To Be or Not to Be a Mother—Elizabeth Goes to the Theater
Two plays—one looking to the past, and the other to the future—descry the plights of former and potential mothers, respectively.
Funny Like An Abortion
Chicago Danztheatre Ensemble / Fat Theatre Project
Play by Rachel Bublitz
Directed by Eileen Tull
Closed March 30, 2025
There are so many events to go to: plays, lectures, poetry readings, music and dance concerts, comedy showcases, puppet shows, mixed media performance art happenings and installations, museum exhibits, open mics, karaoke nights, drag shows, etc. I should be and am grateful for the abundance of activity in my city of Chicago. Apparently I have an abundance of interests. This is both comforting and anxiety-producing, since I can never go to everything, because I can’t be in multiple places at once. Also, I have limited energy. Plus there are all the various individual tasks and responsibilities: housework, Zoom meetings, doctor appointments, etc. I’ll make it to some things and not others, prioritizing the events of friends at venues I have some connection to, can get to, feel comfortable at. I try to avoid too crowded, too loud, uncomfortable places where I’m likely to feel miserable, stranded, stuck.
Everything is a risk, but plays are a special kind of risk, because you might get stuck sitting silently and uncomfortably for hours, both thirsty and desperate to pee, shifting in your seat, painfully aware of your bony ass in the hard seat, while cringing at the pedestrian performance in front of your face. There is no escaping until it’s over. If you leave in the middle, you will be distracting others and seen as rude. The only excuse would be a dire emergency. If you’re at a dive bar, you can leave if you’re not into the band on stage. If you’re home watching TV, you can change the channel or choose from the overabundance of choices on streaming or turn it off and read a book or whatever.
But plays are worth the risk, because live theater can be amazing, electrifying. The immediacy, intensity, originality make it worthwhile.
So deciding to go a play can be like investing in a stock. You can collect information, read various reviews and opinions, whatever’s available. But in the end, it’s like reading tea leaves and it takes a leap of faith and intuition to make a decision, and even then you know you could win big or it could be a total loss or somewhere in between, but you can’t win if you don’t play the game.
I debated whether or not I wanted to go see Funny Like An Abortion. I’d been to Chicago Danztheatre Ensemble events before, so I was familiar and comfortable with the space and knew I could get there and back home. I’m also acquainted with founder/producer Ellyzabeth Adler and other folks involved such as producer/director Eileen Tull and sound designer Gail Gallagher. So those were reasons to go. But I was worried that, due to the subject matter, I might end up sitting through an seemingly interminable amount of cringe.
I’m glad I made it to Funny Like An Abortion. The colorful set and high energy performances made it for me. The stage displayed the somewhat messy (with clothes on the floor and dust bunnies under the couch) apartment of Monroe (Bianca Thompson) who is preparing for her very own abortion party with cupcakes and 30 gift bags to surprise her friend Jade (SaniaFaith). The scattered gift bags of various sizes and colorful designs, as well as whimsical toys including Elmo, set the festive tone as she romps around her apartment taking selfies which she posts with clever hashtags. These are to create an alibi cover story. They’re having a fun girls’ party, not figuring out how to have a successful do-it-yourself abortion, since even saying the word “abortion” is illegal and a virtual assistant butler device listens in to everything as it reminds Monroe about sales. The disembodied voice reminds her to go shopping as she struggles to afford alcohol on her barely-scraping-by income from her job as a pre-school teacher, which she loves and is well-suited for given her high energy levels, love of toys and songs, and interest in improving her literal and figurative juggling skills. (Don’t get me started on how childcare workers are undervalued, despite the energy, emotional intelligence, and creativity required to take care of young children.) At one point Monroe physically bashes the supposedly helpful combination surveillance/advertising machine, breaking it. But even this is not enough to protect them from eventual detection, criminalization, detention, punishment. Their actual fates are left undetermined at the end. A variety of disastrous outcomes are suggested and contemplated.
Monroe turns the choosing of an abortion method into a game show, with herself as emcee. Three numbers are chosen at a time, corresponding to the numbered gift bags. Remember, this is a dystopian future where they lack the knowledge of how to do this, since it’s illegal. One gift bag holds a bottle of Drano, you know, for cleaning out pipes. Another, pennyroyal tea. Other suggestions include a punch in the abdomen or falling down the stairs. Monroe’s hipster librarian boyfriend found a few forgotten books on herbal concoctions hidden in the basement of the library he works at (where they no longer have books to lend out).
As anyone could guess, this play about a dystopian future (that is not entirely implausible given recent legislative efforts to limit and ban abortion access) has an explicit, urgent agenda asserting the need for safe abortions. Jade breaks the fourth wall to tell the audience not to try these various methods, with their downsides and risks, at home.
Some might dismiss the effort as preaching to the choir, since anyone with a different view is unlikely to come to the play. But I disagree. Articulating a message that is under attack in dominant discourse and courtrooms has value. There is value in articulating, reinforcing, asserting our values, thoughts, perceptions, experiences, if only to express solidarity with the like-minded. This is better than suffering in isolation and being told one is evil or crazy. And maybe after seeing this kind of play, people have some kind of ammunition or validation and are better able to express their point of view when challenged by more or less well-intentioned family members, friends, colleagues, or drinking buddies. This is the value of live, independent theater in small venues that rely on donations to stay afloat and viable: https://www.danztheatre.org/ ; https://fattheatreproject.com/.
