The postpartum body has long occupied an uncomfortable place in the Anglophone theater. Much as debates about breastfeeding in public rage on, the act of lactation is rarely represented in the contemporary theater. Similarly, the direct depiction of reproductive loss also remains a materiality often avoided. This paper looks at postpartum grief and surrogate lactation in Frank Galati’s stage adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath (1991) and Sarah Ruhl’s In the Next Room or The Vibrator Play (2010). These plays are anomalistic in that they both enjoyed critically acclaimed Broadway runs and directly featured characters that experience the loss of a baby and go on to nurse people who are not their biological children. The former play ends with Rose of Sharon breastfeeding a starving man after suffering a stillbirth and the latter features a character named Elizabeth who works as a wet nurse after losing her infant to cholera. The dual focus on these women’s loss and the fact that they use their lactating bodies to feed others forces a rare ontological reckoning with aspects of reproductive existence that humans share with other live birth animals. This chapter uses these two plays to foreground the uncomfortable history of wet nursing practices in the United States, but also to explore these plays’ rare insistence on the mammalian realities of gestation and lactation as stage worthy human acts.