for Wednesday, June 12, at the Atlantic Theater Company’s Linda Gross Theater in New York.