In 2019, comedian Alison Leiby, a writer and producer for Amazon Prime’s hit The Marvelous Mrs. Maizel, while on the road with her comedy act, realized she was “late”. She took a home pregnancy test in her hotel room which came up positive. The rest of the story is the fodder of her stand-up monologue about her experience having an abortion after a regrettable one night stand at the age of 35. She tells her story in an evening of anecdotes starting with the way public school sex education classes and ineffectual parental attempts at “the talk” failed her (and most of the predominantly female audience judging from the response) for what was to come.
Leiby opens her show in the intimate Theatre Lab with the disheartening reminder that one year ago the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, monumentally toppling women’s reproductive rights, lending a level of gravity and realism under the humor-infused anecdotes she assembled for the evening. While also admitting that abortion is no laughing matter, Leiby’s efforts to frame her misadventures in the guise of a comedy act is an attempt to deflate the taboo of the subject. If we can talk about it and find laughter behind the shame, it becomes a conversation about something 1 in 4 women experience but are reticent to discuss. Leiby reinforces this nonchalance with her costume of simple black jeans and well-washed, everyday black T-shirt coupled with her less polished, more conversational style of delivery. The choices worked. One could almost sense the audience progressively relaxing as the evening progressed.
In between the cautionary tales and controversial subject matter, she peppers the evening with genuine laughs about bits about the communication barriers between male doctors and female patients (one team of male doctors were baffled by the appearance of her pelvic x-rays, when the first nurse to enter the room informed them what they were looking at was a tampon, located exactly where a tampon should be), the pressure on women to have children (as a woman who once spent a month’s rent on Gucci shoes and is basically unable to even keep a cactus alive, she can’t even pass the most basic test for the responsibilities of motherhood), and sexy but sexless Barbie culture forced onto little girls (“Bitch has like 40 jobs! She’s a pop star/princess/veterinarian. But somebody’s got to pay for that dream house because Ken is just a lifeguard”).
The most memorable segment of the evening is a recounting of a tale her mother brought up over lunch after last year’s supreme court ruling, wherein she confided that she had had an abortion when she was younger, arranged by the mafia. Her grandfather had to drop her off at a parking lot where she and another girl got into a vehicle, were blindfolded and driven around for hours to an undisclosed location, then given a concoction that induced a miscarriage (the equivalent of today’s abortion pill?), hoping she would come back from the procedure. Her father was encouraged not to worry though. “We do all the Rockettes,” the mobsters assured him.
The takeaway was that the abortion, the driving force behind the entire set piece, was in reality a routine medical procedure (she was even given the option of taking a morning after pill) that in telling the story is actually, as she describes it, “anticlimactic”. Her hope is if more women felt free to talk about their experiences, the less emotionally-charged and judgmental the conversations may eventually become, and the more say women will hopefully get in their own reproductive rights.
Running Time: Approximately 70 minutes with no intermission
Alison Leiby: Oh, God, A Show About Abortion currently plays through June 24, 2023, at the Theatre Lab at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, 2700 F Street NW, Washington DC 20566. For tickets, call the box office at 202.467.4600 or purchase online.