- MOM BABY GOD “You all have the power to abstain from sexual intercourse, okay? We’re all abstaining from sexual intercourse as we speak. Raise your hand if you’re not abstaining from sexual intercourse right now."
Last January, Boston-based actor, writer, and activist Madeline Burrows took a trip to Washington, DC, to go undercover behind pro-life/anti-choice lines. "I shaved my legs," she says, "put on some lip gloss, and registered for the Students for Life of America National Conference." The experience became the high-water mark of a two-year project to learn what life is like for young women in conservative Christian America.
The result is MOM BABY GOD, an effervescently depressing solo show that is equal parts ethnography and agitprop about the tweens, teens, and twentysomethings who, Burrows explained in an e-mail, are "pressured in two impossible directions in a culture that tells girls and women to 'be sexy' (for boys) but 'don't have sex' (until it is heterosexual sex with your husband)." Theirs is a paradoxical world, both peppy and grim, where the aesthetics are glitter and cupcakes, but the talk is of warfare and slaughter. "Keep a smile on your face," one of the characters in MOM BABY GOD says, "even when you're talking about bloody things."
