Jessica Huang’s “The Birth of the Pill,” which had its world premiere at the new TimeLine Theatre this past weekend, is not so much an adaptation of Jonathan Eig’s widely read history of oral contraception as a reckoning with how this Chicago-based Pulitzer Prize winner told the story.
And when she’s not taking down Eig, Huang does pretty much the same job on Margaret Sanger (Janet Ulrich Brooks), the founder of Planned Parenthood; Katharine McCormick (Mary Beth Fisher), the wealthy philanthropist and suffragist who funded most of the research for the pill; and Gregory Pincus (Mitchell J. Fain), the scientist whose work with Min Chueh Chang (Rammel Chan) and gynecologist John Rock (David Parkes) was crucial to the development of the contraceptive.
Huang’s central issue is Sanger’s well-documented (if potentially expedient) interest in eugenics, a popular theory among early 20th-century progressives, and the testing of the pill that occurred largely in low-income neighborhoods like Río Piedras in Puerto Rico. There, women anxious for contraceptive assistance were given high, experimental doses of a progesterone and estrogen combination, to the detriment of their health; indeed, three women died during trials that some revisionist historians have said were conducted without informed consent.
Thus Huang foregrounds one of these women — Ramona Delgado, as played by Maria Victoria Martinez and a mere footnote in Eig’s book — as the narrator of her story, telling the story of the pill through her eyes as she summons the other characters in a play that she controls. Even Eig makes an apologetic appearance toward the end in an unusual scene that makes you wonder whether Eig wanted to use this show as some kind of apology for his book or allowed it to proceed and hoped for such a scene to explain himself. Either way, I’ve not seen many shows more fundamentally at odds with the book they had chosen to adapt.
More Top Picks Best Natural Gas Space Heaters
Huang has a valid point of view about the elite Americans’ casual dismissal of the trial’s side effects, tainted as they surely were with at least a degree of racist disregard and elitism. It is worth noting that Planned Parenthood famously disavowed Sanger in the fervent political year of 2020 (although not without controversy). And you cannot accuse this piece of not having a strong point of view.
The problem with such surety of agenda — and I speak artistically rather than politically — is that you quickly clock where the show is going, and it ends up being a piece that pounds you over the head with the authorial point of view with inevitably diminishing returns. You find yourself anticipating the moments when the white characters say something either racist or elitist, and the show provides such moments with such predictability that you start to feel it is not being fair, especially when you add the context of the era. I think Huang does want to debate the pill’s complexity but she can’t help but stack the deck.
The show also suffers from a lot of self-aware stuff about the play itself, which eats up stage time when we really are there to learn about the history of the pill. Sandra Marquez’s production also has a lot of dead air and is a tad overplayed throughout, which is partly a reflection of the show’s peppy, humorous sensibility, but it still leaves you wanting more lived reality that you can believe.
But that means everyone here would need to more fully embrace the complexity of an innovation that changed women’s lives but also extracted its price. That’s not unusual with history’s defining moments , of course; we’re all flawed and we’ve no idea how people will view us in the future. But as I left the show this weekend, I strongly felt that Huang, most certainly a talented and impassioned writer, would have been better writing her own show about the pill. Adapting works that you have a huge problem with is a bit of a bait-and-switch.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic
Review: “The Birth of the Pill” (2.5 stars)
When: Through Oct. 4
Where: TimeLine Theatre, 5035 N. Broadway
Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes
Tickets: $65-$100 at timelinetheatre.com
More Top Picks Best Swim Fins
Theater top 10 for fall 2026: Culture wars, campus controversies and epic change