India’s unregulated, billion-dollar child surrogacy business is booming. The country has some 1,200 assisted reproductive technology clinics, which lure perhaps 100,000 women to rent their wombs to foreigners. As the standard marketing pitch goes, the fees these impoverished women earn can change their lives. But often they’re cheated out of money they’re promised, then denied medical care for postpartum complications. Hoping for a way out of poverty, they often end up more hopelessly mired in it.
So why does Katie’s absence become a crisis? For the same reason most every crisis arises in this play: because it’s convenient for the playwright. When it’s time for a bit of trouble—Katie confronting Craig’s inadequacy as a husband, Craig freaking out about the reality of surrogacy, Suraiya questioning her role—Yee injects it without context or development. And just as quickly, it can vanish: one moment Craig can’t face Suraiya, the next he wants to take her out on the town. Certainly human behavior can be contradictory, but Yee can’t create a suitably complex reality to make human behavior credible.
