What better way to attract New York's blood donors than to offer them free tickets to a bloody Irish play? Belinda McKeon reports
Regardless of their final verdict on the Broadway production of Martin McDonagh's The Lieutenant of Inishmore, there's one bodily fluid that has been given liberal mention in the reviews. "Blood winds up on pretty much every surface," wrote Ben Brantley in the New York Times; "bloodbath", "blood-soaked" and "bloodlust" gasped his counterparts elsewhere. In this instance they're not exaggerating. They go through five gallons of blood a night at the Lyceum, where The Lieutenant transferred earlier this month after a successful off-Broadway run, and somewhere backstage is a small room that must resemble an abattoir, as fresh batches of the red stuff are emptied from Tupperware containers and spread over the play's macabre set of props - dead cat, severed hand, severed head - and prepared for sloshing across the walls and floors of the set.
The blood is fake, made daily from a mixture of peanut butter, chocolate syrup and food colouring, with some olive oil sometimes thrown in to recreate that unmistakeable cat-innards-gloopiness. But this week at the Lyceum, the focus is on the real stuff, with members of the public being offered a free ticket to the play in exchange for a pint of their own blood. Sounds vampiric? Maybe so, but it's all legal and above board. A red bus from the fleet of the New York Blood Center (NYBC) parks outside the theatre and opens its doors to donors, who come all day and do their bit for the city's blood supply, in exchange for one of the lowest-priced tickets (€20) to the show.
The play's producer, Randall L Wreghitt, laughs as he explains the thinking behind the endeavour. "Well, everybody was talking about our blood!" he says. "There's been so much about it that it caught even me off guard. So, I thought, let's get them talking about other blood. Let's embrace that and see if we can help out."
Wreghitt knows how to sell an idea, and he also knows the importance of blood donations. As a teenager, he almost learned the hard way. "I was in a very bad accident when I was 16," he says. "And I hear this from a lot of people, that that kind of thing is what starts it, a personal experience. And it didn't occur to me, probably before that, ever, because . . . you're a teenager, you think you're invincible. But all of a sudden, I needed blood."
In that it is currently grappling with a severe blood shortage, the NYBC is no different to the Irish Blood Transfusion Service (IBTS), which last week announced that it had just four days' worth of blood in its blood banks and issued an urgent call for donors. Like the NYBC, the IBTS has been hit hard by the impact of variant CJD; measures taken to safeguard the blood supply have seen donations drop by four per cent over the past two years. In the greater Dublin area, only six per cent of those eligible to give blood actually do so.
But the situation in metropolitan New York is much worse - perhaps unsurprisingly, given the city's melting-pot composition. Despite the fact that some 90 per cent of Americans will need a blood transfusion in their lives, the national average for donations is just five per cent, and in the New York area it's lower still, at two per cent. The restrictions introduced in response to the risk of CJD transmission in blood products have seen the blood supply fall by 25 per cent in the last three years - the exact percentage of blood that was flown daily into JFK airport from Europe. Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands were the primary suppliers, but now blood from those countries as well as all other countries in Europe is banned. This, as NYBC's director of communications, Linda Levi, explains, is compounded by the fact that so many potential donors within the US are barred from giving blood - as are those who have visited several countries in Asia and Africa within the last 12 months.
Donations in New York haven't always been so sluggish - there was a stampede to give blood hours of the 9/11 attacks, when an estimated 36,000 units (one unit being roughly equivalent to one pint) of blood were donated to the centre. Of those, only 258 were actually used, and much of the surplus became quickly outdated and had to be discarded over the following months. When an emergency happens, Levi explains, it's the blood already on the shelf, rather than the blood donated in response to that emergency, that most counts. And right now, the shelves are worryingly bare.
Back in the lobby of the Lyceum, two young women walk up to the box office to buy tickets. "You know you can get free tickets if you donate blood today," says John Gibbons, an NYBC volunteer. "No thanks," she says, and hands her credit card through the box office window.
Gibbons shrugs too; he has seen it all before. "You have to plead with people. Give them some reason. And only once you've convinced them that we are desperate for this blood will people donate."