Photo Caption: Kelly McAndrew and Meredith Garretson Photo by Daniel Rader

A presentation of Occasional Drawl Productions in association with Harbor Stage Company, Blood of the Lamb takes place in what appears to be a little-used break room at Dallas Fort Worth Airport. One of the women, Nessa (Meredith Garretson), has been brought here after the red-eye flight on which she had been traveling from Los Angeles to New York was diverted after she fainted en route. She only has a vague idea of where she is and almost none of how she got there, nor why.

Joining her is Val (Kelly McAndrew), a smartly dressed, sharp attorney, who arrives hauling files, a laptop and cell phone, and a large handbag to carry it all. Nessa assumes Val is there to represent the airline, seeing assurance that she does not plan to sue over the incident. But as the facts emerge, we learn that Nessa, who was pregnant when she boarded the flight, had suffered a miscarriage. And Val, it seems, has no interest in protecting the airline; she is there to test a new law aimed at protecting the rights of an unborn child, even one who has died in utero.

As a satire, and in wake of the torrent of recent laws that curtail reproduction freedom in (thus far) two dozen states, this particular piece of fictional legislation cuts harrowingly close to the bone. For a while, and before we, along with Nessa, fully grasp the implications of her situation, we mostly follow Val as she struggles to fill in the many forms she must juggle in the wake of this latest piece of legislation. Nessa's is the first test case, and Val is frequently on the phone or on Zoom talking to a group of attorneys (all of them male) charged with shaping how the law will be enforced. If they don't get everything right, she knows she will be personally blamed.

As the late evening turns to late night, the men on the other side of those calls disappear, and Val is left alone to handle things. Will Nessa be able to veer Val away from her responsibilities as a lawyer and her personal conservative and faith-based beliefs and connect with her woman-to-woman? It is a mark of the playwright's smart writing, the balanced performances of Kelly McAndrew and Meredith Garretson, and Margot Bordelon's tautly managed direction that the answer to this question remains up in the air until the very last moments of this unsettling work whose Kafkaesque situation seems frightfully plausible.