Timely, urgent, and provocative part-documentary play, Jeff-nominated for best Ensemble in 2024 for Idle Muse production at the Edge Off Broadway in Chicago. Since Roe was overturned, it has had two full productions and 5 readings, including its first reading in a state that has outlawed abortion (South Carolina). In 2019, it had a celebrity reading fundraiser for A is For off-Broadway in New York City at Rattlestick, starring Cynthia Nixon, Kathy Najimy, Ana Gasteyer, and others. The total number of completed performances, as of this writing, is seven full productions and at least 17 readings.)

Two monologues by Micki, a Jane member and Black civil rights worker, involved in the Chicago Conspiracy Trial, will appear in anthology of women's stage monologues to be released later in 2024 by Venus Theatre Company, the country's longest-running feminist theater company. See https://www.gofundme.com/f/FrozenWomenFlowingThoughts

The fall 2023 production by Idle Muse in Chicago has just been Jeff-nominated for best Ensemble! See attachments below of reviews calling the play "fast-paced" and "gripping."

The play is based on my original interviews with women who ran this legendary underground abortion service in Chicago before Roe v Wade. Since 1999, it has been a favorite of colleges, for its many diverse roles for young women, with a reading at Temple University and full production at UCLA in late 2022.

This play was featured in September 2019 in American Theatre Magazine as a play being used to raise awareness for abortion rights, featuring a high-profile celebrity reading that month at Rattlestick Theatre in NYC to benefit A is For, starring Cynthia Nixon, Kathy Najimy, Ana Gasteyer, Monique Coleman and others:
https://www.americantheatre.org/2019/09/18/a-is-for-art-about-abortion-access/?fbclid=IwAR2ioGCWkLTqmo0PA9Fe2nYD5cn0E5u_z5OiTKqvdLD6zQdWCfMx05AGh5Y

NPX included the play on a list of recommended plays on reproductive rights:
https://newplayexchange.org/features/reproductive-rights

I provided sources to the 2022 HBO-produced documentary, "The Janes," mainly ordinary women that I found who used Jane while researching this play. That includes Crystal, a Black woman who accompanied her friend to a Jane abortion as a teen from the West Side.

This drama addresses how when abortion is outlawed, it still goes on, and can be a harrowing experience even in the best of circumstances. It also inspires about the power of feminist organizing to meet women's most urgent and vital material needs.


Offered for free for pro-choice fundraisers.

The part-documentary play is based on original interviews about “the best-kept secret” in Chicago, “Jane,” an underground abortion service that operated from 1969 to 1973. This network, run by a feminist collective of mostly middle-class housewives and students, was the one safe alternative for about 11,000 Chicago women of all backgrounds. In all those years, “Jane,” which boasted no fatalities and operated in private apartments throughout the city, was well trusted by and commonly received referrals from police, university administrators, social workers, clergy and hospital staff.

Writing about play’s premiere production, Chicago Reader critic Kim Wilson said: “Everyone -- but women especially -- should hear this story.”

Research for the writing of Jane includes a detailed, original investigation into its past and interviews with those who were on the scene in Chicago. This includes, most notably, women who used the illegal service. The drama is stitched together from original interview transcripts, fictionalized reenactments of conversations, and historical documents, such as an excerpt from an actual "witch"-led abortion-rights street theater from the early '70s, internal memos of the group, and front-page newspaper coverage of “The Abortion Seven.”

The research was used by the makers of the PBS documentary, Jane: An Abortion Service, which aired in 1998. The interview transcripts, quoted in the 1997 book When Abortion Was A Crime (University of California Press), are also on file with the Special Collections Department of the Northwestern University Library.

Was excerpted in two Smith & Kraus "best of" stage scenes and women's monologue anthologies. Two scenes were recently accepted into the first anthology of abortion-related literature, Choice Words, due out in 2020 from Haymarket Press

The play has also been written about by drama scholars, such as in in Frontiers article about innovative feminist docudrama structure, http://muse.jhu.edu/article/530604
and as chapter in book about feminist plays on abortion,as one play that addresses the issue most directly and unapologetically.
http://www.amazon.com/Examining-Confrontation-Ambivalence-Depictions-Reproductive/dp/0779904524/ref=la_B004SW9GUQ_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1461959847&sr=1-1&refinements=p_82%3AB004SW9GUQ%2Cp_n_feature_browse-bin%3A2656022011

Three versions are available, including the revised & updated 2019 version requiring fewer actors. Also available on request are two shorter student-made adaptations: one hour-long monologues-only version and one half-hour of scenes.

The new version of the play includes three main characters, which emerge organically as leaders during different parts of The Service. That includes founder Heather Booth, who went to organize the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, signed into law in 2010 by President Obama, and spearheaded by Senator Elizabeth Warren.

The theme of this short play is the incalculable loss to society when artists or inventors die before their prime, whether because of AIDS or other tragedies -- man-made or not, focusing on Jewish history.

“Ten-minute” play; one simple set possible. Offers major roles for seniors, or actors playing seniors. Running Time: 10-15 minutes.

The drama takes place in the imagination of a former Nazi, Heinz in 1995, at a dire time point in the AIDS crisis. He imagines a confrontation with a Jewish boyhood friend, Abraham, who had aspired to be a great doctor, whom he had killed in a concentration camp during WWII. As he watches his son die of AIDS, he remembers Abraham’s childhood dreams of inventing the cure to a terrible illness.

His meditation/fever dream is prompted by news of the death of Jonas Salk, a Jew of his era.
Like other works of the playwright, even while contemplating dark subjects, the play dares to use humor, such as in a meditation on Holocaust survivor Anne Frank’s sales of her twentieth novel and ego problems.

AWARDS and PRODUCTIONS:

Finalist in Chicago Dramatists’ “Ten-Minute Play” Competition, receiving staged reading with Steppenwolf actors. Judged by David Zak of the Bailiwick Theater, Spring 1999.

First-place winner of play competition of the Unfinished Works program of AIDS Services Foundation Orange County, Irvine, California, December 2005. Play published in book of winning entries.

Winner of Diversity Festival, Eastern New Mexico University, Portales, New Mexico, March 2001.

Finalist in festival by SNAP! Productions, Omaha, Nebraska, at the Millennium Theater, Summer 2000.