Winnie Holzman. (Photo courtesy of Showtime)
Winnie Holzman has long been a keen observer of contemporary life, especially of women and girls. Even the fantastical musical theatre spectacular Wicked, to which she contributed the book as well as the two-part movie screenplay, brings attention to girls’ identity formation, social pressures, life goals, and, above all, their close friendship. The TV series she created, My So-Called Life (1994-1995), as well as the ones she wrote for (thirtysomething, Once and Again), captured the zeitgeist of their time and could plausibly be said to speak for their generation (or multiple generations).
In her new play, Choice, now at Princeton’s McCarter Theatre Center through June 2, Holzman takes on abortion in her own inimtable style. The play follows Zipporah Zunder (played by Ilana Levine), a journalist in her 50s who decides to write an article about CLAF, or “Children Lost and Found,” a phenomenon in which women claim to “discover” the souls of their aborted fetuses in people born nine months and 49 days after their abortions. Zippy’s project, which takes place in 2020 and ’21 at the height of Covid, forces her to examine her memories of and feelings about her own abortion, as she manages her relationships with her loving and aging husband, with her sharp and funny young adult daughter still living at home, and with Erica, her close friend since the age of 14. The play is funny, weird, humane, and compelling.
I recently spoke to Winnie about her return to (non-musical) theatre and her desire to bring a necessary and nuanced conversation to the stage.
STACY E. WOLF: Where did this play come from?
WINNIE HOLZMAN: It came partly from a feeling of intense frustration about the way abortion was talked about in our culture. This is way back in 2005 or so, but it’s been this way for many years: There was this incredibly polarized, brutal, unfriendly, angry way that abortion was always talked about—judgmental and in a harsh way. I thought, isn’t there another way to have a conversation about it? Then I thought, well, I’m in theatre. Isn’t that what plays are for? To be able to have a kind of a meditation on a big subject, that feels like you can hardly understand it, because it has so much mystery in it? I felt intimidated by the subject. I have an instinct that if I’m really intimidated by something, I should go towards it in terms of my writing life, because that’s where the gold is.
One day, we were in the kitchen of our house, and I told my daughter I would like to see a play that is a meditation on abortion, and she said, “If you don’t write that play, Mom, who will?” Also, the success of Wicked gave me the freedom and the responsibility to write this play.
What other ideas were key to the play from the start?
I got this idea: What if some people felt that they were being visited by a person that actually was the soul that they had decided not to give birth to? What if that was happening? I also had an idea about things entering my life—something’s in my house that I didn’t invite in, what is it? I’m scared to look. Is it going to kill me? Is it going to harm me? And I knew that idea had depth and that there was a universality to it, that it is part of our lives.
Tell me more about how the play developed.
For a long time—for years—I felt like, I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t even know what a play is! I remember feeling, what is a play nowadays? It could be anything. I felt so lost, which, as someone who has had a long career as a writer, is a familiar feeling to me.
I had a telephone book-size stack of pages I printed out that were notes on this play: thoughts, ideas, three different versions of the same scene, lists of things that I thought should be in the play. But nothing I could hand to somebody, because it was so disorganized and crazy. And then I made some choices.
I had one production of the play at the Huntington in Boston in 2015, which was a gift and a great learning experience. But that was just the beginning. This material was so personal to me; I needed distance and perspective. That production was before Covid and before the fall of Roe. The world is so different now.
Then I met Sarah Rasmussen, and she wanted to direct the play. So we would sit around a table with actor friends of mine and my family—my husband is an actor and my daughter, though not an actor, is a writer and a very good actor. She read the part of the daughter and my husband read the husband. That might sound kind of goofy or weird to people. But for me, it was a huge help. I had to distill it. Two acts became one act.
The style of the play is remarkable because it pairs snappy, funny, quick, everyday dialogue with a fantasy dream world. A taped interview morphs into a voice in Zippy’s head; an esthetician who might be a “lost child” transforms into the nurse who performed Zippy’s abortion. The present becomes the past becomes the future. When I saw the play, I was struck by how its juxtaposition of the here and now with the imaginary is a lot like everyday life. What world is this?
That is how I see the world: It’s not just one world. The mystery aspect of life is very real. Everything has a key that could open up to another realm of significance, which is what the play is about. And it’s about the mystery of connection. Why does somebody come into your life? What does that mean? What does it mean, for both of you? Is there a blessing in that? Or is it scary? What is the hidden gift that the person comes bearing? The play asks, does an ending have to be the end? Can the ending mean that something new is going to emerge?
