Theater scheduling being what it is, writer/comedian Alison Leiby’s one-woman show Oh God, A Show About Abortion, which just opened at the Cherry Lane Theatre, was on the books long before last week’s leaked Supreme Court draft opinion draft in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. And now that the entire country is talking about the likely overturn of 1973’s landmark Roe v. Wade ruling, there couldn’t be a better time for Leiby’s highly personal show about her own abortion.
Not that Oh God, A Show About Abortion has changed owing to recent events. “The show is exactly the same as it was before we lost all of our rights,” Leiby assures the audience.
If you’re expecting an 80-minute screed about abortion rights or freedom of choice, you’ll be sorely disappointed. Oh God… does detail Leiby’s abortion—an experience that she describes as “anticlimactic,” likening how she feels after leaving Planned Parenthood in SoHo (“because I’m fancy,” she says of her neighborhood choice) to how she feels after shopping Nordstrom Rack: “mostly satisfied but a little underwhelmed.” But the procedure itself is only a small part of the show.
Leiby spends more time on other equally thorny issues: birth control, sex education, pop culture, periods, fertility, and buying overpriced plants in Brooklyn (apparently as traumatic as any of the aforementioned subjects—who knew?). She makes a passionate case of the much-maligned Barbie as a model of modern womanhood: “Bitch has 40 jobs. She’s a popstar/princess/pet stylist, but someone has to pay for that dream home because Ken is only a lifeguard.” She envisions a really “honest” birth control pill commercial—one that isn’t “just a musical that breaks out in a grocery store.” She talks about why we don’t talk about periods, and does some mind-boggling math, calculating that the average woman ends up having her period for roughly 2,220 days—or six years!—of her life: “Someone runs a marathon once. It takes four hours and they talk about it the rest of their lives. We menstruate for SIX YEARS and we have to smile quietly while we bleed out in a meeting.” (So…you don’t want to hear about the marathon I ran?)
Refreshingly, Leiby is also unapologetically honest about her choice not to have children—a decision about which she’s wholly confident, but with which she’s still confronted at so many turns. “I feel like when I say I don’t want kids that is somehow an insult to women who have children,” she confesses. Because when you’re a woman, your pro/con decision on procreation is, for some reason, everyone’s business. (Including the government’s, but that’s another story.) “I’ve been asked if I’m going to have a baby by my mother, by my grandmother, by my gynecologist, by my coworker, by my friends who have kids, by my friends who don’t have kids, by a salesperson at Bloomingdale’s. And then by my mom again,” she says. “The only people who ask men if they want a baby are women who have been dating them for like, 11-14 months.”
If Leiby didn’t live in New York, and needed to have her abortion in another state—say, Missouri, where she was doing standup when she learned she was pregnant—this would have been a very different show. Perhaps there would have been fewer laughs and more oh-my-god moments. But one suspects Leiby’s mission would have remained precisely the same: quite simply, to talk about abortion more. Without judgment or fear, and not in whispers or shouts. Just…talk.
Oh God, A Show About Abortion opened May 9, 2022, at the Cherry Lane Theatre and runs through June 30. Tickets and information: ohgodshow.com