There was also a call to various actions at the end, including donating to the Chicago Abortion Fund: https://www.chicagoabortionfund.org
Mother Courage and Her Children
Trap Door Theatre
Play by Bertolt Brecht
Directed by Max Truax
Closed March 29, 2025
Returns July 17–19, 2025
Wars are about religion and real estate. The power hungry play their war games, redrawing maps amid their negotiations and capitulations about abstractions, laws, sovereignty, and money, purportedly in the name of some ideological or religious or cultural purity or hegemony, but we know that’s a sham. Meanwhile people on the ground suffer and die and struggle to survive. Those are my conclusions after seeing Mother Courage and Her Children at Trap Door Theatre. But I knew that already. Still, I’m glad I made it to the play. I hadn’t been to Trap Door Theatre before, at least not at its current location.
I remember playing the part of Mother Courage in a middle school play. This would have been circa 1981, so my memories are vague and incomplete. But I remember loving playing the part. For my costume I pulled my long dark brown hair back, powdered it to look gray, and took a old tan corduroy skirt and cut holes in it to make it look appropriately ragged. Passing me on the stairs, one of classmates mistook me for my actual (thin, older, gray-haired) mother.
So when I saw Mother Courage come up in my Facebook feed, I knew immediately I wanted to see it. You have to decide these things in advance so you can buy your ticket, since the runs are relatively short, the spaces are small, and some nights sell out.
The Uber driver left me off a block from the theater, I’m guessing because he didn’t know how to get to the address. I walked past storefronts until I came to a long, narrow passage with a door at the end. Once through the door, I was in the middle of a restaurant. Then there was another door. I was there plenty early but there was only one bathroom. I was in line, but I went into the theater to put my jacket on a seat to save it, and then I lost my place in line to an older man and a child, so I let them go ahead of me without complaint. After my turn, I realized my seat on the side close to the entrance was not good for seeing the text displayed on the back screen, so I moved to a seat at the end of the first row by the back exit.
The text on the back screen announced the significant historical events and foreshadowed what would happen in each act of the play. The play spans about 12 years (1624-1636) of The Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648)
The set featured a wagon, from which Mother Courage peddles her goods, including brandy and belts, to soldiers. Before the start of the play, the actors were milling about the stage, reciting their lines. I was interested in the purpose of the white makeup I saw on their faces, particularly around their eyes. I wondered if it was supposed to invoke commedia dell’arte masks or 1920s Weimar Germany cabaret makeup or maybe just to make their faces show up better in the lighting. Searching on the internet, I found that often white makeup is a way to indicate the performer will be playing multiple roles, which some of the actors in this play did.
I was sitting very close, just a few feet away from the stage. There is some awkwardness in that situation. I’m unsure if I should look directly at the actors or avoid eye contact before the actual play begins. Close to the end of the play, the actress playing the mute daughter Kattrin (Emily Nichelson) breaks the fourth wall by going up to audience members directly, pantomiming for them to stand up.
The play reminded me of memorably intense theater experiences I had in the past, some decades ago in small theaters in my neighborhood. The choreographed musical numbers were energizing, foreboding, as well as comic. Mother Courage (Holly Cerney) appeared just as I would have imagined, wearing a ragged skirt and hair pulled back from her face, her personality and demeanor bawdy and brusque. I was especially impressed with the clever use of props in the play. Unadorned objects in abstract shapes perform multiple purposes—in one scene a gun, and in another a tap for brandy, for example—and can be accessed easily from the wagon or a fanny pack or article of clothing.
A beginning scene features a sergeant proclaiming the merits of war to a recruiting officer. War enforces order and discipline; peace is a disorganized mess, according to the sergeant. When they encounter Mother Courage and her three children, they demand to see their papers. Mother Courage makes fun of them by offering a bible, a map of Moravia, and a document declaring her now dead horse doesn’t have hoof and mouth disease. Accused of insubordination, she tells the stories of her children and their different fathers and names. In addition to Kattrin, there are Eilif (David Lovejoy) who is recruited to be a soldier against his mother’s wishes and Swiss Cheese (Rashaad Bond), who, according to his mother, is too honest for his own good.
The sergeant and recruiting officer try to recruit her sons as soldiers, an offer which she emphatically rebukes. Though she foresees the death of all three of her children and the sergeant as well, the recruiting officer manages to sneak away her son Eilif to become a soldier. He will be both celebrated as a hero and then later executed in disgrace during the play, praised and villainized for the same act. As another soldier drags him away to his death, there is this exchange:
CHAPLAIN: What shall we tell your mother?
EILIF: Tell her it was no different. Tell her it was the same. Aw, tell her nothing.
Her two other children will be killed as well. And she will be left alone.
Bertolt Brecht wrote Mother Courage in 1939 as a condemnation of war, authoritarianism, Nazism and Fascism. I’ve read that he was disappointed in the compassion and affinity audiences felt for the Mother Courage character. He apparently thought Mother Courage was at fault for not realizing the dire situation she was in, that she was making her living off of a war that would eventually kill off her children. But I must say that I also find the character of Mother Courage likable, relatable, even admirable in her striving to make a living for herself and her children, laughing vivaciously in the face of adversity. Certainly the war is not her fault. Don’t most of us find ourselves caught up in larger events and systems beyond our individual control, uneasily complicit in hierarchies and injustices, yet muddling our way through to survive, because the only other choice is depression and death?
Why do pro-birth demagogues want people to have babies so badly? So they can grow up to be soldiers in their wars (militaristic and ideological)? What rational person wants to raise children to be fodder for the military-industrial complex or whatever dystopian/authoritarian/late-capitalist nightmare is in our future?
Perhaps freedom of thought and (we hope) freedom of expression and each other make life worthwhile, or at least less hopeless and miserable
On the Uber ride home, I told my driver all about the play and we had an awesome conversation.
This kind of thought-provoking cultural work is worth supporting if you are so inclined: https://trapdoortheatre.com/