Yea, because there’s so many things funny about murdering the unborn.
Philly Theater Company to Stage Abortion Musical
But it’s struggling to find a name for the show, which debuts in August. “Fetus Chorus” turned out to be a bit too much. Normally, when we get a press release from a local theater company about its latest work, the press release includes, you know, the name of the play.
From Philadelphia Magazine:
The abortion musical has its roots at the Pig Iron School for Advanced Performance Training, where [co-creator Alice] Yorke and the co-creators studied. Yorke says it was there that she developed a character of an “irate gun-toting fetus running around and shouting about how it would kill anyone who tried to hurt it.”
In those early days, there was also a Busby Berkeley-inspired song-and-dance kick-line of fetuses, though Yorke isn’t sure that it will be included in the final version.
Yorke explained to the magazine that the musical is not “pro-choice propaganda” while co-creator Scott Sheppard assured readers that the group “pulled back a bit on the politics” in it:
“We’re definitely, as makers, on one side,” Yorke admits. “But we’re trying to ride a funny line. This isn’t self-congratulatory. I want us to examine why we feel this way. I want people to reckon with themselves. This is a show about personhood, the right to bodily autonomy, and the violence of the partisan politics that surrounds this issue.”
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“We don’t wanna serve up this didactic play that pats liberals on the back,” insists Sheppard, 33, also of South Philadelphia. “Abortion is hard. One one side, you have people who think that murder is happening. On the other side, it’s people thinking about women’s health. This is already a terribly divided debate. We didn’t want to just add heat to that fire.”