Hester Swane — a Medea-like figure — lives in exile “by the Bog of Cats,” a remote, mysterious wasteland. Abandoned by her mother as a child, she eventually takes the life of her own daughter, before being received into death herself. This fatal action becomes an epic, necessary ritual of mourning, freeing mother and child from a multi-generational cycle of stagnant grief. Metal conjures Hester’s earthen, unforgiving world in battered garden furniture, corrugated barn siding, and a rusted arc of sky. The costumes are the stuff of the everyday. To me this is a story about grief, rage and fear: natural and necessary parts of our humanness and what it is to be alive.