The Women of Lockerbie  is a story about overcoming grief, and how we mourn the absent.

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Maddie Livingston roams the hills outside of Lockerbie, Scotland, desperately searching for the remains of her son who died in a bombing years prior. Alongside her husband, Bill, and the titular Women of Lockerbie, Maddie learns how to heal old wounds, and how to grieve the death of someone who has seemingly vanished from the Earth, leaving no trace or body behind. 

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The show revolves around the bombing of Pan Am Flight #103 in the airspace over Lockerbie, Scotland.  The bomb, which killed over 200 people, detonated in the compartment right below Adam Livingston's seat. Throughout the show Maddie wrestles with the fact that she has nothing of her son left-- not even a body to bury.  On the seventh anniversary of his death, she finally breaks during a vigil honoring the victims, and flees into the hills, ransacking them for any trace of her son.  She, like all the victims of the crash, has been unable to cleanse herself of her grief because she lacks anything tangible belonging to her son. As the character Olive so aptly puts it: 

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"The sky was not meant
to be a burial ground.
It’s too big and when
you store your grief there
it runs wild."

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Because Maddie lacks a body, an urn, or even a piece of clothing denies Maddie, and so many others, the catharsis that comes with the act of mourning. 

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Catharsis comes in the form of the Women of Lockerbie. Immediately following the bombing, the United States government consolidated the wreckage into the shelves of the warehouse. Among them, seatback cushions, books, and personal effects of the victims have been shelved forever. These "Shelves of Sorrow" serve as the largest crime scene record in Scotland's history. The Women of Lockerbie acknowledge this, and seek to return the victim's belongings to the families, to bring them peace. 

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Unfortunately, the U.S. Government disagrees emphatically with the women. They, represented by the conniving diplomat George Jones, hope to covertly destroy the clothing, removing an embarrassing "international incident" from the public eye, and erasing any sign of the bombing. Whereas they seek to make the victims forget the bombing, the Women choose to remember. In the course of one night, these events intersect. Sorrow turns to rage, hate turns to love, and night breaks into day. 

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The scenic design for this production purposes the image of "shelves of sorrow" hanging above the audience in order to remind the audience of the stakes. The image of the belongings of the victims: clothing, unopened Christmas presents, luggage, dangling precariously above the audience serves to establish the catastrophic horror of the bombing, and also the disastrous consequences should the women fail to keep the clothes from destruction. Most importantly however, they also serve as reminders of the all-encompassing nature of grief. Every shirt, every shoe, every Christmas present, represents a family who has had a hole ripped through their lives. Families that, much like Bill and Maddie, desperately need to mourn the loss of their vanished loved ones.