Chicago author Jonathan Eig’s non-fiction book, “The Birth of the Pill,” does not come across as an obvious candidate for theatrical adaptation.
It’s filled with compelling details about the development of the revolutionary contraceptive and spreads its focus out over four characters who are importantly, but not always directly, involved in how the birth control pill came to be. The book lurches forward in fits and starts, as scientific progress often does. It allows the known significance of the social change the pill will bring — enabling sex without fear of pregnancy and all that means — to drive the tale more than suspenseful narrative or personal stakes.
So there’s no question that its adapter needed a willingness to take theatrical risks. Playwright Jessica Huang certainly brings that.
Her play of the same name, receiving its world premiere at TimeLine Theatre’s new building in Uptown, brims with creative ideas about how to tell the story. It has a strong point of view that embraces complexity, and finds some inspired moments of humor.
But clever ideas and an inquisitive perspective can’t always make a play spring to theatrical life, and this one falls squarely into the “noble effort” category. In all honesty, it comes across as a piece still early in development and in need of a fresh conceptual start.
From the beginning of the play, Huang introduces a new character, narrator Ramona Delgado (María Victoria Martínez), who claims to be a “footnote” in the story. We’ll eventually discover that she is one of the dozens of Puerto Rican women who participated — many without informed consent — in the clinical trials for the pill. Many experienced problematic and even severe side effects; the dosage was much higher than it should have been. In history books, including Eig’s, their stories are treated as little more than a statistic on the road to progress.
The concept is intriguing and certainly fair. The trials were held in Puerto Rico in part because, unlike in much of the mainland U.S., contraception was legal there. But the attitudes of the main characters – especially Margaret Sanger (Janet Ulrich Brooks), pioneering founder of Planned Parenthood and the driving force behind the pill’s existence – unquestionably included a superiority complex, flirting with eugenics. Yes, the pill would bring women around the world access to reproductive freedom, but she didn’t mind saying it also meant the “wrong” women wouldn’t have so many babies.
But Ramona’s story remains a vague one. She seems to be an aggregate character, and she comes off as exactly that: a representation, an idea, and in Martínez’s hands, a big personality, but not a person.
As Ramona, Martínez steps in to play the supporting characters, and Huang also invests her with theatrical powers: The ability to snap her fingers and stop the action. The playwright toys with this, giving that power to Sanger as well. In an early scene, the two battle over who has control of the storytelling. Again, it’s a smart and meaningful idea, but it’s mostly abandoned thereafter, which is welcome because it quickly grinds any forward movement to a halt.
Still, the scene is entertaining, as are many of the scenes here. Huang and director Sandra Marquez do a particularly fine job with the lab scenes, as researcher Min Chue Chang (a sincere and likable Rammel Chan) explains some of the science and euthanizes (stuffed) rabbits as part of the experiments.
In the book, the foremost protagonist is Goody Pincus (Mitchell J. Fain), the brilliant scientist who had fallen from an academic perch at Harvard for talking too publicly about his work on early in vitro fertilization. But he’s mostly a supporting figure here. The most lively scenes largely belong to Sanger and the wealthy philanthropist Katharine McCormick (Mary Beth Fisher). Ulrich portrays Sanger with an upright posture that signals how intimidating she can be, which makes her an ideal match for Fisher’s comic yet convincing take on fur-wearing McCormick, overflowing with a carefree nonchalance only massive wealth can provide.
Huang and actor David Parkes also have a lot of fun with the character of John Rock, the trusted, earnest, Catholic gynecologist who here serves as an emblem of walking testosterone.
These excellent performances suggest there would be other promising ways into this story, as we can see the very different yet essential qualities they each brought to the project’s success.
By centering the play around Ramona, and yet never really letting her enter the story, Huang unfortunately creates argument but not drama. The play starts fading early, and the final scene — in which Eig himself appears (portrayed by Fain, again) — falls flat.
It sums up the problem here: This version of “The Birth of the Pill” doesn’t feel so much like storytelling as commentary.