Comic distills absurdities, burdens of being female
Leiby takes on abortion and says what women everywhere are thinking
To women everywhere, Alison Leiby serves catharsis.
You might want to thank her for saying what we were all thinking, but such a formulation alone doesn’t give her enough credit. We don’t have her eye for tiny storytelling details, her big-picture understanding of systemwide malfunction, her wit for turning unprocessed chronic rage into tart little morsels.
Leiby’s “Oh God, A Show About Abortion” isn’t just about abortion, which is not at all to say it waters down discussions of women’s bodies, sex and unwanted pregnancy. The procedure itself takes up only a few minutes toward the end of her 85minute stand-up show, as an account of competent, routine health care and a copacetic outcome that Leiby herself describes as anticlimactic — exactly how so many women experience abortion.
Instead, much of the piece, which played at Brava Theater for one night as part of this year’s SF Sketchfest, distills the absurdities, burdens and outrages of walking through the world as a woman: the lack of male birth control; the way modern medicine shrugs at the female anatomy and disbelieves female patients; how the world forces every menstruating
person to become “an amateur sleight-of-hand magician,” lest a non-menstruating person’s eyes should see a period product, possibly forcing him to consider even subconsciously a biological reality that, on average, occupies six years of a woman’s life.
Through it all, Leiby, who lives in Brooklyn and writes for TV (“The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” “The President Show” and “Triumph’s Election Watch 2016”) in addition to performing stand-up, has the air of your friend group’s hyperarticulate, skeptical ringleader — the one who has an inner monologue running at a steady patter all the time that she could choose to vocalize
or not.
She can paint a picture of a more accurate commercial for birth control, complete with grocery store rotisserie chicken gnashed at over the kitchen sink, as if she’s storyboarding a feature film.
In delivery, she excels in jamming together two discordant ideas as if the second one is a continuation of the first and in planting details that have a sneak-attack payoff later in her show. And she knows just when to go offmike and scream into the void.
But mostly, “Oh God, A Show About Abortion,” presented by Ilana Glazer of “Broad City,” lets Leiby’s keen, satisfying insights build without adornment or fuss. To have a uterus is to live in constant low-grade fear, she points out: first that a woman will get pregnant before she is ready, then — for many — that she won’t be able to get pregnant when she wants to.
When Leiby slowed down to say, “I don’t want kids,” she had the self-awareness to add, “That’s a hard sentence to say out loud.” Despite how evolved she is, how certain she is of her position, the world still makes such an assertion suspect, problematic. It doesn’t know what to do with a woman in her 30s or 40s who is not a mother; it doesn’t even know what to call her.
Leiby argues that she’s a bad candidate for motherhood, what with her profligate shopping, fondness for heavy drinking, “wake and bake Wednesdays” and vengeful thoughts that at least once veer into quasivandalism. In so doing, she suggests the possibility of a next chapter in abortion narratives: What about a story about a woman who seems like she could be a great mom — stable finances, home and partner, perhaps some archetypal mothering personality traits — but who simply doesn’t want to become one? Such a choice isn’t a referendum on anyone else, let alone