With October in full swing, it’s officially spooky season. And theatre is getting in on the act, with shows like Off-Broadway’s new suspense thriller, Blood of the Lamb, at 59E59 through October 20. But you won’t find ghosts or goblins in the new work from playwright Arlene Hutton. She’s chosen a much scarier subject: oppressive conservative laws.

The story follows Nessa (played by Meredith Garretson), a young woman who faints on a cross-country flight to New York City. Her medical emergency forces the plane to divert and land in, by chance, Dallas, Texas, where medical professionals determine the fetus Nessa is carrying has died. When the play begins, Nessa finds herself in a non-descript room (designed by Andrew Boyce) somewhere within the sprawling DFW airport, and up against Val (Kelly McAndrew), a lawyer assigned to represent her unborn—and deceased—child. Nessa is at risk of fatal case of sepsis and needs an abortion. Val, and Texas lawmakers, have other ideas.

Writing Blood of the Lamb has been a bit of a roller coaster for Hutton, who began working on the piece before the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade and ended women’s right to an abortion nationally. “I called it speculative fiction when I first started writing,” Hutton shares. “I never dreamed Roe would be overturned.”

But of course, Hutton did not just fall out of the coconut tree. Controversy around abortion rights, and the conflation between abortion as family planning versus medical care, is anything but new. Hutton says the play has always had real-life inspiration, one of them being the 2012 case of Savita Halappanavar. The Indian-Irish woman died from a sepsis-related heart attack in Ireland after being denied an abortion to remove a deceased fetus. The preventable tragedy led to the passage of Ireland’s Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act the following year, allowing for abortions in cases where a pregnancy endangers a woman’s life.

But the biggest inspiration, Hutton says, was a story that did not make headlines, coming instead from a personal friend.

“It was a woman I know in Florida,” says Hutton. “She was pregnant, and at about 21 weeks, doctors discovered the baby had a condition where the brain is outside the skull.” The condition, which had been missed until well past half-way through the pregnancy, rendered the fetus non-viable. Hutton’s friend thought she would be wheeled immediately into an operating room, thinking of what she needed less as an abortion than a surgery. “She was told, even 10 years ago when this happened, that there was only one doctor in the state that would do an abortion that late.”

That meant Hutton’s friend was left with the terrible choice of either travelling across Florida and finding housing for several days, or waiting to have a "natural" birth. The former would leave her considerably poorer, to say nothing of the massive disruption to her life and work schedule. The latter would force her to spend weeks carrying a baby that she knew was dead, an option that could also create further medical complications, maybe even life-threatening ones. Luckily, Hutton’s friend had the financial wherewithal to get to the right doctor, but the story crystalizes the way these oppressive stances on abortion affect women’s lives, both physically and emotionally. “I thought about that story for years, and ultimately it became the initial spark for this piece,” Hutton says.

Cut to 2022, and Hutton had written a one-act play from that spark and held a reading of the new work over Zoom. That was May 2, 2022. The very next day, Politico published a leaked draft of the Dobbs decision, the public's first time learning that the Supreme Court would indeed likely overturn Roe v. Wade (which became final the next month). “That told me I needed to write a whole new play,” Hutton remembers. She says that first one-act version is now more or less the first 10 pages of Blood of the Lamb. “It’s no longer an absurdist play,” she says. “It’s no longer speculative fiction. I use some of the laws in a way that they’re not being used yet—I hope I don’t give anyone ideas. But the laws have kept changing, so I’ve had to change.”

In a bit of cruel irony, Hutton says it’s almost felt like anti-choice lawmakers were playing catchup with her own imagined nightmares. The playwright had researched burial laws in Texas, and devised a situation in which Nessa would be detained specifically because aborting her dead fetus could perhaps be considered abuse of a corpse. Earlier this year, a nearly identical situation cropped up in Ohio, when a woman was arrested after trying to flush the remains of a miscarriage down a toilet. A grand jury thankfully declined to charge the young woman, but the frightening scenario Hutton had dreamed up was nevertheless suddenly not just fiction. “Things I thought I’d discovered, was dreaming up, suddenly they’re real—and everywhere,” Hutton says.

With a story plucked out of the headlines, you might think Blood of the Lamb would be a dry, fact-heavy diatribe drama. But what Hutton ended up writing was a suspense thriller, albeit one more based in reality than, say, Alien: Romulus. Hutton says that comes from what makes the underlying point most effective. “We get gasps from the audience when new information is revealed,” she says, “or when the lawyer says something that we just can’t believe anybody would say.” Hutton also thinks the suspense factor helped the show become a hit in its earlier international runs—the work played both Adelaide Fringe in Australia and Edinburgh Fringe in Scotland before producers Brian Letchworth and Christa Scott-Reed of Occasional Drawl Productions brought it Off-Broadway.

The suspense, Hutton says, expresses the very real stakes to the audience, and is a natural way of looking at legitimately terrifying situations that can all too often become a race against the clock. But, ultimately, Hutton is a big believer in storytelling as a change agent. “I always think to tell the small story to tell the big story,” she says. “We relate to hearing about an individual. There’s a lot of brilliant, wonderful political theatre that makes the case for change. This does that in its own way, but that’s not the purpose of it. The purpose of it is to tell a good story and leave the audience making up their own mind.”

That last bit means that lawyer Val can’t be just a villain. Hutton was purposeful in writing the character as a woman, herself victim to a legal system being led questionably by men. “One woman is trying to save her life while the other one’s trying to save her job,” Hutton says. “This is a lawyer who’s trapped in a situation where she’s trying to figure things out and is not getting a lot of help.” The nuance of sexism being experienced by someone who is also actively engaged in denying women their own bodily autonomy adeptly shows how this horrifying trend affects everyone—including the people carrying it out.

“I hope that some people who vote differently than I do will also relate to it,” Hutton says. “This is not a piece of agitprop.”

As America hurtles ever closer to a very momentous election, it’s easy to see why Blood of the Lamb is just particularly timely. Perhaps incongruously, Hutton doesn’t want Blood of the Lamb to become perpetually timely, in the model of plays like Our Town or even Shakespeare’s canon. This playwright, in fact, pines for her latest opus to become a dusty, unrelatable relic.

“My greatest dream is that this play goes out of date and doesn’t need to ever be done,” she says. With abortion on the ballot in lots of battleground states this November, we’ll know if that’s in the cards soon enough.

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Photos: Blood of the Lamb Off-Broadway

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