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Here Where It's Safe
“We are both of us desperation,” says a teenage, Indian surrogate mother (Makkar) to her American client. Her reasons are twofold: to assuage the Westerner’s worry over the transaction and to articulate the connection between wanting a child more than anything and having no currency beyond your ability to carry one.
Stage Left regular Lewis’s new play poses a captivating, timely question: What’s owed beyond money when you buy a baby? And while the back half occasionally hits Grey’s Anatomy–level melodrama, director Bishop keeps things grounded in that through-line of desperation. Particularly strong are Makkar as Beena, a benign manipulator walking the thin line between naive and exploitative, and Krebsbach as the long-suffering American father-to-be, who approaches the tragedies of miscarriage and a strained marriage with brittle, hard-won dedication.
In Stage Left’s boxy storefront (which the company will soon leave for the new Theater Wit on Belmont), scenic designer William Anderson has crafted a lush blending of U.S. prosperity and Indian want. A multipurpose living space handily encompasses the numerous locales while also serving as a clever illustration of Western culture appropriating Eastern, down to the floor rugs. While Lewis’s story comments on the cultural abuses inherent in the surrogate industry, it’s ultimately about the power of human connection. Witness the opening image of Beena, carrying a tiny light into the darkened world.
