Rachel Cairns wrote and starts in Hypothetical Baby at Factory Theatre in Toronto.DAHLIA KATZ/Supplied
- Title: Hypothetical Baby
- Written by: Rachel Cairns
- Director: Courtney Ch’ng Lancaster
- Actors: Rachel Cairns
- Company: Factory Theatre, Nightwood Theatre in association with the Howland Company
- Venue: Factory Theatre, 125 Bathurst St.
- City: Toronto
- Year: To March 8, 2025
Critic’s Pick
“I’m so excited to tell you about my abortion,” Rachel Cairns says.
And she’s not, pardon the pun, kidding.
In Hypothetical Baby, presented at Factory Theatre by Nightwood Theatre in association with the Howland Company, the multidisciplinary artist behind the award-winning podcast Aborsh movingly shares every detail of her small piece of the abortion puzzle.
At the same time, she puts her narrative within a larger context, offering a bird’s-eye view of the “existential dimensions of our reproductive lives.” The play explores the complexities of the decision to become a parent in a country facing an economic, environmental and health care crisis, all of which makes life increasingly hostile to people who dare to want children, careers and some sense of financial independence.
Searingly honest and filled with introspection, information and humour, Cairns’s autobiographical monologue directed by Courtney Ch’ng Lancaster is an enlightening journey through a difficult topic.
In 2019, Cairns’s birth control, an IUD effective in more than 99 per cent of users, failed. A relatively successful actor who still had to shine shoes in the tunnels of Toronto’s PATH to make rent, Cairns knew she wanted children at some point, but the timing wasn’t right in her long-term but unstable relationship.
She also quickly realized that she knew very little about abortion access or mechanics, or the physical and emotional toll of pregnancy. Even with familial and political support, the process was full of barriers and difficulties, making what should have been a simple decision into a philosophical whirlwind around what “My Body, My Choice” really means.
Cairns thoughtfully presents the idea of choice as a paradox. On one hand, she says, so many avenues seem to lie open to us in the modern world that we suffer from decision paralysis, a point she illuminates via a heartbreaking story about poet Sylvia Plath. On the other hand, choice implies a degree of control over our circumstances that Cairns argues we do not have, making many of our perceived options illusory in a practical sense.
Cairns reflects this fear of the absence of self-determination in her show’s structure. From the beginning, the playwright attempts to control this staged version of her experience, with limited success. A modest platform and wall by production designer Julia Howman create Cairns’s small refuge in the middle of a far larger stage. She sits in a lone chair to process the positive pregnancy test, but then leaps up into a nearly out-of-body moment, dissociating from an upsetting conversation with an unsympathetic doctor to gleefully discuss the dramatic possibilities of the conflict.
Another way Cairns found to handle the changes happening to her body without her consent was to become informed. Her main pregnancy craving was for context, which is supplied in the form of Howman’s elegant projections of frantic Google searches, pages from scientific journals and blurred YouTube clips that seamlessly interact with Cairns’s narrative. Despite some glancing comparisons to our southern neighbours, the intel is refreshingly Canadian, which may make viewers reflect on how much our knowledge of abortion rights is mistakenly shaped by a barrage of information from the U.S.
Cairns’s struggle to choose the point in her life where the monologue’s story begins further represents her search for control. Does the play begin at the moment of conception? Does it begin at the start of her relationship with her clingy but uncommunicative boyfriend? Or was it with her choice to become an actor, a notoriously capricious career with limited remuneration? Perhaps it was when, as a teen, she finally saw her mother cry from the stress of single parenthood.
This recurring metaphor of starting and restarting makes the story cascade like waves, and while it’s less effective when presented as a search for an ending, it successfully simulates a torrent of societal pressures.
A skilled performer, Cairns fluidly switches between characters, subtly portraying her boyfriend’s long-distance sullenness, a shoeshine client’s well-meaning but clueless advice and her realist mother’s simultaneous steadfast support of her abortion and quietly devastating judgment of her career.
Particularly engaging is an imagined debate with a perky, quirky young anti-abortion activist she encounters online who reminds Cairns of herself, only more polished and full of glib, silken lines about preborn humans and responsibility. Becoming obsessed with her alternate universe version, Cairns flashes between embodying her own increasingly tired and frustrated visage and the poise of her imagined opponent, small alterations in body language and Howman’s blue lighting producing an astonishing makeover.
Cairns’s acute self-awareness and self-deprecating humour ensures that any sense of “poor me” is mitigated by acknowledgments of her relative privilege and the perspectives of friends and family. You might even wish that she’d allowed herself to be a bit more messy and selfish; while analyzing the situation from every intersectional angle is valuable, some passages that meander from the heart of her experience feel more like a pre-emptive apology for not being perfect representation.
Cairns may be excited to talk about her abortion, but her complex and stirring story explores more than just a single choice, while also firmly centring the political on the personal.
While acknowledging the truthful advice that there is “never a perfect time” to have children, she wonders why we’ve made parenthood seem like an unattainable luxury.
If there really is no “perfect” time, she asks, could there at least be a possible one?
In the interest of consistency across all critics’ reviews, The Globe has eliminated its star-rating system in film and theatre to align with coverage of music, books, visual arts and dance. Instead, works of excellence will be noted with a critic’s pick designation across all coverage. (Television reviews, typically based on an incomplete season, are exempt.)
