A note from playwright Nadja Leonhard-Hooper

Are you a “female” of reproductive age? Have you noticed that strange things are happening around/ inside you? I feel I turned 31 or however old I am (just checked- 32), and everyone started talking about having babies. Every very sensible nonbinary people started talking about giving birth as something the body was “made to do.” What the duck? I’m excited about having kids someday, but this made me feel a little amboyvalent about the whole thing. I can’t even imagine how disturbing this would be for someone who finds the idea of having kids disgusting.

Almost everyone I know who as a uberus has something scary and unexplained going on with their body. Why is that? Why are there no answers? I know why. It’s the P word :( You know which P word I mean. So then you look for answers outside of the doctors office- Pussy power!! And Mama you find yourself in an alt right pipeline with raw milk transphobes who think it’s your divine calling to procreate in a nap dress.

Do you think this play too hard on men? Or, then again- is the play actually too easy on men? This concern is a pendulum that swings back and forth: I’m going too easy on men → I’m going too hard on men → i’m being a defender of men! → I’m being so cruel to the poor men…  My hope is that this is good, actually, because that’s how I feel in real life. I should be more forgiving..i should be more vengeful…I should be more understanding…I have to stop trusting these fuckers! I just think it’s very hard to be a man. I do. I think being raised as a traditional man is an abusive thing to do to a child. The only people who have really firm ideas about how men should behave seem to be complete psychopaths. Not that it’s any easier to be a freemale..foymal…fee-maile? Best to be a slug. Best…to be a slug. 

I would like to write beautiful serious plays about the experiences that many people are having right now: getting flashed and groped and raped, and having rapists in power always and forever. And having abortions and miscarriages, and being forced to carry unwanted pregnancies to term, and dying of miscarriages because they can’t access care that’s labeled abortion care. And giving birth in auto body shops because they can’t go to a hospital without risk of deportation. And giving birth in a courtroom right here in Brooklyn. And being forced by a judge present on zoom to have a caesarean against their will. And having mysterious pains for decades and being disbelieved and abused by our medical system, especially if they are not white. I would like to write beautifully and seriously about this, but unfortunately I am a completely perverted demento, and my scream for reproductive justice for all people must come in the form of a fart joke.

In closing, my primary goal with this play is to make you laugh and to surprise you. I myself crave surprise, because it reminds me that the world can be different from how it is right now, and I can be different from how I am right now.

I’m very grateful to Clubbed Thumb. This play was so clearly evidence that I should be in some sort of intensive therapy and instead they gave me my Off Broadway debut and I will love them forever for that.