Examining the Use of Safety, Confrontation, and Ambivalence in Six Depictions of Reproductive Women on the American Stage, 1997-2007: Staging "the Place" of Abortion (review)

The national response to Roe v. Wade and other milestones of the pro-life/pro-choice debate illustrate the issue of abortion as one full of dramatic crisis, and yet this issue has not largely been confronted on stage. Lisa Hagen's insightful work, Examining the Use of Safety, Confrontation, and Ambivalence in Six Depictions of Reproductive Women on the American Stage, 1997-2007, reveals important information about why and how abortion has remained in the margins of theatrical creation and what this does to hinder the realization of the female experience. She explains that "we want to hide abortion, but also to drag it to light, to face it with fascination and fear" (157). This observation introduces Hagen's argument that the further the abortion procedure is distanced from the stage, the further the audience is distanced from the reproductive woman's lived reality. Critical to this thesis is the assertion that the abortion procedure itself is the only experience shared by reproductive women who have chosen to terminate their pregnancies. Hagen uses this claim to support her central argument, and yet it shows itself to be problematic, given the plethora of reproductive experiences presented in the pieces chosen for this study.

Hagen analyzes six contemporary plays, chosen partly because of their use of abortion as a key element to the plot. She effectively leads the reader from plays that distance the procedure to those that attempt to stage it. Hagen further justifies her selections by noting their contemporary scope (all were written between 1997 and 2007) and their traditional nature (Hagen defines these plays as traditional because none of these pieces were explicitly politically motivated or executed, and all were single-authored). Following an extended introduction, three core chapters center around specific themes: the relationship between abortion and issues of safety/ concealment, visibility/confrontation, and ambivalence. Hagen's approach is one that integrates textual analysis of plays with social and academic discourse around the topic of abortion. Her purpose is to present a model for viewing abortion that can be used to examine the many different areas of study that handle abortion— including those excluded from her study due to necessary limitations of scope.

The first chapter analyzes plays that distance the characters and audience from the abortion procedure in order to, as Hagen suggests, protect the audience from the trauma of the reproductive woman's life. The women represented in the plays for this section are primigravidas (women experiencing their first pregnancy). By using this medical term, Hagen parallels the plays' distancing of the abortion experience from the protagonist. The distancing tactics used in these two plays include avoidance of the abortion procedure itself and displacement of focus away from the reproductive woman. Keith Bunin's The Credeaux Canvas, for example, places emphasis on the reactions of the two male characters. Hagen successfully demonstrates how this conceals the true woman's experience by drawing the parallel to society's focus on the emotions and concerns of people other than the reproductive woman herself. In Elizabeth Heffron's Mitzi's Abortion, Hagen highlights how family, medical, and historical groups' perspectives are acknowledged more than the title character's.

Chapter two uses protest to highlight the tensions between abortion and its representations on stage. As Hagen states: "Protest is inherently performative, therefore it contains a great deal of theatricality; the 'watched' aspect of protest along with its desire to communicate a message in the most memorable way possible makes it a mimic of theatre" (165). The two plays discussed in this chapter, Wendy MacLeod's The Water Children and Dominique Morisseau's Retrospect for Life, use protest to emphasize the sensationalism and politicization of abortion. Hagen skillfully shows how the inclusion in The Water Children of certain extremist...