When playwright/performer Joyful Raven premiered this solo show in 2022, it was fresh off the heels of the SCOTUS overturning Roe v. Wade, setting back bodily autonomy laws nearly 50 years. It wasn’t just that the show revolved around abortion, but abortion from the point-of-view of someone who wants more than anything to have a child of her own. Two years later and Raven’s show returns on the eve of a presidential election in which the two most prominent candidates are a woman who vows to protect abortion access and an accused rapist running on a platform based on a fascist manifesto.
Then again, if there’s one thing to truly be gleaned from Breed or Bust (through November 2 at The Marsh SF), it’s that procreation plans rarely go, well, as planned. It’s no coincidence that even before the show begins, the audience is treated to a playlist that includes Outkast’s unplanned pregnancy banger “Ms. Jackson” and Stevie Wonder’s tribute to his then-baby daughter “Isn’t She Lovely?”. You could argue that the playlist sends mixed messages, but the show proper will clarify just how on-brand those choices are.
With many jokes having been made about what little difference (if any) there is between stand-up and solo shows, it also makes sense that the opening night show was preceded by a stand-up set by Holly Shaw, who riffed on being a single mom of a collegiate son, dating pervy dudes (who move her hand “like [she’s] Helen Keller” to try and cop a feel), and the confounding nature of tailgating at sporting events.
We came then to Raven’s show, the story of the Bay Area-born child of hippies who was so convinced that she’d be a mother one day that she even became a nanny in her twenties. She and lifelong BFF Naomi both live it up as they wait for the inevitable to happen. Still, that doesn’t begin to prepare Joyful for the train wreck of a relationship in which she finds herself with James. He’s great in bed, but awful at life—a combination that inevitably results in Joyful becoming pregnant.
Though all the above has been explained as hilariously as Raven can make it, the decision to eventually have an abortion is treated as an event as devastating as it is necessary. Despite the fact that she’s given an official due date of April 1, she finds herself full of turmoil over whether she should terminate a pregnancy with a guy who ghosted her after learning the news. She even finds herself having a conversation with her would-be child, as if to ask their permission for the toughest decision she’s ever had to make. “And then it was done,” she says.
Not quite. No, this was just the first chapter of Raven’s tale that seems to find Naomi having the kids Raven never does, of Raven enrolling in UC Davis for a theatre degree, and getting an IUD that seems to coincide with her reuniting with James. All the while, Joyful never loses her desire to become a mother. She even openly ponders the idea of getting knocked up just for the hell of it when James begins withholding sex from her because she was texted by a former one-night stand. The thing is, neither her best-laid plans nor her expecting the unexpected prepare her for all the curveballs of life she finds thrown at her.
A performer can get far by knowing their audience and Raven certainly benefits from the crowd that showed up for this opening night. In addition to there being enough theatre geeks in the audience to get Raven’s Spring Awakening comparisons (she was cast in the show in school), there were also more than enough women in the audience to relate to her battles with toxic masculinity. She’ll frequently set up a joke and intentionally leave the punchline silent, one of which a particular woman was happy to finish on opening night. Our host also joked that she’d performed the show six months prior with a friend in the audience with a date. Said date was so struck by the show that he apparently vowed to get a vasectomy afterward. (Raven offered “back-alley vasectomies” to whomever else felt so determined after the show.)
It’s to Raven’s heartbreaking credit that even after two years, she conveys each sorrowful and hilarious moment as if it were fresh. She knows the importance of remounting the show just ahead of the election (she’s only done minor updates to make a few timely references), but it’s clear her purpose isn’t simply to sway one’s mind in regards to policy. Rather, her goal is to put a specific face on the very sort of person who’s forced to make the decision of whether to keep or terminate a pregnancy. And her annoyance doesn’t just go to shitty exes, but also to a system that gives so little credence to sexual education that even the most basic prevention measures are overlooked because they aren’t even known. She quips, “If academia spent less time on post-Structuralism and more time on the ‘clitocracy’…”
Speaking of prevention measures: besides myself, there were maybe two others masked in the opening night crowd. Fortunately, my seat was next to one of the standing air purifiers around The Marsh, which made me feel doubly-safe with my own MedifyAir MA-10 running next to me. Over the course of the hourlong, intermission-free show, the CO² readings on my Aranet4 peaked around 1,183ppm by the final bow.
Whether or not Joyful Raven’s show has changed anyone’s mind, or will by Election Day, isn’t something that can be gauged easily (save for the dude who got a vasectomy). What can be said is that it’s an illuminating tragi-comic memoir of someone for whom reproductive rights are more than a political slogan. One would think that being a woman who wants to get pregnant would make her path easy to tread. She’ll be the first to tell you that if you believe that, the joke’s on you.
BREED OR BUST runs through November 2nd at The Marsh-SF. Tickets and further info here.
