Abortion — one of the biggest national issues — comes to MoCA next month.
The Newtown Avenue museum and performance space will host a staged reading of “The Wish.” The montage of dramatic scenes about the loss of abortion rights is described as “inspiring … gut-wrenching … at times comical.”
Two performances are set for May 8: 2 and 7 p.m.
Westport writer Ina Chadwick is the executive producer — and the founder of The “A” Chronicles. Her non-profit “tells stories with quandaries, irony, moral indignity, heartbreak, love and passion. Mostly about abortion.” And it “creates theater that makes visible lives other than our own.”
Screenshot from The A Chronicles website.
She describes the back story: “In 1969 I made bedside visits to women in the postpartum ward at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, to gather information for a research project on the efficacy of an IUD, conducted by the World Population Council.
“One week I was assigned to the exam rooms to chaperone doctors (all men) in the free OB GYN clinic.
“I witnessed a heartbreaking case of incest. A 12-year-old Down Syndrome girl was 3 months pregnant. Abortion was illegal.
“I was outraged that although most of the girls and women I knew could get an abortion if they needed one, this girl — unaware of what was happening, and her Irish immigrant mother who was stunned and devastated — had no choice but to have the baby.
“I followed them to the elevator and gave them a society doctor’s name. He would help.”
That encounter impelled her involvement with a lobbying group to push Roe v. Wade through Congress. She formed a Westchester County Committee For Abortion reform.
In 1973, the US Supreme Court recognized for the first time that the constitutional right to privacy encompasses a woman’s decision on whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.
“Here we are. 51 years later,” Chadwick says. “Thank you to MoCA for collaborating on a theater production with The ‘A’ Chronicles.”
As for “The Wish,” Chadwick was initially reluctant to take on the script that she calls “a last-ditch manual to save abortion in the US through theater.”
Written by 6 young women on the eve of the Texas Supreme Court’s decision to criminalize the procedure, she calls it “a radical theater piece.”
Chadwick had just launched The “A” Chronicles “with a grand vision to find and stage stories of heartbreak, moral indignity, quandaries, love, and passion, all dealing with abortion.”
“I had witnessed the scary times ‘before, and then the freedom and peace of ‘after,'” she recalls.
But “The Wish” was “unlike anything I ever saw, read or heard. Like listening to rap and hip hop lyrics, I had to adjust my experiential lens to hear and see the pathos in the mini-dramas, and get used to the language of women living in environments where they have little control over their own lives. Profanity is part of how they tell their stories.”
Chadwick realizes, “to make a difference in the arts we must push past discomfort. I had to resurrect the outrage of my own younger self.”
After 3 workshop readings of “compelling monologues, wry short play cycles, mesmerizing mythological tales and witch-weaving spells for healing herbs, and magical empowerment,” producing the show became “an imperative.”
More than half a century after that life-changing experience in a New York hospital moved her to work on the national stage, Ina Chadwick continues to tell important stories about important topics.
Next month, she’ll do it right here in Westport.
For more information and tickets, click here.
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