Life imitates art in new play about abortion in U.S.
The new play by writer Rachel Bublitz, “Funny, Like an Abortion,” is a wild and sobering comedy about two women exploring dangerous at-home solutions in a dystopian United States future in which abortion has been outlawed.
It's one of two plays receiving workshop “festival premieres” as part of PlayGround's 26th annual Festival of New Works at San Francisco's Potrero Stage and will be simulcast online. The other one is Daysha Veronica's “The Deliverance,” about a Black farmer struggling with whether to sell off the family land. Bublitz's play closes out the festival on May 28-29.
Just a few hours after we discussed Bublitz's play on May 2, a Supreme Court opinion draft leaked, indicating that a court majority was poised to overturn Roe v. Wade and reopen the floodgates for state and federal abortion bans.
She would never have wanted this play to be quite so prescient, but Bublitz said she could already see the writing on the wall. In fact, there's a section of the play that gets updated as more and more draconian laws are passed.
“It's getting worse,” she said. “It's getting so much worse. There's so many more states who jumped on the bandwagon not only to almost eliminate abortion, but also making moves to enforce criminal charges against women who do seek abortions, even outof-state abortions where in that state it's legal. And Roe v. Wade is very much in jeopardy. It's going to take a miracle for that not to get knocked down. And then I think there's like 14 states where it would immediately be illegal, across the board without exceptions.”
Even being able to see this coming, Bublitz noted that the speed with which the anti-abortion movement has rushed to turn back the clock on decades of social progress has been alarming.
“We have a lot of things that didn't expect to see in my lifetime, like lots of banning books again,” she said. “All these things are coming back up again that I felt like as a country we had decided to move past. And apparently we have not.”
Bublitz said she originally wrote “Funny, Like an Abortion” because a theater had inquired whether she had any two-person comedies, and at the time she didn't.
A formerly Bay Area based playwright now living in Salt Lake City, Bublitz is not one to shy away from thorny topics. Her drama “Ripped” at Z Space, grappling with date rape and the complexities of sexual consent, won the Will Glickman Award for the best new play to premiere in the Bay Area in 2019. It had previously been featured in Z Space's 2018 Problematic Play Festival, highlighting scripts that had been deemed too controversial to produce elsewhere.
“It is a very dark comedy,” Bublitz said of her new play. “I make a lot of jokes that are incredibly offensive. When I was writing it, I had to step away from my computer and just think, wow, I'm making jokes about Drano. I'm making jokes about wire hangers. But I feel like the dire humor has to match the dire circumstances.”
Amid the absurdity, she hopes the play drives home the high human cost of hard-line legislation.
“For people of all views, I hope that I give people space to think about things in a new light,” Bublitz said. “In 2020 at Utah Valley University, they read this play in class. And one of the things that really struck me was a young man's response. He had never thought of what it would be like to be in this situation and not have anywhere to go. He'd always just been told that abortion was wrong, and he thought that this play gave him space to think about it in a way that he had never had the opportunity to think about it before. That's something that's really important to me in all topics, but especially the more thorny ones.”
The new works festival, running through May 29, also features Best of PlayGround, a selection of six standout 10-minute plays from the company's monthly Monday Night PlayGround staged readings. There's also the Young Playwrights Project, featuring short plays by high school playwrights, and four staged readings of full-length plays in progress. Admission to all events is free but reservations are required. More information is at www.playground-sf.org.