Midwives at Round House

Last night I snagged a couple of free tickets and went to see Midwives at the Round House Theatre in Bethesda.

The play is based on the #1 New York Times bestseller and Oprah's Book Club selection novel Midwives by Chris Bohjalian. It was adapted by Dana Yeaton and directed by Mark Ramont.

The play is set in a small Vermont town (I wish I had known this at the beginning of the play - more on that later), and as the play unfolds, we discover that we're witnessing, and being somewhat part of, the events and memories leading up to the trial of Sibyl Danforth (played by MaryBeth Wise), a lay midwife, who has been charged with manslaughter in a childbirth gone disastrously wrong.

The play starts 15 years after the event, with a very pregnant woman making an entrance into a hospital room from within a very beautiful stage prop that arches over the entire stage. It is sometimes lit, and sometimes translucent, and it is sort of a remarkable cage where stripped tree branches are caged and suspended around and over the stage, looking like a huge Yuriko Yamaguchi sculpture.

The pregnant woman, we soon find out is Charlotte Bedford (played superbly by Kimberly Parker Green), and she now lives in the imagination of the retired midwife, who is recovering from cancer.

Her daughter (Connie Danforth, played by Stephanie Burden), is now a medical student in Boston, and is visiting her mother, who has apparently shipped her all of her journals to Connie.

Narrated by a variety of characters, the play moves back and forth in time, slowly decomposing for the audience a set of clues and information about what happened on the night that the childbirth went wrong.

As Connie looks back on her mother's trial, both her and her mother (and silently the ghost of the dead woman) are attempting to understand and figure out what truly happened on that night, and heal the wounds left on their psyches in the years that followed.

The audience is treated to a very horrific re-enactment of the childbirth, which is taking place in the Bedford's home on a wintry and icy New England night. A night when the phone lines are down and the the roads are so slick with ice that no one can even get to their car when the delivery gets complicated.

The midwife, thus unable to get her patient to a hospital, tries courageously to save both the mother and unborn child while her inexperienced apprentice of three months and the woman's terrified husband (who is a minister and is played by Gene Gillette) generally get in the way.

The audience is led to believe that the mother dies but that the baby is saved thanks to an emergency C-section done by Sybil with a kitchen knife.

And this is where the issue becomes complicated, as first the the apprentice and then the husband suggest that maybe the mother wasn't really dead when the midwife cut her open.

And the rest of the play presents the case, showing bits and pieces of the trial, re-enactments of the operation, and the final resolution between mother and daughter, as to what may or may have not happened that night.

For the first twenty minutes or so of the play, the Charlotte Bedford character is completely silent, usually just ghost-stepping around the stage or sitting on the bed. And I was thinking to myself: "This actress has the best role ever in a play: no lines to learn!"

Soon I became fascinated by her silence, and began to realize how her facial and body postures were affecting the audience and I.

Eventually, when she spoke, both in her role as Charlotte Bedford and later as the voice for the judge in the trial of Sybil Danforth, it was clear to me that Kimberly Parker Green had the most difficult role in this play and she stole this show.

Kimberly Parker Green, managed to make her silent parts become integral parts of the discussions and fights going on between mother and daughter. In part thanks to excellent lighting, in repose she (because this actress is very fair skinned and light-haired), became almost like a Vermeer painting, except when her subtle facial expressions added fuel to an argument (Sybil can see Charlotte) or reproachment to an excuse.

One thing that I completely missed: Why were both Bedfords (the preacher and his wife) speaking with heavy Southern accents in a scene set in rural Vermont?

Either they have their geography wrong, or maybe I missed a part where they were Southeners who had moved to Yankee-land. In any event, it was a bit distracting and out of place with everyone else's lack of any noticable accent, as no one attempted a New England accent (caps instead of cops, ps instead of pierced, and yaaad instead of yard, etc.).

The play is powerful and well-directed, and the audience (average age around 65) visibly winced many times at the harshness of the events unfolding in front of them.

With the singular exceptions of Parker Green, and Lynn Steinmetz (who superbly plays both a nurse and a doctor in two different roles) I became somewhat annoyed by the rest of the acting performance.

In part this was a cascade effect from the extended arguing scenes between the midwife and her daughter. Both actresses kept the same tone and style of speech throughout all levels of fighting; the daughter very shrill and screechy, and the mother very stoic. Meanwhile I kept thinking: "This isn't how people really argue - at least no one that I know."

Nonetheless this is a very powerful play, and surprisingly eye-opening in the sense that it offers us a window into a nearly extinguished aspect of American life: the lay midwife.

The play runs through Feb. 26, 2006. Read the WaPo review of the play by Lisa Traiger here, and read the Wash Times review here, and the WCP review here. Isn't it nice how every paper in town reviews theatre? When was it the last time that we saw the big three review the same gallery show?

Sibyl Danforth: MaryBeth Wise
Charlotte Bedford: Kimberly Parker Green
Connie Danforth: Stephanie Burden
Bill Tanner: Paul Morella
Louise, Dr. Gerson: Lynn Steinmetz
Lori Pine, Anne Austin, Patty: Rana Kay
Asa Bedford, David Pine: Gene Gillette
Stephen Hastings: John Lescault
Dr. Lang, Barton Hewitt: John Dow