Sorrow is ground into this play, from the skirl of the bagpipes as you sit down to the grey lighting and scenery that evoke fog and mist and a mizzling rain to the involuntary moment of silence as the play ends that resumes once the bows are taken. Deborah Brevoort, the playwright, has taken the big events of the 1988 Pan Am crash and created a human-sized elegy that illuminates the larger story.
And it’s fitting that the play is set in the wild places in Scotland—a place of clans and winds and an untamed beauty, much like the landscape of grief, and forgiveness. This cast does full justice to it.
While Americans were the majority on the plane, there were a total of 21 nationalities aboard. All 243 passengers and the 16 crew members were killed, as were 11 residents of Lockerbie. It was, and remains, the worst terrorist attack, as well as plane crash, in Great Britain.
This show takes place seven years after the crash, on the winter solstice. The Americans have a warehouse where they have stored everything they can find from the crash; many of the women of the town want to take all the clothing and wash, iron and fold it so the victims’ families have something tangible to hold in grief. The action takes place at a small river coming out of the hills around the town.
It focuses on an American couple, Madeline and Bill Livingston from New Jersey, and four Scottish women—Olive Allison, who is harboring an anguished secret from the Americans, First Woman, Second Woman, and Hattie, a cleaning woman who works in the American government representative’s offices.
Madeline (a ghostly Dianne Hood) has never gotten over the first agony of her grief over losing her only son, Adam. As with intense grief that turns in on itself, her portrayal captures the pain, horror and blind selfishness of a grief that has fed on itself for so long it’s become monstrous. Bill brought her to the memorial hoping she might find some surcease.
Three of the women of Lockerbie leave the memorial to help Bill try to find his wife, who is again frantically roaming the hills, seeking some piece, even a bone, of her son. It is part of what they do, listen to the stories and stoically become a sieve for the boundless grieving.
The second half of the show is when the intensity becomes almost unbearable. As Hattie, Carole Long provides both impeccable comic timing as she squares off with George Jones, the American State Department representative, and a canny head for planning how to liberate the clothing, because the Americans have decided to burn everything, starting that night, under the guise of health and safety.
Frankly, the Americans should have known better than to go up against the Scotswomen. They never really had a chance.
These fleeting moments of comedy give the audience a little room to breathe, which is a boon. This is an intense play, and beautifully unsentimental. Everybody is battling angry urges; in one eye-opening moment, Madeline learns that Olive lost people and starts realizing that she is not the only person in the world to have been dealt such a body blow. This is a turning point for Olive; and for her husband, who for seven years has been stalwart and has had nobody to pour his grief into. It also speaks to the strength of the Scots as they did blame the American government for their hubris in misdealings with Libya at the time, which likely led to the whole tragedy. Yet they had welcomed them to their town and fed and housed them, and listened to them. And they wanted these pieces of clothing as a healing gesture for everybody.
In an inexpressibly sad moment, in the end, the women are gazing at the first bag of the clothing, and Olive sits back on her heels, looking stricken. Madeline steps over again and opens the bag. It’s a small start toward finding a way forward, perhaps.
The cast is uniformly excellent. The play has a structural formality about it. First and Second Woman are very much a Greek chorus; they are deadpan when they say “you have to hate somebody” and “you have to give love.” It’s an acknowledgment that one must go through the first to get to the second, and it’s spoken with flickering candles against boulder-strewn hills—a wild place. This theatre in the woods is also a beautiful backdrop for this work and adds to the rawness of the emotions conjured inside.
And it’s fitting that the play is set in the wild places in Scotland—a place of clans and winds and an untamed beauty, much like the landscape of grief, and forgiveness. This cast does full justice to it.
Advisory: Some strong language.
Running Time: Approximately 93 minutes with no intermission.
“The Women of Lockerbie,” runs from March 1 – 17, 2019, at the Bowie Playhouse at White Marsh Park, MD. For more information, please click here.
