Theirs was a secret space. In the early 1970s, Molly Smith and her sister Bridget attended weekly women’s consciousness-raising sessions in a friend’s living room near Washington’s Catholic University. They read books such as Our Bodies, Ourselves, a groundbreaking text about women’s health and sexuality. Sitting on cushions, the circle of women listened to one another, laughed and cried and shared their deepest secrets.
“Women needed spaces where they could be open, where they could be uncompromising, where they could speak about the beginnings of their feminism, where they could speak about their stories around their bodies without shame,” Smith, now 70, recalls by phone. “A lot of women didn’t understand their bodies at all.
“We were looking at all kinds of books about female autonomy that women didn’t know. It was deeply mysterious because people wouldn’t talk about it and so it had to be in spaces where no one else could come in. It had to be in a place where men were not allowed. It had to be in a place that was women only so that women would be free to say whatever they needed to say.”
Images of that time came flooding back to Smith, artistic director of the Arena Stage theatre in Washington, when in June the supreme court’s rightwing majority overturned Roe v Wade, the 1973 ruling that has enshrined a woman’s constitutional right to abortion. A hundred days after that bitterly divisive decision, 66 clinics across 15 states have been forced to stop offering abortions, according to the thnktank, Guttmacher Institute.
“With the decision the supreme court made, we moved back into being second-class citizens,” Smith continues. “I was fighting this fight in the early 1970s and now to have it back again is horrifying to me.” Smith read voraciously about what the nation’s highest court – with three justices appointed by former president Donald Trump – had done and felt angry, upset, frustrated and desperate. Then, one morning, she woke up and resolved to respond through her art. The result is My Body No Choice, an Arena Stage show featuring fiction and non-fiction monologues from eight female playwrights including V (formerly known as Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues), Fatima Dyfan, Lee Cataluna and Lisa Loomer.
Some directly address the choice to have – or not have – an abortion. One struggles with the knowledge that her mother tried to have her aborted. Another gives a speech in defence of abortion rights that goes down badly at a Catholic school, stating: “Brett Kavanaugh forced a teenager named Christine Blasey Ford on to a bed and lied about it to Congress and then lied about his views on Roe.”
Another gives a harrowing account of a miscarriage and following medical advice to have the pregnancy tissue surgically removed from her uterus to avoid risk of infection or haemorrhage. In post-Roe America, she warns, this could be criminalised: “In so many states, I would suffer weeks waiting for the end of the loss that already happened. Danger to my health weeks. Paralysing my heart. I can’t even think about it.”
One woman, a survivor of childhood abuse, describes having an abortion on 4 July, interpreting the sound of independence day fireworks as a celebration of her autonomy: “This abortion was the first real choice I had ever made about my own body. I was 23. My body that had been battered, raped, denigrated and taken by clumsy, aggressive boys in the dark. My body that had been erased, that had felt so dead, was suddenly empty and alive.”
Other monologues are more broadly about bodily autonomy, from the freedom to choose your body size to making a decision around when to end your life. Each is delivered in a setting reminiscent of those 1970s living rooms with couches and table lamps and a big Persian rug – the actors listen and react to each other’s stories, and even some audience members sit in comfy armchairs.
Outside the auditorium, playgoers are invited to record their personal stories in a “whisper booth” or post sticky notes on a “whisper wall”. Among the anonymous handwritten messages: “Don’t legislate my womb!”; “I became pregnant from rape – I had an abortion to take care of my mental health”; “My best friend died in childbirth after being forced to keep her pregnancy”; “I got pregnant after high school and had an abortion because I wasn’t ready; my choice”; “There is no time when women shouldn’t tell their stories”; “I’m a man: how can they do that to women? Insane!”
Smith reflects: “Having choice removed as a woman is not just awful but it is gut-wrenching. For any man, to have these kinds of choices made about their bodies, they wouldn’t take it. Women have taken it and taken it and taken it over the centuries and it’s time for it to stop.
“Women have been secretive about these stories, haven’t wanted to tell them, haven’t wanted to talk about them, because women feel shame, blame, guilt, sorrow and don’t speak about their bodies. We have to. Women need to get out and tell their stories regardless of how difficult it is, regardless of how complicated it is, because unless women are telling their stories, change won’t happen.”
My Body No Choice is framed around the issue of bodily autonomy, Smith explains, because the supreme court’s decision touches on any choice that women make around their bodies. “Whether it’s a choice around breast reduction, a choice to have chemotherapy or not having chemotherapy, a choice to die, we need to have these choices for ourselves.
“Otherwise we’re controlled by the system, controlled by other people and it makes women small. I believe that women need to be big and large and active and verbal and able to make decisions for themselves because nobody knows what your body is except for you.
“Nobody can understand your body in the same way that you do. For years, even doctors often don’t take women seriously when they go in to talk to them about something going on with their bodies. It’s all part of this system of objectifying women and utilising women as objects as opposed to whole human beings. This kind of decision that the supreme court made, it won’t end here. It’s just going to continue on and on and on until more rights are taken away from women. So speak out.”
Smith, who was raised as a Catholic and attended a parochial school for 13 years, says the show has drawn some letters of complaint from patrons who oppose abortion, but two or three times as many from people offering support. She has made contact with theatres and universities around the US to host readings of the play.
So far she is aware of at least 20 such readings from Arizona to Hawaii to West Virginia, from conservative states to liberal states. “If they give people a backbone and an ability to be able to speak then, oh my God, we’ve done our job. From a theatre piece, moving into the kind of intimacy where we can share these kinds of stories is radically important right now.”
Arena’s Kogod Cradle, where My Body No Choice is being performed, carries special memories for Smith: it is where she married her longtime partner, Suzanne Blue Star Boy, in a ceremony presided over by the supreme court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The death of Ginsburg in 2020 enabled Trump to nominate the conservative Amy Coney Barrett and seal the fate of Roe v Wade.
The juxtaposition is illustrative of how theatre and politics are intertwined in the nation’s capital (Abraham Lincoln, after all, was shot while watching a play). It is a relationship that Smith has embraced during the 25 years of running Arena, a period in which she oversaw its move to the second biggest performing arts complex in Washington after the Kennedy Center.
Her tenure – which will end next summer, after which she intends go travelling – has included Roe, a play about the landmark case written by Loomer that opened just before Trump’s inauguration, a drama about conservative supreme court justice Antonin Scalia and a “power play” cycle that aims to commission 25 new works, one for each decade of American history (nine have been produced so far).
“Probably 20 years ago, I started doing work that was political and was very much about the world we live in, in the United States, and many of my colleagues said, oh, you can’t do that, people are not going to be interested in seeing this. I said, it’s people’s bread and butter here. We live, eat, sleep, the news here. We started producing work that would have been political in nature and audiences were hungry for it.”
My Body No Choice is therefore an apt directorial swansong for Smith just before the 8 November midterm elections, in which Republicans believe their focus on inflation and crime will outweigh Democrats’ emphasis on abortion rights in the battle for control of Congress. Some Republicans favour a national abortion ban.
She adds: “I hope it wakes people up – because it was four months ago and people have gotten a little sleepy about it – and reminds them of why women’s bodies and choices we make around our bodies is so important. I want to scream it out loud so that people can hear it and wake people up because, if we lose this midterm election, what happens? What kind of a country is this?”