I want to use theatre for what it can do, which is to surprise us in ways that are real and in ways that are mystical. I wanted people to be able to come to the play and take from it what it meant to them. I didn’t want to tell people what to feel, tell people what to think.
Some of the language in this play is quite poetic. The main characters are writers, and they talk about writing and about language. How and why do words matter to you?
At Princeton, I was an English major with a concentration in creative writing. So for four years, all I did was write poetry: that idea of choosing the most powerful word, and the rhythm, the sound of the words, and how they affect the emotion. That was a big part of my basic training.
If there isn’t a word for something, but you’re experiencing it, how do you express that to someone else? That’s a lot what the play is about also. If you’re experiencing a connection that doesn’t make sense or that there isn’t a word for, or that our culture doesn’t have a box to put it in, what do you do with that?
For example, Zippy hears the thing outside “scratching,” which is a scary word. Scratching isn’t knocking; scratching is softer and stranger. The idea of something scratching at your door—it’s about an animal or something wild, something untamed, something that we can’t control. The scratching at the door is a mystery. What is that?
This play features a lifelong friendship between two women, which is so rare to see onstage. How do you understand Zippy and Erica and their friendship?
If I had to name the character that Zippy reminds me of, it’s Alice in Wonderland: One minute I’m normal me, and I’m pretty sure I know who I am, and the next minute, I’m having these encounters, and they get, as as Lewis Carroll says, curiouser and curiouser. Right? And these encounters hold a meaning. I didn’t sit down to write a play that references Alice in Wonderland, but much later I realized that’s why I wanted Zippy to be in her nightgown at one point.
Erica is that friend you really look up to: You think she’s more attractive than you, she knows how to dress better than you. You think that she’s smarter than you, that she’s more talented than you. And it’s part of the attraction. I’m not saying Erica looks down on Zippy, not at all; in fact, I think Erica in her own way actually looks up to Zippy.
Many more things happen to them, and life takes so many turns. How does that friendship stay a friendship? And in some cases, it can’t. When I first wrote the play, the friendship absolutely ended. Erica walked out and she didn’t come back. I thought of it as over, even though Clark, Zippy’s husband, says, “Just because something ended doesn’t mean it’s over,” which was my way of saying, who knows what’s next for them?
When I returned to it, after Covid, after Roe v. Wade fell, it didn’t feel right to me anymore. Instantly, a group of women writers that I know—a huge group of women, television writers and screenwriters—all banded together online, and we began to work, to say: How are we going to raise money for abortion organizations? How are we going to help? It was almost instant. What I’m trying to say is that it no longer made sense to me that the friendship is over. So we brought Erica back in that final scene.
Near the end of the play, there is a powerful scene in which Zippy and Erica are heatedly discussing their friendship, and the family dog is lost. It feels true to life, especially to women’s lives: the juxtaposition of the profound and the mundane.
Yes, the tea kettle going off and the phone ringing and the dog is missing. You could have just one thing happening, but having many things made a lot of sense to me—this is just something you get better at the more you write.
Audiences have noted that the play surprised them because it’s not polemical or two-sided. We don’t hear the anti-choice perspective, but rather emotionally fraught conversations about abortion and parenthood and choices. Erica says something like, there’s no space for me both to have no regrets about having had an abortion and sometimes maybe regret at not having a child. We don’t talk about this in our culture.
She says, “I did want to do what I did.” In all of my writing, I want to write what I want to see onstage. When Stephen Schwartz and I were writing Wicked, we would ask ourselves, What do we wish it could be? He’s very committed to that idea of using ourselves. When I write for TV, I ask: What do I wish I could see on TV? I feel like the more I do that within myself, the more I have a chance to reach other people. I think we’re all much more connected in ways that we don’t notice and realize. It’s a little counterintuitive, because it sounds like if you’re getting personal, it’s just for you. But I get personal in order to reach out to others.
I don’t want to make it sound like this is a political play, because I don’t really know that it is. I guess it’s a political act to write a pro-choice play, and I have written a pro-choice play. But I feel like I wrote it in my terms. I didn’t write a polemical play. Maybe it isn’t what people would expect a pro-choice play to be. I don’t mean to prejudge people, but it might be unexpected in certain ways. It’s my version of a pro-choice play.
Stacy E. Wolf, one of America’s foremost scholars on musical theatre, is professor of theatre at Princeton, director of fellowships, and director of Princeton’s new program in music theatre.
