Review of "The Women of Lockerbie

Bay City Players production of "The Women of Lockerbie" solidly directed and acted

by Janet I. Martineau | The Saginaw News

Monday January 19, 2009, 11:32 AM

Choice vs. fate ... grief that knows no end ... hate turned into an act of love....

For a little more than 90 uninterrupted minutes, the Bay City Players production of "The Women of Lockerbie" leaves its audience hanging on every word and wondering, wondering, wondering.

Will its suffering parents, who lost a son on the very real Pan-Am Flight 103 blown-up over the tiny Scottish village of Lockerbie in 1988, find solace during their visit there seven years after terrorist act? Watching the wife/mother roaming the town's hills for some small remnant of her son, after all these years, is utterly heart-breaking.

What about the three Lockerbie residents, still coping with what they saw that grim day...and in particular what about one of them, Olive. There seems something unusually unsettling about her.

And that ornery American government official ... why can't he bend and release the clothing gathered from the crash site, so the women of Lockerbie can perform a healing ritual with it.

Deborah Brevoort's insightful script and Marc Beaudin's beautifully understated direction of it make this a must-see play. It speaks volumes about the human condition, and is performed brilliantly by its cast of seven.

This is a quiet play. A soft-spoken one that allows for some unspoken moments of reflection. It is a 10-tissue affair, but the tears are unusual ones we cannot fully explain other than to say it is because the eloquent lines, the poignant situations have so resonated on a zillion levels.

In those 90 quick moments "Lockerbie" deals with difference in how men and women deal with grief, the anguish of how one simple decision (Pan-Am vs. Delta) made by a mother meant her son died, what the residents of Lockerbie witnessed that day juxtaposed with how the New Jersey mother heard the news, how faith enters into all
this and the importance of making sure love always triumphs over hate in some significant way.

Enough said so not to spoil the joy of discovery in this play other than to praise the performances, in particular Elizabeth Dewey as Olive, who from her first appearance on stage connected fully with us; Dulcie Baker and John Tanner as the grieving parents, and Bethany Wagner and Carrie Krzyminski as two other women of Lockerbie who also deftly serve as a Greek chorus in the script.

"Grief needs to talk" is one of the early lines in "Lockerbie." And in every sense, the script lives up to that concept.