A conversation between Abbe Tanenbaum, author of the play Committed Citizen, and Abby Minor, ACP Board Member
This is the first post in ACP’s new 2021 blog series featuring conversations with recent grant partners. We started this series, which is facilitated by ACP Board Member Abby Minor, in order to highlight some of the many questions, tensions, and insights that animate the complex work of destigmatizing abortion. We also launched this series for the simple reason that here at ACP, we’re always up for abortion conversations!
At the end of January I had a chance to talk with one of ACP’s most recent grant partners, Abbe Tanenbaum. Abbe received a 2020 ACP grant to produce Committed Citizen, a play she wrote after she came across a set of powerful letters written decades ago by women seeking abortions. The play, which explores the relationship between an eccentric older feminist activist and the young actress she hires to clean up her wildly disorganized apartment, was sparked by Abbe’s own experiences. Committed Citizen, which enjoyed a digital performance on September 13th, 2020, reflects on intergenerational feminism and the legacy of older feminisms.
I talked with Abbe, who lives in Northern Ireland, from my home in Pennsylvania. We had a long trans-Atlantic conversation over Zoom, touching on subjects such as being an artist, the different ways people come to abortion destigmatizing work, and why we love hearing abortion stories. Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.
AM: How did the work of addressing abortion stigma come into your life?
AT: My play, Committed Citizen, is based on real-life letters written by women seeking abortions in the 1970s. These letters, which came from all over the east coast, came into my life through someone I met while I was living in New York, pursuing a career as an actress and working as a personal organizer. One of my clients had worked as a counselor at an underground clinic in the 70s. This person had been very involved in the feminist movement, and she sparked my interest—in many ways she showed me different ways of thinking. She would mention a name, like Flo Kennedy, and that would launch me into research and reading—so I was learning through conversations. And then when she showed me these letters, they stayed in my mind. They stuck with me and eventually propelled me into writing this play. They gave me permission to move from being an interpretive artist to being a creative artist—they launched me from being an actress to a playwright.
AM: So for you, the work of destigmatizing abortion and coming into your identity as a playwright have been synonymous. I wonder if the way you’ve talked or thought about abortion has changed over the course of this project?
AT: I’ve always been pro-choice, but doing the research has helped me to be more specific as to why—I’ve become better at defending my position. Initially I would shy away from telling people this was a play about abortion—but I realized I wanted to try to normalize it even in the tiniest way that I could. So I try to talk about abortion in a way that’s normal, in everyday conversation—like how I talk about what I had for lunch, or my period. Even if it makes other people feel uncomfortable, I’m learning not to project that discomfort back to them. Even if I myself am feeling uncomfortable, I try not to project that. I’m going to fake it until I don’t have to fake it anymore!
“I realized I wanted to try to normalize it
even in the tiniest way that I could.”
AM: I get that! I was writing a book about abortion for years, and I often struggled when people asked me what I was writing about. Do I tell them? Do I not tell them? Sometimes I felt bad for not being more comfortable, even after years of doing this work. But I like what you’re saying—we aren’t always going to feel totally at ease, for obvious reasons. We might have to fake it, and that’s okay—even if we’re faking it, projecting comfort around abortion itself is a form of destigmatizing. That’s work we are doing, even in just one small exchange. I’m also wondering, aside from conversations about the play, how did you approach talking about abortion within the play? What kind of research did you do to figure out how you wanted to talk about abortion?
AT: I sought out documentation of people talking about abortion in the most private way they could—so, not public testaments, but videos where people are just talking to the camera, in public solitude. I read books like The Choices We Made and Judith Arcana’s Hello. This is Jane. I also did research to help me understand New York City in the 70s and the contours of the feminist movment at that time, including the role of Black women in the feminist movement. I read Assata Shakur’s Assata: An Autobiography, Ain’t I a Woman by bell hooks, and Abortion Rap, which documents the NYC trial that tried to nullify the state’s 1828 abortion law. That trial was one of the first that actually allowed women who had abortions to be expert witnesses as opposed to just doctors and nuns. Flo Kennedy was one of the lawyers, so I also read her autobiography, Color Me Flo. Once you start talking about abortion people start sending you articles. And at one point there had been a part in the play that took place on an anti-abortion picket line, so I also read anti-choice blogs. I wanted to know, how do these people talk about their perspectives?
AM: Can you tell me about a moment you felt really proud of your work during this project?
AT: I felt really proud when I was Venmo-ing all the participants their payment, when I was paying all the actors and artists who worked on it with me. I felt really proud I could create that space with them, especially during COVID. It felt good to say, ‘your art and your voice were important.’ So often artists are asked to do things for free—it felt really great to be able to do that for them, thanks to the grant from ACP.
AM: If you could wave a magic wand, what’s one aspect of normative abortion conversations or rhetoric you’d change? Is there a word or concept associated with abortion you’d delete from the conversation if you could?
AT: Hmm, I think—I think what I most hate is blame. I hate things like, ‘you put yourself in this mess.’ I would love for abortion to be treated with more compassion. We all are on our own journey, and if that’s not part of yours, then that’s not part of yours. It doesn’t have to be inherently positive or negative. It just is. I would definitely get rid of the notion that there is some ‘kind of person’ who has an abortion. Any person with a uterus can have an abortion.
