Interview: Rachel Cairns of HYPOTHETICAL BABY at Factory Theatre

"My Body, My Choice," as the slogan goes. But how many factors go into that choice?

After actor and playwright Rachel Cairns had an abortion in 2019, she found that the choice of how and when to become a parent was infinitely complex, bleeding into every facet of life. In her autobiographical play HYPOTHETICAL BABY, she "grapples with the personal and societal factors that shape our reproductive lives and the intricate relationship between choice, change, and loss."

Cairns, who also hosts the award-winning podcast Aborsh, brings the show, a Nightwood Theatre production in association with The Howland Company, to Factory Theatre this week after a successful 2024 run at Tarragon.

BroadwayWorld spoke with Cairns about the goals behind telling her story, finding humour in a seriously complex subject, and the play's uniquely Canadian lens.

BWW: What is the premise of HYPOTHETICAL BABY and why did you choose to tell your story theatrically?

CAIRNS: It's an exploration of all of the many practical and existential considerations when you're deciding to become a parent. Or not. I wish I had a better answer for why I decided to tell it other than because I wanted to.

BWW: That's a good answer. That's why most art exists.

CAIRNS: I've been acting in theater for my entire professional life, but I've never felt called to write anything for the theater. I've always made short films and web series and all of that work is pretty autobiographical. It's still definitely narrative driven. It's not documentary or anything like that, but I definitely have the memoirist bug. It's the way I connect best with narrative, both as somebody who expresses it and also as a consumer. I love when people tell me what happened to them. 

In the play itself, it's very self-referential. When I got pregnant, I realized, oh shit, I actually don't know how to get an abortion, I guess you just go to your doctor and get an abortion.
You can go to your doctor and just get an abortion. My doctor wasn't going to help me get one though. And that conversation was very not what I was expecting, certainly in downtown Toronto. And while half of me was enraged that I was dealing with someone else's judgments and inappropriate questions, and another part of me was scared because I thought, this guy's not going to actually help me figure out how to get this thing, the writer brain in me was lighting up and being like, ooh, conflict. Ooh, great dialogue. That kicked off the the journey in terms of my own personal story, what ended up becoming the play and those scenes from my life just continued to present themselves to me throughout my own personal experience. I ended up writing them down, stringing them together and turning them into this play.

BWW: A lot of great theater and art involve questions that don't have an easy yes or no answer, even if a yes or no decision has to be made. That plays into the decision that you were making, how multifaceted it is. As women who are interested in reproductive rights and reproductive justice, we think that it is a yes or no answer. And if you choose an abortion, you're making the right choice for you. But that doesn't mean that it doesn't come with a greater complexity than that.

CAIRNS: You just cut to the heart of what I hope people take away from the show.

BWW: Tell us about that complexity at the heart of your play.

CAIRNS: I liked the duality, in terms of, again, my own experience and recognizing that it was something that I wanted to explore creatively and write and share about. That duality being that this is simultaneously not a big deal--the choice to have an abortion, my birth control failed. I decided not to be pregnant. Like in that way, it didn't even feel like a choice. I was just opting for my natural state. And my partner was on the same page as me.

I come from a progressive, supportive family. There was no real drama or high stakes around my personal decision or the logistics of accessing it. And yet it was a decision that was in conversation with how much money I was making, my professional trajectory, the status of my relationship, if I wanted to build a future with that person, my spiritual beliefs, where I wanted to physically be on the planet. It intersected with so many huge things that I was reckoning with as a person in my life and trying to figure out what my course was going to be.

BWW: And so, simultaneously, it's not a big deal, and it's actually kind of a huge deal and connected to many more things than just a simple question of bodily autonomy.

CAIRNS: Yeah, absolutely. It's an enormous question because it ties into everything. It ties into health, relationships, career plans.

BWW: Many people have the thought that not now also means not ever.

CAIRNS: Yeah, totally. Where they are two completely different things. I'm very much in the "I want a kid just not under those circumstances" camp. It's not really just a show about abortion. I personally think it's a show about parenthood, even though it's a decision of not becoming a parent then and the preparations for parenthood later. But that's where I am positioned in the abortion conversation, more or less.

Let's make it easier to have kids for people who want to have kids because having kids is just increasingly so expensive and unattainable for a lot of people. It gets to be a complex, thorny conversation very quickly. While also recognizing that there's so many reasons why people need to terminate in a pregnancy and decide how many children they want to have, if they have them at all.

BWW: So I know that you also have an award-winning podcast called Aborsh. And you'd mentioned that these are two complementary versions of a story, that the abortion podcast is the journalist version and HYPOTHETICAL BABY is the diary version. Why are they both important ways for you to tell that story?

CAIRNS: I try my darnedest to, in the play, acknowledge that my story is a pinprick of a particular experience along a vast continuum. And where I can within the like 80 minutes of the show I try to bring in those intersectional ideas, frameworks, concepts, but it really is my story. Therefore, because of all of the various factors and constellation of my identity, there's limits on all the stuff I'm able to cram in there plus the time limit.

