(I’m trying to catch up on writing and tracking things since I remembered that I have a website where I’m supposed to be writing about and tracking things I’ve been doing and I haven’t touched it in a slightly yikes number of months.)
First, though, this weekend is the opening of the US premiere of Mia McCullough’s The Squirrel Plays!
I’m so excited for Mia and for everyone who’s going to get to see her work, but it’s a little bittersweet. When we took the show to Edinburgh in 2018, many good things were in progress for reproductive health care across the world: Ireland had just had its landslide referendum result, and then Argentina’s congress voted on a new bill that would pave the way to legalising abortion there too.
As a cast of mostly North American immigrants with a variety of visa situations between us, we kept glancing back across the pond nervously. We knew something was going to happen with reproductive rights, but we weren’t sure exactly what or when. It sometimes made talking about the show challenging; we knew in our guts that it was important, but it was hard to explain that in a soundbite-sized chunk while handing out flyers.
When Mia flew out to see us, we spent a good hour talking it all through. She theorized that when it happened, Roe v Wade wouldn’t take a direct hit but instead get undermined by a bunch of lesser, tetchy bills. Death by a thousand cuts. It would be harder to track, and as a result, it would be harder to raise awareness around it. It… did not happen like that. (And it was a year ago. A year ago! What???)
I wonder what watching this show will be like in a post-Dobbs environment. The Seattle production will also feature all three plays in the sequence, covering even more topics than we were able to in our runtime in Edinburgh: racism, gun control, gerrymandering, district lines and social media justice.
And you can check out more about Mia McCullough’s work and what she’s doing next here ❤️
