Much as some films are short stories, some short stories can be films, or plays, or paintings, or all three. While ‘Abortion, A Love Story’ isn’t only a play, it pulls off the unbelievable (even after you’ve read it) task of incorporating an unperformable play (which is nevertheless still a play) into the flow of the story.
Natasha and Lucy are two dissociated, anarchic students with no respect for the college systems and even less for their theatre studies classmates. Lucy reads Natasha’s email and writes a play for them both to star in. Natasha rewrites and improves it, and agrees. The play they stage celebrates and rips on everything from their respective abortions to the history of women on the Irish page and stage. It’s 77 pages long and every one of them is a bizarre and utterly sincere joy. It really is the kind of story you have to read to believe how masterfully, and naturally, it works.
Published in Show Them a Good Time by Nicole Flattery. The Stinging Fly, 2019
A Personal Anthology 