And so the podcast really allowed me to broaden the lens in terms of bringing in different voices and perspectives beyond my own and do deeper dives into subjects that maybe literally are just one sentence that you quickly skate over in the play but can turn into 30 minutes of larger conversation in the podcast. And then it also has become a platform I can share with other people who want to tell their abortion stories. It's allowed me to be in conversation quite literally with a lot more voices and put stuff that didn't fit into the play somewhere else.

BWW: So would you recommend that people dive into the podcast before watching the play, or do you think that the play is a good place to start and maybe springboard into the podcast?

CAIRNS: I think both approaches will work. If you listen to the podcast first, maybe you'll have like a bit more intel and know some inside jokes. But the first season of the podcast is structured around my personal abortion narrative, which is the same construction for the play itself. So they're very familiar, and starting with the play would be totally cool too.

BWW: This isn't the first production of HYPOTHETICAL BABY. It was also performed at Tarragon Theatre.  What has the experience been like now that you've actually put it in front of an audience? What has audience response been like?

CAIRNS: I've really enjoyed it. It took a long time to get it on stage, it felt like to me. I'm also an impatient person. A version of the show was ready to go in like 2020 and we didn't get it up until 2023. In hindsight, I'm grateful because the script did evolve and I'm very happy with where it exists now. And 2020 was not a good time to be putting anything on stage. By the time we got it on stage in 2023, it felt like it was ready because Courtney [director Courtney Ch'ng Lancaster] and I had been working on it for several years. 

It's very affirming when people share their abortion stories with me, which I love receiving. But even more so people who haven't had an abortion but still deeply relate to all of the pain points in the story, such as, "I can't believe how much I have to spend just to keep a roof over my head." How  we want to have kids, but we can't stay in the city, but our jobs are in the city. Or, "the more I wait to have kids, the older my parents get." And then it also becomes this thing of elder care and childcare at the same time. All of these very complicated social crunches that Canadian society is in right now. 

I love the abortion stories and I don't want the abortion stories to stop, but when people actually realize, this is actually a piece that's talking about the social crises in our society and what it means to have a social democracy and safety net, that's really what I hope instigates conversations afterwards. 

BWW: Because obviously the personal autonomy part of it is incredibly important, but I think a lot of the time we ignore the greater economic pressures, social pressures, and pressures of all kinds. There's the pressure of the fact that, even in our more equal society, women are expected to do more of the childcare, for example. But the economic factors, especially in a city like Toronto, are enormous. It feels like you have to win the lottery before having children.

CAIRNS: Thank you. I feel that way and it makes me angry. She says, laughing. But yeah, that's a very big driving force of this particular creative expression in my life, just saying, "This is messed up! Listen to us: this is not okay!"

BWW: We're in a very interesting time politically now, as in the curse, "may you live in interesting times." A lot of what's going on in Canada is very much overshadowed by the behemoth to the south, you know, now that Trump is back in power and reproductive rights in the US are again in massive jeopardy. But at the same time, we are in Canada. And this is a Canadian story. How does the show deal with the fact that much of what a Canadian audience's feelings and experiences are, in terms of the abortion debate, so heavily informed by our knowledge of the US as opposed to what's in our own backyard?

CAIRNS: That's one of the reasons why I wanted to write about this, because once I had an abortion and coped with it by becoming a geek about all things reproductive justice, I realized just how Americanized our information is and how even the most well-intentioned people don't know the landscape in detail of what reproductive rights look like in Canada. The history of it, the current present state of it, and also the unique threats to it. What's happening in the US, we should all be horrified by. But it would take a very long time and a very mobilized and organized religious nationalist movement to recreate the particular circumstances that we're witnessing right now. Not to say that there aren't things we need to be very concerned about here, but it's more so like the defunding of healthcare and kind of more so along those lines. So there's that. 

I don't talk about the American situation in the play, other than a couple of passing references to it. When I had my actual abortion, it was at the end of 2019, and Alabama had just become the newest state to try to pass a ban pre-Roe. And so that was in my own cognizant awareness at the time when I was going to an abortion clinic in Vancouver and thinking, wow, if I was born 2,000 miles south of here, that would have been a different story. But the play is very Canadian, set in Canadian cities and dives into the context of our our history and the present moment.

The podcast really takes that and runs with it further to help disseminate information and education that I learned post- my abortion. Since sharing this work, I love it when people are like, "I didn't know that" or "I learned so much." I feel appreciative when people pick up what I'm putting down and take something away.

BWW: There will probably be some people who are maybe reluctant to see the show because they feel that it is a super heavy or divisive subject. What advice would you give to that prospective audience?

CAIRNS: Well, first of all, I called it HYPOTHETICAL BABY and also the companion project Aborsh. Personally, I feel they're names that have a bit of a wink in them, you know what I mean? So I'm trying to convey that there's jokes. It's not all heavy. And even though abortion is the inciting incident and it's someone's abortion story, it's really about working class issues that we're all up against. It's just through the lens of this huge decision about whether or not to bring new life into the world.

Whenever people are kind of like, oh, I don't want to see an abortion story, I'm kind of like, maybe examine your internalized misogyny. Why not? What's wrong with somebody on stage with a uterus talking to you about what it's like to live with one and have to exist in the world and how it informs their choices? Why is there resistance to that?

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