Just imagine if Caryl Churchill, Maria Irene Fornes and Judy Chicago had a love child and it was this play? Spare Rib follows two generations of abortion providers: Harriet, a member of the underground collective Jane in the early 1970’s and Florynce, her daughter who is a contemporary abortion provider. The action rockets between three distinctive eras, early 1970’s, 30 years later and the present. Members of the cast play multiple roles as they time-bend and genre-bend. Naturalism collides with surrealism; the goddesses Kali, Oya and Mama Quilla are hunting in the Nantahala forest alongside three women barely written into history, the Empress Theodora, Shen-Tsan, (the uncredited) mother of Chinese medicine, and Madame Restelle, an abortionist in mid-1800s New England. What abortion play would be complete without a band of obstinate fetuses with strong ideas about life and death?

In an interview with the author in Talk of the Town, The New Yorker's Rebecca Mead describes Spare Rib a "quasi-comic abortion drama." www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/12/14/cold-read