AM: Could you talk about something that felt like an important discovery for you, in terms of talking about abortion and stigma?
AT: A big discovery for me was realizing that part of the stigma busting was how I was interacting with people who might not even see the show. It was not just that I got this money and got to put on the show, but that it was an opportunity for me to talk to people I wouldn’t normally talk to about abortion. It gave me a platform for that. I got the opportunity to make the conscious choice that I wasn’t going to shy away from discomfort or conflict. I still have those moments when someone asks me what the play is about and I ask myself, are you going to really tell them? more often now I tell them.
I’ve also discovered that I love hearing people’s abortion stories. It cuts through the shit so fast. It cuts through the small talk.
AM: That’s so true. It sounds like you’ve spent a lot of time sitting with other people’s stories. I’m wondering—forgive me if this is too forward—but do you have your own experience with abortion? I’m just curious, because so many people come to this work from their own experience, and it sounds like perhaps it was others’ experiences, in the form of these letters, that really led you into this. That’s interesting to me.
“I felt really proud when I was Venmo-ing all the participants their payment. It felt good to say, ‘your art and your voice were important.’”
AT: I don’t have a personal experience with abortion, and that’s something I sometimes feel self-conscious about. Often when I tell people about my play, they wind up sharing their own story with me, and it’s such a powerful thing to be trusted with. Sometimes I wish I could trust them with something as equally vulnerable and important.
AM: Well as someone who’s on the other side of that exchange sometimes, I can honestly say that the biggest gift someone can give me when I tell them about my experience is the gift of showing me they are totally okay with abortion! Like, way more than whether you have had an abortion, I am looking to see if you are deeply supportive. And I think you are making that very clear with all the work you are doing. Unfortunately there is sometimes this ‘team’ rhetoric with different reproductive experiences—people who have this experience vs. this experience. The truth is, there are a lot of different experiences you can have with a uterus, and we all have some combination of those. The most important thing, it seems to me, is honoring all those experiences, and trying to make each one as dignified as possible for each other. On that note, I wonder how you would you describe your ideal abortion conversation? What would that look like?
AT: First of all, I would definitely want somebody there that understands the language around it. I wouldn’t want to be the monitor, I would want people who have facilitated these conversations a hundred times to do it. What I love is when people—and it happened after the digital reading of the play—I love it when people feel like they can share their abortion story. I love creating a space where people feel comfortable to do that. That is the beginning. if you’re unable to talk about it, that means there is probably some shame at play. And by creating a space where people can share, we can reinforce the fact that it’s not shameful. To be able to create that space for people who maybe are carrying a little of that cultural shame, which is so understandable, maybe this can be a step in the direction of letting that go. No one feels bad for having their appendix taken out. So I think the ideal conversation, for me, is one that’s happening at all! Just to create the conditions for the conversation, that’s my goal.
AM: Yes, right--like, it’s hard to go speak our stories in front of elected officials, or petition to change the way abortion is represented at a cultural level, if we aren’t even able to tell our own stories in a safe space with trusted listeners. I have often seen folks want to jump to those other levels of addressing stigma without first doing it on the individual and communal level. I get that desire to leap right to addressing stigma at the institutional level, but my own experience tells me that’s a lot easier once you’ve had the chance to process with yourself and in safe spaces. So I think the kind of space you’re creating is really important--just bringing abortion to the table as something that can be named and talked about at all.
As you go forward, what are you still hoping to learn about fostering abortion conversations—and how are you hoping to do that learning?
AT: I’m really interested in how to foster these conversations in Northern Ireland. Doing that as an outsider and doing it in a way people feel comfortable to share, that’s the challenge. I live in a small community, and there’s a sense of there not being much privacy. I want to figure out a way that I can make the people involved feel comfortable and that there is privacy, that we can have these conversations in an intimate way, that first step, without feeling like we’re having them with the whole world. You can’t go from not ever having told anyone, to telling the world. I’ve love to watch experienced abortion conversation facilitators do their work, pick up the language they use. That’s the next step for me.
AM: How is the title of your project significant to you? What is a ‘committed citizen’?
AT: I love that Margaret Mead quote—"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world.” I think that’s true. I saw that embodied in the character of Nora [Committed Citizen’s main character], in this second wave feminist character, feeling so driven to change a culture. To get out of your house and go and march, and disrupt. If you do it alone, nothing’s going to happen, you’re just a crazy person. But if you get a group of committed people to march next to you—which is such a feminist idea, that we’re stronger as a collective, versus this masculinist idea that, ‘I’m going to be the best, I’m going to scale the mountain first.’ If we all work together, we can get to the top.
AM: Where have you felt that in your life?
AT: In theater, when you’re putting on a show—everyone is working together. When you can’t be strong, you know someone else is going to be strong for you.
AM: And what’s your dream for this play?
AT: I would love to see it fully staged, to put on a fully produced production. I would love to see it in Northern Ireland and also to tour it. In my wildest fantasy, it’s a cultural revolution.