I saw Mitzi’s Abortion at ACT Theatre yesterday, and I really liked it. Speaking strictly on aesthetic grounds, it’s the most affecting play I’ve seen so far this year. Sharia Pierce, as Mitzi, is a perfect little rubbery being—completely unmoved by the theological, political, and medical discussions going on around her, more or less accurately pigeonholed by the PowerPoint lecture describing a woman’s psychological responses as she progresses through a pregnancy. She’s not exactly my kind of woman, but I take a weird pleasure in stubborn, anti-intellectual female characters (see Xavière, in Simone de Beauvoir’s She Came to Stay), and Pierce is an unmistakable physical presence.

I have some quarrels with the play in its current incarnation—please, for the love of God, cut the third cell-phone interruption regarding wood chips. It’s waaaaay too much. And why does Aquinas, who is supposedly so sympathetic to Mitzi’s plight, disappear at her hour of need, only to reappear to grant her forgiveness in the eyes of the Catholic Church? There’s some bizarre implicit judgment going on there.

But overall, Mitzi’s Abortion is really funny, vivid, and deeply sad.

Why deeply sad? Because, despite the apparent neutrality (even universality) of the title, Mitzi’s Abortion is not about an unwanted pregnancy—at least at first. In spite of the fact that the vast majority of abortions are performed during the first trimester, playwright Elizabeth Heffron decided to approach the issue from the most extreme case imaginable. Mitzi’s fetus is anencephalic—it has no skull and no brain and will not survive more than a few days outside of the uterus. However, since it has a brain stem, it also will not spontaneously abort. It may continue to grow physically up to a year inside her body. Horrific, right? By the time this condition is discovered, it’s already past the point where her physician will even do a dilation-and-extraction (or “partial-birth abortion,” if you’re into vague and judgmental euphemisms). Mitzi has to be instillated, or injected with a saline solution which will simultaneously kill the fetus and instigate labor.

What I find most interesting about this approach (which is inseparable from the structure of the play as a whole) is that it precisely parallels Hillary Clinton’s suggestion that abortion be acknowledged as a “sad, even tragic choice for many, many women.” (My 2005 essay dissecting this rhetorical about-face is available here.) I’m not suggesting that Heffron had this tactic in mind, or even that her work should be considered primarily in a political light, but thinking about it from that perspective really gives me pause.

Let’s consider the context. There are very, very few plays being written right now that deal with abortion, whether as a tragic subject or a casual one. (Similarly, there are very few movies that deal with abortion, very few television shows that deal with abortion—I would even venture to suggest that there aren’t a whole lot of novels dealing with the subject in a non-peripheral manner.) If you’re going to write one of those very, very few plays, and you profess as a goal “I want to be able to say [the word abortion] out loud and not wait for a pipe bomb in my mailbox” (“From the Playwright,” in the Mitzi’s Abortion program), is the best strategy really to cloak the subject in solemnity, tragedy, grief, and even horror? No woman is going to be any closer to being able to bring up her abortion in casual conversation because of this play. Or a million plays like it.

I do not deny that this strategy is effective—I think even a “except in cases of incest, rape, or to save the life of a mother” pro-lifer would be able to see this play and be moved. I mean, seriously. I think it might even change a few minds. (This is a shocking accomplishment.) But at what cost?