Metro Pulse/Backstage/Midwives

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What:
Midwives

When:
Thru March 14. Call 974-5161 for showtimes

Where:
Ula Love Doughty Carousel Theatre, UT campus

Midwives' resolution is something to ponder

by Paige M. Travis

While working her way through the books chosen for Oprah's Book Club, my friend Jennifer read Chris Bohjalian's Midwives. "It will make you never want to have a baby," she told me frankly. I felt justly warned—about the book and Dana Yeaton's adaptation of the book into a play being performed at the Ula Love Doughty Carousel Theatre.

Indeed, Midwives doesn't make childbirth look like the greatest fun in the world, but I could learn that from watching any number of soap operas, cable medical shows or episodes of ER. What Midwives brings to the subject of midwifery, or "catching babies," is something much deeper and complex than the pain of labor.

Bonnie Gould plays Sibyl Danforth, a former midwife, who is undergoing chemotherapy in the hospital when she's visited by her medical student daughter, Connie (Christina Apathy). Their relationship is cool; a certain distance keeps them from being warm and loving and entirely open with one another. They both seem to have something to hide, or something they don't want to give away. Connie is studying to be an obstetrician, the legitimized, degreed, medically accepted version of a midwife. Sibyl is honored and offended by her daughter's choice of professions. How can Connie follow in her footsteps and still somehow be mocking her, pointing out where she herself failed?

Twenty years before, when she was a practicing midwife in rural Maine, Sibyl was helping a young mother give birth to her second child. Charlotte Bedford (Amy Hubbard) was a simple country woman whose labor becomes difficult and lengthy; she pushes, then waits, pushes some more, for hours. She and her husband are concerned, but they defer to Sibyl who exudes a calm confidence. She's "caught" hundreds of babies, and this one will be no different.

But it is different. Charlotte dies, but the baby lives. And the circumstances lead to criminal charges and a courtroom battle.

The Carousel Theatre is a traditional round with the audience circled around three-quarters of the stage area. Minimal props establish the setting and the time. Three chairs and an IV pole make up the hospital room. Across the stage, a white-sheeted table is the birthing bed. And all around are bare-limbed trees—spindly, leafless branches stuck into wooden posts surrounding the cast and audience. Softly lighted from behind white screens, the effect is of a womb-like enclosure, a forest that feels safe yet foreboding, sometimes claustrophobic.

With her presumably bald head wrapped in a scarf and her arm tapped into an IV, Sibyl relives the dramatic moments for her daughter. The flashbacks, and the characters they contain, come into the outer circle from the wings. The choreography creates a separation of past and present that's very ingenious and effective.

Always superb, Gould is expressive and restrained. She plays Sibyl as an authority on catching babies, not a second-string alternative to a "real" doctor. Conflict works on Gould's face constantly as she begins to doubt her confidence and her own memories. As the dead mother, Hubbard's very presence is haunting. Barefoot, dressed in a long, white nightgown, she paces the stage; Sibyl sees her everywhere, in her past and maybe even in the present (those are strong drugs pumping through her veins). As the courtroom scene escalates, Charlotte also plays the judge—a totally appropriate and telling choice in casting (whether the playwright's or the director's). Sibyl wants her patient's forgiveness, second only perhaps to her daughter's.

Christina Apathy's Connie is a prickly young lady. Many people in their early 20s are touchy, defensive, and aggressive with their parents—even when they've never borne the burden of having to decide whether their mother was a murderer or not. Connie's relationship with her mother is strained, and her attitude is adolescent. I couldn't tell if that was the approach chosen by the actress or just the character's revealed immaturity. Either way, Apathy was more believable in the flashback scenes as an alternately affectionate and huffy 14-year-old Connie.

Carol Mayo-Jenkins provides some laughs as Sibyl's sassy nurse Louise. And David Brian Alley is particularly touching as Asa Bedford, Charlotte's preacher husband, when he breaks down on the stand while testifying about the night his wife died in labor.

According to the Midwives' program, Bohjalian considers her book to be a mother/daughter love story. But that wasn't the main feeling I had after the final scene of the play. The courtroom drama escalates as the confrontation between the two women comes to a head, creating a real sense of building emotion. And while the judge hands in her verdict, and Connie tells Sibyl how she feels after all these years, we are left to wonder and decide for ourselves what we would have done in Sibyl's situation—or Connie's or even Charlotte's. The answers aren't easy, but they make for a good night of contemplative theater.