Freedom Isn’t Free It’s bleak.

Freedom Isn’t Free

It’s bleak. It’s often uncomfortable to watch. It’s bloody. It’s about what a mother’s love will carry her to do.

Fucking A, at the Public, is a dark brew of classic tragedy (Medea), Brecht (Mother Courage) and Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter). There aren’t many surprises, but there are some wonderful performances in a piece that falls into the “theater that makes you squirm” canon.

It opens in a small town in a small country in the middle of nowhere. Hester Smith comes in for her ritual clean-up after a night’s work. A candle is lit. Meat hooks and hoses hang from the catwalk above. The blood is washed off the latex gloves and her collection of medical instruments (perhaps last seen in Dead Ringers?) are hosed off and dropped (clank, clank) into a metal bucket for the next customer. She’s a modern Hester Prynne, but the A she wears isn’t embroidered on her smock, it’s branded onto her breast … and the smock is cut open, by law, so that everyone can see. She is an abortionist, not an adulterer. Her services are not illegal, but still condemened to be out the outskirts of the civilized world. She is a necessary evil, performs a function that is simultaneously good and bad. She toils to save gold coins to secure her son's freedom. He has been, she believes, wrongly imprisoned for a minor crime, accused by the wife of her small town's mayor.

I think the standout of the show is S. Epatha Merkerson. Her Hester is so weighed down by the world … her profession, her unrelenting quest to secure her son’s freedom. Mos Def was eerily childlike as the Monster, Hester’s son who has escaped from prison. Peter Gerety’s Butcher was very touching (notwithstanding the none-too-subtle matching bloody aprons and parallels between his and Hester’s profession).

Perhaps the show tries to address too much – abortion, the justice system, society’s justification of hurting those who’ve been accused of hurting others. How far removed are we from a bunch of redneck hunters who will track down human "low life" in the name of justice and sport? At least they didn't eat what they kill .... "that would be a bit much."

It’s a little self-aware – but isn’t all Brechtian theater? Perhaps it’s a little to oversimplified – but isn’t that the heart of fable and myth ... a simple story with a deeper message?

Like The Handmaid’s Tale, this is a story that you’re drawn into and upon leaving, are thankful that it’s not the way the world really is. Yet. I'm sure I'll reread Ms. Atwood somewhere down the road. I'm glad to have seen Fucking A, but don't know that I need to go there again.