Theatre Talk

I recently attended a live theatre production. That sounds a little highbrow doesn't it? I'll give it to you straight - I went to a play.

The play was about several women's experiences around, basically, having babies. Or perhaps more accurately, reproductive issues or something like that. ("Accurate" and "something like that" in one sentence - I astound even myself with this sloppy communication.) Now this topic (reproduction, babies) is not exactly up my alley. (Why does that sound dirty to me?) But a friend of mine was in the play which is how I ended up going to see it. (Don't stop reading yet, I'm gonna drop some sports talk soon. [That was like when you're watching t.v. and they say 'and coming up after the break..' - a teaser.] )

So this play thing (unlike other play things, ha ha hahahaha ;) ) worked out better than expected. First of all, shortly into the play, my friends' character is in labour and in the chair beside her you see a man's jacket. Okay, that's not such a great thing I realize, but I'm getting there. So the nurse comes in and the woman gives this big speech about how her husband will be right back and he wants to share in this experience so much yada yada. Then some other stuff happens and the nurse comes back to check in again. This is where the comedy kicks in. Instead of the confident "my husband is so into this!", we now see the woman looked rather angsty (if that's not a word, too bad, I'm using it anyway) and she asks the nurse if there are any t.v.'s between her room and the cafeteria, where her husband had gone only for a moment, he didn't want to miss a minute you know, because he's so into this. The nurse says there are, and the woman says, 'oh no, the Leafs are playing tonight aren't they' with such a worried look on her face - the audience cracks up. (I did later think, why's it always have to be the Leafs! But then I took a deep breath and reminded myself that I should be thankful just to have had a mention of hockey in a play such as this one and to not get greedy.)

So anyway, there was also a teen girl having a baby and she brought the comedy as well. The audience was loving her. Her screamed exclamations of "oh shit that hurts!!!" brought quite the chuckles especially as they contrasted so well with the other more serious women. All the women also did little vignettes in which they spoke aloud their inner thoughts - I think there's a name for that in theatre - solliquay? I especially liked the first half, the second half got more into the issues side of things (the play was meant to be eductional) as we heard the women express the pain of not being able to have children, of making choices between abortion or adoption, and some of the issues around surrogacy, egg donation, etc. All the actors were fabulous. I was impressed.

So after the curtain, the actors and director and some other person whose job description I can't be bothered to give a name to all sat down on the edge of the stage to interact with the audience. That was some good times. Two highlights in particular.

One, an older woman started going on and on about teenage pregnancy - she was blathering more than anything but it came across that teens should really give up their babies because of course they'd grow up in poverty, single-parented, etc. I think I could feel discomfort in the air. Soon after a woman in the front row blasted this woman, saying that she had been a teenage mom, she was 27 now and had 4 kids and she's a damn good mother and that sort of thing. There were no fisticuffs.

Second, a man in the audience (yes, there were some - all related to the actors in the play perhaps - that sounds like a generalization, but all the ones I saw were) made a series of positive comments about the play, adding that it was the first time he realized he wasn't a woman. That got some chuckles for a moment before he went on to explain that he knew he was a man, he wasn't suffering from a gender identity crisis of some kind, it was just that it suddenly hit him that women have to deal with these issues just due to being born female. Now normally I would roll my eyes and think something along the lines of, 'wow, this guy's really milking this sensitive guy thing, wonder how often that strategy gets him laid', but this time I actually found the comment interesting.

I guess I'll have to find a play about men's reproductive issues now to balance things out.