For some arachnids such as spiders and scorpions, it’s normal for the offspring to consume their mom to live.
But it’s a sign of supreme desperation when a human mother tells her starving children that they should eat her body for sustenance when she dies.
That heartbreaking story is related in “Sickle,” Abbey Fenbert’s one-act drama that’s up at Mixed Blood Theatre through this weekend.
Staged with muscularity by Lisa Channer and Vladimir Rovinsky for Theatre Novi Most, a small company that’s doing big things, the production is a throbbing punch to the gut. And it spotlights a stellar all-female company of actors whose artistry transports us into the maws of yawning tragedy.
In fact, in the final act, Tracey Maloney’s performance as a Mother Courage-esque figure at wits end leaves an indelible slow-motion picture that is worthy of a movie poster.
“Sickle” is set in the early 1930s during the Ukrainian famine known as the Holodomor. After the men have been deported, conscripted or killed in a village, the women take on all the roles in this microcosm of society, including standing up to the authorities who take their harvest and leave them to waste with hunger.
Maloney depicts Anna, a selfless community mother who shares her rations with others at the expense of her own well-being. She is superb in the role, showing Anna’s capacity for love and understanding before the big final moment. Her performance alone, which extends her range and power, is worth the trip to “Sickle.”
Maloney acts alongside and opposite Adelin Phelps, whose Iryna has a cracked soul that’s much more visible. It would be easy to read Iryna as tempestuous and crazed, and we get some of that physicality.
