A mother has been grieving over her son's death for seven years. The seven years of grieving makes her grief look like a pointless obsession of a woman who has lost her mind.
"The Women of Lockerbie," presented by the MSU Department of Theatre, revolves around a mother, Madeline Livingston, who lost her son in the crash of Pan Am flight 103.
After all these years, she still wanders around a forest in Lockerbie, Scotland, where the crash took place, to find the debris of her son's body.
She won't talk or listen to anyone. Ever since the crash, her life has been trapped with the deep, sorrowful guilt for letting her son get on the plane. "Why me?" she keeps asking, cursing her fate and mourning.
Her husband Bill Livingston, on the other hand, seems to have moved on. Unlike his wife, he's calm and manages to hold himself together.
It's not that he's cold-hearted, it's just that he believes in keeping the pain inside. It is his way of grieving because he's a man - a man shouldn't cry and mourn loudly because it's "a woman thing."
The play tells us that, with either way of mourning, the Livingston couple won't truly get over their son's death. Madeline will not be able to get her life back unless she lets her wounded soul heal. Neither will Bill, unless he lets his grief out.
The play ends as Madeline and the women of Lockerbie, some of whom also lost their beloved family members in the crash, get together and wash the victims' clothes to send them to the victims' families. All the victims' families finally find a way to carry on with their lives.
The play touches upon the pain of losing loved ones in a tragic incident. While most people have forgotten about the crash, the victims' families still have to deal with a reality where their loved ones are not there.
Such pain is too remote and unimaginable to most of us. The acting of theater senior Laura Weissinger, who plays Madeline, is moving and compelling enough to make the pain easy to see.
Led by female characters, the play also conveys feminist values - depicting women as a healing force and a symbol of peace and men as symbols of violence and evil. The ending is reminiscent of a war scene where women do all of the nursing while men are fighting.
But that's where the play's problems arise. It fails to show a constructive picture beyond the traditional dichotomy of gender roles.
Throughout the play, "women vs. men" talks dictate the plot. The women say it was men who bombed the plane. A male character, George Jones, is a cold-hearted government agent sent to burn all the victims' clothing. When all the women get together to wash the clothes, they look strong and rigid. Meanwhile Bill, seen behind the women, looks weak, small and lost.
So, women prevail.
But, if only Bill had joined the women in the ending, it could've been a more harmonious scene, where women and men are equals, minus gender labels, sharing the same pain and the same healing.
