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by Rachel Cairns, directed by Courtney Ch’ng Lancaster

Nightwood Theatre with The Howland Company, Factory Theatre, Toronto

February 25-March 8, 2025

“Christmas in reverse”

Hypothetical Baby is the kind of play that makes a person glad to live in Canada. The autobiographical play could be subtitled “My Abortion”, in which playwright Rachel Cairns describes the lead up to and the fallout from her having an abortion. The play is a mixture of storytelling and factual data that only occasionally devolves into lecturing. What people may find so surprising about a play on this subject is that it is so funny. As an audience we have to realize lucky we are that such a play can even be staged.

Cairns’s story is built on the recurrent theme of “This is when it all started”. She begins with depicting her first visit to the doctor when she thinks she might be pregnant despite having used an IUD. The action keeps moving forward until Cairns hits a significant moment that makes her think that “It all started” even earlier. She flashes back to that time and starts to move forward again. Part of the built-in humour lies in Cairns’s continual backing up to find an origin point, backing up far enough to when her parents meet.

The engaging persona Cairns creates for herself is that of an innocent who has to confront the strange new world of pregnancy and ending pregnancy. She describes both in great detail, often referring to information she finds online with Julia Howman’s projections showing pages from Google and YouTube on a screen behind the platform where Cairns performs.

Cairns has had an on-again, off-again relationship with a guy for three years when she discovers she is pregnant. She is an actor and therefore impoverished and earns money shining shoes somewhere along The Path, Toronto’s underground tunnel system. Although she is 30, she knows that now is not the time to have a baby. If she has a baby, she can’t also pursue a career. Unless she marries a boyfriend about whom she has doubts, she can’t afford to raise a child. If she did marry and her husband left her, she would have to move in with her mother in Vancouver and wind up caring for a baby as well as an aging mother. She knows activists speak of being “pro-choice”, but Cairns doesn’t see that she has a choice.

In the course of the show, Cairns plays at least ten characters keeping all distinct through voice changes and gestures aided by Julia Howman’s precise lighting cues. These include her mother and her father, various doctors and clinicians, her boyfriend, her boyfriend’s friend’s girlfriend, her fellow shoe-shiner and an anti-abortion lecturer on YouTube. Of these the portraits of her mother and the YouTuber are the most vivid. Making Cairns’s travail immensely easier is her realistic mother, who has had two abortions herself, and is tirelessly helpful. Cairns brings out her dry wit and disarmingly frank advice beautifully, even though what she says often shows up Cairns’s naïveté.

Cairns’s impression of the unflappable YouTuber, with her calming voice and patronizing attitude allows Cairns to iterate all the salient points that the pro-life movement makes about the human rights of “pre-born children”. Cairns plays the role so well that as the YouTuber speaks in her seemingly cool, logical manner, we momentarily forget the flaws in her argument. Fortunately, Cairns, playing her ideal self, does not forget, and the debate between herself and the YouTuber is probably the most dramatic point of the evening.

In trying to seek the origin of her story, Cairns eventually has to go back to the history of women’s rights and reproductive rights in North America. This is all very interesting but at this point in the final third of the play, drama gives way to lecturing. This is rather too bad since previously Cairns had had a way of making lectures dramatic, as when her boyfriend’s Pakistani friend’s girlfriend lets Cairns know how extraordinarily privileged Cairns is to be a White woman living in Canada whereas millions of women around the world do not have the wealth, social climate or health care system even to consider abortion.

In fact, though Cairns’s play is focussed on her abortion, its underlying narrative is that of a 30-year-old woman moving from ignorance to knowledge. She comes to learn about her self, her own body, her favoured place in the world because of her race and where she lives and finally gains a greater understanding of what is most important in life. Cairns tells us her play has no neat ending because life is a process. Through trying to find the origin of her story, Cairns has discovered that the story of one woman’s abortion is the product of innumerable historical, social, political and economic forces.

Hypothetical Baby is illuminating as well as humorous. As an audience in Canada we have to realize how incredibly privileged we are to see such a play performed. Cairns notes that progress is not linear. Recently, we have found that this is all too evident. The US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade on June 24, 2022. Now 19 US states have banned or limited access to abortion. In Canada, abortion is a legal health care service that is free with proof of provincial health care. Cairns doesn’t emphasize enough how fortunate she is to have had a medical instead of a surgical abortion. The abortion pill has been available in Canada since 2017. Currently it is banned in 14 US states. One of the key lessons audiences should take away form Hypothetical Baby is that we should not take the rights and privileges we have in Canada for granted.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Rachel Cairns as Rachel. © Dahlia Katz.

For tickets visit: www.factorytheatre.ca.