You know the old nursery rhyme: “Lizzie Borden took an ax and gave her mother 40 whacks/When she saw what she had done, she gave her father 41.” Borden was acquitted in court, but not in our imaginations. People still obsess over the details of the case, like the improbability of Lizzie’s alibi—she says she was in the barn, but the dust looked undisturbed—and the fact that there wasn’t a trace of blood on Lizzie’s clothes when the police came but a neighbor saw her burning a dress in the yard a few days later. (And, as long as we’re looking back at the record, Lizzie’s stepmother took either 18 or 19 blows to the head; her father got 11.)
Blood Relations, an occasionally plodding 1980 play by Canadian writer Sharon Pollock, doesn’t try to prove Lizzie’s innocence so much as explain why she might’ve done it. It opens with Lizzie (Caitlin Frances) and her actress-lover (Peggy Gannon, playing a character based on the real-life actress Nance O’Neil) in Lizzie’s home several years after the murders, dancing around the question of her innocence. They’re buttoned-up lesbians of the Gertrude Stein model with high collars, big skirts, and some debate over the proper way to serve tea—it’s hard to imagine either of them bludgeoning anyone to death.
Frances plays Lizzie with a perpetual air of tight-lipped exasperation—I guess living in a small town where everyone thinks you’ve killed your parents will do that to a person—but decides to indulge her lover’s questions with a game. “You’ll play me,” she says to the actress (who is not named in the play), and they launch into an extended flashback of what happened just before the murders. Pollock paints a stifling picture of the Borden household: a cold and conventional father (Bill Higham), a passive but fussy sister (Alyssa Keene), a stodgy and unpleasant stepmother (Jody McCoy), and a handsy step-uncle (Joseph P. McCarthy) who’s trying to swindle Lizzie and her sister out of their inheritance.
If he succeeds, Lizzie believes she’ll have no choice but to marry some man—the last thing she wants to do. The pressure slowly builds over two acts with tense conversations over breakfast and tea that begin as lightly sublimated—in that quintessentially 19th-century way—then become increasingly desperate as Lizzie feels her options and freedom slowly being siphoned away.
The only bright spot in the household is the Irish maid Bridget (played in the flashback by the actor playing Lizzie), who punctures the oppressive late-19th-century mood with quiet sympathy for Lizzie’s bind. She tells a story about a cook who spent her days “bowin’ and scrapin’ and smilin’” while spitting in the soup and seasoning omelets with little specks of her hair. “You should be more like cook,” Bridget advises. “Smile and get round them.”
But bowing and scraping is not in Lizzie’s emotional vocabulary. Blood Relations has faint echoes of Hamlet—the plight of a grown-up (and slightly mad) child hemmed in by dissimulating adults, a nasty stepparent, and power plays over property and inheritance. But Blood Relations is a little too polemical and earthbound to turn all that tumultuous material into gripping drama, despite Frances’s and Gannon’s energetic performances as Lizzie and the actress. Pollock’s play charts the social powerlessness and claustrophobia women like Lizzie must’ve felt in the late 19th century, but it doesn’t leave us wanting more. 
