Timely, unflinching and provocative part-documentary play, Jeff-nominated for best Ensemble in 2024 for Idle Muse production at the Edge Off Broadway in Chicago. Had celebrity reading off-Broadway at Rattlestick in NYC, featuring Cynthia Nixon and Kathy Najimy, before the pandemic benefiting A is For. Has had dozens of readings and seven full productions across North America. Monologues and scenes excerpted in many anthologies, most recently in Frozen Women, Flowing Thoughts, published in 2024 by Venus Theatre Company, the longest-running regional feminist theater company, and Choice Words, the first abortion-literature anthology, edited by Annie Finch in 2020.

Since Roe was overturned in 2022, it has had two full productions and at least five readings, including its first readings in states banning abortion, Florida and South Carolina, where it raised money for local abortion funds.

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.

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-…

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.

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.

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-Re…

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 STORY:he play starts in 1965, when University of Chicago undergraduate Heather Booth, who has recently returned from Freedom Summer in Mississippi, receives an urgent call from another Civil Rights activist. His sister is pregnant and needs an abortion, and he knows that Heather, already an expert organizer, knows a lot of people. She puts him in touch with an older Black doctor who had been closely involved in supporting the family of Emmett Till in the 1950s. Soon the word spreads, and Heather receives too many calls to handle the referrals herself. Heather then recruits other activists -- many of them graduate students and hippie housewives -- and they use the code word "Jane" to describe their abortion-referral service to callers.

Heather's doctor retires, and they hire other to perform the abortions. Soon, the women of Jane or "The Service" discover that the "doctors" they have hired are not real doctors, resulting in some organizers leaving The Service in protest. Others take it as a cue to take the bold step to learn the procedures themselves and become abortionists, to be able to charge much lower prices and make the procedure more widely accessible. In the next few years, they become experts, performing more than 10,000 safe abortions. The Service continues even after a May 1972 police bust, only disbanding in January of 1973 when Roe v. Wade becomes the law of the land.