Aya Ogawa’s play “Meat Suit” is not for the squeamish. If the grotesqueries of human anatomy and its functions repel you, then you should probably find a different show. Me, I spent most of the performance with a character’s breast milk cascading down my shoulder.
Eww, right? But the character, Momo (Liz Wisan), is a clown and the breast milk isn’t liquid. It’s made of slender white paper streamers that erupt from her costume nipples, because she has a new baby at home, and lactating breasts wait for no one. House left, house right — if you’re anywhere near the front of the audience, you’ll be within range of a milk explosion, and you’ll just have to sit with the mess.
In a larger sense, sitting with the mess of motherhood is the point of this raucous, poignant, angry, compassionate and sharply comical show, which Ogawa (“The Nosebleed”) has also directed, for Second Stage. The blissful, pastel-pink public image of mommyhood doesn’t stand a chance against the physical, psychological and social reality as “Meat Suit” depicts it in a series of thematically linked vignettes, interspersed with original music and lyrics by Leyna Marika Papach.
Proffering the catharsis of honesty, the recognition of absurdity and the comfort of fellow feeling, the show traces the life cycle of motherhood, and what mothers lose and gain along the way. The excellent cast of five are all, essentially, clowns, their performances elevated and stylized.
Momo, who bookends the play, makes her entrance as human flotsam, delirious with sleep deprivation. Her flesh is unrecognizable to her: breasts dangling hyperbolically low, and at starkly different lengths. (Jian Jung’s sculptural bodysuit/meat-suit costumes come with assorted viscera and private parts, sometimes in the headgear.) A psychic state made manifest, Momo is instantly sympathetic and very funny.
So is Shaina (Cindy Cheung), a married mother who wakes in the night with no memory of her sex-starved husband (Wisan) or their clamorous twins (Maureen Sebastian and Marina Celander). The toddlers soon demand to breastfeed, and bicker in their cartoon voices about which breast each gets, because they agree that one is inferior.
Maternal loss of bodily autonomy, and of sense of self, are strong themes in “Meat Suit,” but petty rivalries among mothers don’t escape its gaze, either. Nor do the underlying aches of loneliness and insecurity.
A conversation between two newly acquainted mothers (Celander and Sebastian) is an almost staccato barrage of competing views — on sleep training, diapers, vaccinations, day care — until the tone shifts, with a grace that is a hallmark of Ogawa’s work, and allows them a deeper exchange.
Another scene, among the show’s sweetest and most affecting, is between a single mother (Celander) and her son (Robyn Kerr), as the child grows from infancy to adolescence. Then the mother, alone, sings a quiet, melancholy solo: “Everything that I give to you, moves through you, and disappears. All the love and hope I pour into you, you take for you, or throw away.”
“Meat Suit” inhabits a landscape of mothers, as opposed to parents more generally, which doesn’t mean it is retro in its thinking. It does recognize the retro when it sees it, though, as at a P.T.A. meeting populated almost wholly by mothers. One spots a man in the crowd and says, passive-aggressively, “Oh, Richard, so nice to see a dad at one of these meetings. Are you between jobs?”
The production’s sole miscalculated scene is, unfortunately, the first. The humor of the opening minutes is forced as Momo’s child-free friends await her at brunch. Laughs don’t land until she arrives.
The show is in the largest space at the Pershing Square Signature Center, but both the performance and the audience are on the stage. The set (by Jung) is reminiscent of Senga Nengudi’s stretchy, childbirth-inspired abstractions, yet there’s no accompanying backdrop to mask the busy, utilitarian-looking side wall behind the actors. In such close quarters, leaving it bare is distracting, and feels less experimental than cheap.
“Meat Suit” is not, in any case, a sleek, mainstream show, and it doesn’t want to be. But it does speak to a wide spectrum of humans: to mothers, and to anyone who has ever been the child of one. Which, as it acknowledges with thoughtfulness and feeling, is all of us.
Meat Suit Through March 15 at the Pershing Square Signature Center, Manhattan; 2st.com. Running time: 1 hour and 35 minutes.
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