Simon Stone’s adaptation of Lorca’s Yerma is structurally quite faithful to the original, although at first sight it will look anything but. The 1934 play is set in the ultra-patriarchal rural Spain and Stone’s Yerma in a large city of the present-day Anglosphere (local references are adapted for Toronto here). Both plays are technically about one woman’s obsessive pursuit of pregnancy – and in both plays the crisis of infertility is actually the trigger that detonates a bunch of underlying and much greater problems for everyone involved. Both plays have the characters of the sister Maria, husband Juan/John, Yerma’s mother, and Victor, and they perform similar functions on both sides. I was prepared to complain about Stone being a tourist who gets to sashay in and write about the drama of the woman’s reproductive choice, and what could he possibly know about that, but I came to the conclusion that Stone’s adaptation (and probably Lorca’s original) is not only and not primarily about giving birth. This relationship was ready to crack. If it wasn’t the pregnancy, these people would have wrecked their lives over something else.
In the Spanish drama the young protagonist suffers under cultural and societal pressure to become a mother. It is less clear why the woman of the contemporary play becomes so destructively monomaniacal about it, but it becomes a bit clearer as things unfold. She has been, we learn early on, against having children and religiously diligent about protection. Both she and her partner have corporate jobs – his is taking him on long international trips, hers navigates the muddy waters of the influencer blogo-journalism. (Leah McLaren and Lainey Lui came to mind for some reason.) The couple fancy themselves as living against the “bourgie cliche”, but when the DINK (dual income, no kids) unit buys a three-storey house, this fantasy is harder to sustain. How do you fill a three-storey house, after you’ve secured all the designer furniture you craved? The next logical project is… offspring.
Kids, for the contemporary Yerma, are the next logical step after career success and property acquisition. Or is it all about the completeness of the image of a happy couple? (Instagram, you called?) Or has she spotted a torn seam in her marriage and decided to tug at it with her pregnancy obsession? Even when things take a turn for the bleak later in the play with endless rounds of IVF, adoption for her is out of the question.
An old love, Victor, reappears in her professional life. She was briefly pregnant with Victor when both were too young to start a family and she had an abortion which she now in her late thirties regrets. As her husband John travels more and more and can’t match her zeal for intercourse deliverables, she resumes flirting with Victor. He is cooperative only to a point.
Her sister Mary, just like in Lorca’s Yerma, conceives at the drop of a hat. (It will happen twice within this short play.) She is in an unhappy marriage to boot, and yet is graced with easy pregnancies and births. In one scene between sisters, she is so appalled and depressed by the demands of the young motherhood that she offers the baby to her sibling. No, I’m serious, why don’t you take him? By the end of the play however Mary will be the sane one remaining.
Before you get the impression that Yerma shames its central character for “barrenness” in any way, there is a key complicating leitmotif that the Simon Stone version honours: it is taken as a truth in Lorca’s play that conception happens only if there is true passion in marriage and in the sex act itself. Juan however just can’t be bothered, and the onus is on him to take interest in his own marriage. (It’s like that Victoria Wood song.) In this new version, the protagonist believes that John’s heart was never really in it, or never sufficiently in it, and that that’s why all their attempts failed.
There are a couple of false notes that I should mention. The last scene happens in a register all its own and doesn’t fit in any way with the rest of the play. In Lorca, Yerma ends up killing the husband, and with him her only chance of having a child. In Stone’s last scene there’s a different kind of blood spilling, but the tragedy minute feels tacked on.
Also, the mother in Stone’s play is made out to be an aged second wave feminist who can’t stand hugging her own children. The lines she gets about her own pregnancy ring true – this is the first generation that had the pill and could say no to marriage and pregnancy and had grand plans around reforming and redefining the nuclear family. But giving her the horror of physical affection, why? To blame the emotionally withholding mother for Yerma’s craziness?
I mean, sure: if we had any conservative theatre critics in this city, they could make the argument that this entire play is a warning about what happens when women don’t give birth when at their youngest and most fertile, that is, as soon as there’s a chance, and no idling about. Some could also make the argument that perhaps we as a society have gone quite far in denaturalizing the love between the mother and the child. I won’t be that critic though. The mother-child dyad and its special bond is, historically speaking, recent; there is a much longer history of contracting various aspects of motherhood out to wet nurses, other female family members, servants, and institutions, and a long history of couples abandoning children and even infanticide as the only “birth control” measure available in various historical periods. (I’m relying here on Laurette T. Liesen’s review of Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, from a 2001 edition of the journal Politics and the Life Sciences. Or see this summary of Sharon Hays’ The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood:
Hays, a sociologist, shows that the definition of “proper parenting” has always been slightly out of reach, keeping mothers constantly striving and off balance. She chronicles how, for centuries in Europe, child-rearing was a socially devalued task and often outsourced to wet nurses, nannies and boarding schools. That changed with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who argued for breast-feeding and affectionate mothering, fostering the “cult of true womanhood.”
In Puritan New England, raising children was about guiding their spiritual development, a matter too important to be left to the soft “indulgence” of mothers. Instead, mothers were to follow the rules set by authoritarian fathers. That gave rise to “moral mothering,” urging moms to trust their instincts to bring out a child’s inner goodness; then the 20th century’s “scientific mothering,” which encouraged schedules, letting babies “cry it out” rather than soothing them and emotional distance. That era was followed by “child-centric” mothering, later criticized as “smother mothering.” Then came the benign neglect of the 1960s, followed by the guilt and ambivalence surrounding working mothers, which has culminated, in Hays’s view, in modern “intensive mothering” standards, which have never been higher.”)
Director Diana Bentley places the action in a sunk, swimming-pool-like all-white space, with props introduced and taken out with each new scene. The pace of the play is extremely efficient, scenes pared down to lean. Acting was good all around and Sarah Gadon (Her), Daren A. Herbert (John), Louise Lambert (Mary), Michelle Mohammed (as protagonist’s Gen-Z assistant) and Johnathan Sousa (Victor) all deserve highlighting. Martha Burns as the mother deserves her own sentence, though: how great is it to see her on stage again? Her character Helen’s description of how pregnancy felt (Remember the movie Alien?) is itself worth the price of admission.
Speaking of which, Coal Mine Theatre is now in a small basement off an alleyway on Woodbine and Danforth, and while your preferred day may show on the website as sold-out, there should always be some rush tickets available on the day of the performance. Closes March 5.
