Displaying items by tag: Timeline

There are always two sides to every story. The writer or playwright will tell a story offering key details and scenes that move the story forward in the way that leads the audience to a message or conclusion the writer or playwright want to convey. The difficulty of any story writing, in any form, is what to include or what to exclude in your story. That is something that can be controlled. The other difficulty is trying to convey a message or point to your audience, one you want them to walk away with, chew on, think about. This difficulty is completely out of the writer’s control. Attempting to tell two sides of the same story adds a level of complexity for the writer and the audience and it’s not an easy feat to pull it off. The Birth of The Pill takes aims at just this style of storytelling, the world premiere play now playing at Timeline Theatre.

In the mid‑20th century, a radical dream begins to take shape: a simple pill that would give women full control over their reproductive futures. Championing this groundbreaking idea are feminist activist Margaret Sanger, scientist Gregory Pincus, gynecologist John Rock, and philanthropist Katharine McCormick—visionaries working under intense secrecy amid legal, scientific, and religious roadblocks. Meanwhile, in Puerto Rico, clinical trials raise ethical questions, as the lives and bodies of women like Ramona Delgado are exploited in the quest for scientific advancement. Commissioned and developed by TimeLine and based on the book by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jonathan Eig (King: A Life), the world premiere of The Birth of The Pill explores the transformative power of vision and invention, alongside the costs of pursuing both by any means necessary.

The Birth of the Pill is not a lift and shift theatre adaptation of the book of the same name. The book was written as a non-fiction historical account of how “The Pill” came to fruition. It is clinical, literal, factual. It recounts the stories of the women (Sanger and McCormick) who spearheaded the campaign to develop The Pill on behalf of women everywhere. But The Birth of The Pill, like many historical accounts, does not discuss the lives of the very real, very lost voices of the very real women whose lives were forever changed and affected by the Trials conducted in Puerto Rico. Those women’s stories was a different story altogether, one the book’s author did not aim to tell. It wasn’t an intentional dismissal of the storyline, but a concurrent one, a differing viewpoint, a second side to the story.

The cast of "The Birth of the Pill" at TimeLine Theatre Company.

The play, written by playwright Jessica Huang and directed by Sandra Marquez, aims to give that second storyline a voice, the story of the Puerto Rican women who were tested and experimented on in pursuit of this revolutionary form of birth control. The key actors in this play include Janet Ulrich Brooks as Margaret Sanger, María Victoria Martínez as Ramona Delgado, Mitchel J. Fain as Goody Pincus, and Mary Beth Fisher as Katharine McCormick. Through the narration of Ramona Delgado we are guided through history alongside Margaret Sanger from her post in the first ever Planned Parenthood in Brooklyn, NY, through the funding, research, and later development of The Pill. While well intentioned, the play takes a considerable detour from its source material at the critical point of human trials to examine that second storyline, namely, the toll and morality of human Trials. There is a poignant moment between the narrator and Sanger wherein a philosophical question is posed: Given everything you know, the impact it had, would you do anything differently? That is where this play should have ended.

The character of Delgado is a valiant attempt to write the women who trialed The Pill into the story of The Birth of the Pill but it’s a completely different perspective and is not given its due. Perhaps that was the intention of the playwright. Throughout the play, the main character, our narrator, is sidelined, dismissed, overlooked, even silenced. It’s a subtle and artistic representation of how the trial participants were treated. At a key point in the play we move away from the historical retelling of The Birth of the Pill, abruptly changing narratives. The light and humorous narration takes a sharp turnaround to become one with a modern viewpoint. It criticized the ethical and moral viewpoints of the main characters, their actions, their decisions, diverging away from the source material. Published in 2014, the book could not have accounted for or discussed the cultural, social, and moral impacts the 2020s had on the story of The Pill. I don’t believe the author was ill-intended by not accounting for the lives of the trial participants, or examining the moral and despicable acts committed in that state. The Birth of The Pill tries to rectify and almost apologize for this unintentional oversight leaving the audience with a hurried and heavy-handed message that leaves you questioning: which story was the play trying to tell? The story of the birth of the pill or that of the women who were tested on? It’s not the same story, it’s the second side to the same story.

Jonathan Eig (Mitchell J. Fain, left) and Ramona Delgado (María Victoria Martínez, right) discuss the complexities of historical narratives.

Not every play can pull off the duality of storytelling, where two differing viewpoints are given the stage. The Birth of the Pill is a story worthy of telling and seeing. It was humorous, moving, challenging, and overall compelling. It can stand on its own, with a simple yet complex ending on a philosophical dilemma. It deserves to be told on its own, without a modern, critical perspective and narrative. Then there is the different viewpoint. Another side to the same story that deserves its own time, its own space, unhurried, told in full, with all the vitriol and venom many of the acts committed on the path to progress deserve. The Birth of the Pill play inadvertently, or possibly intentionally, provided a foundation and springboard for a new story to come to light, one that given its own voice, time, and space, would only add to the power of the original story. There are two sides to every story. This particular story deserves both to be heard, just not at the same time.

The Birth of the Pill Runs through October 4, 2026, at TimeLine Theatre (5035 N. Broadway, Chicago). Set you calendar reminders and be sure to get your tickets at https://timelinetheatre.com/events/birth-pill/.

*Extended through October 11th!

TimeLine Theatre opens its 29th season with the world premiere of Hundreds and Hundreds of Stars, a deeply personal and politically charged play written by and starring Sandra Delgado. Under the careful direction of Kimberly Senior, the production folds an intimate family drama into the broader context of immigration under the Obama administration — a time when the tension between belonging and legality became a defining national paradox.

Delgado plays Clara, a woman whose life reads like a quintessential American story: educated in U.S. schools, an unemployed professional, a mother, an ex-wife paying alimony, and the devoted caretaker of her aging, recently widowed father. Yet, she carries one crucial distinction — Clara was born in Mexico. In the eyes of the government, despite her decades of living and contributing to the United States, she exists in a fragile legal limbo. It is this tension — between a lived sense of home and the precarity of status — that fuels Delgado’s heartfelt and sometimes haunting narrative.

The story unfolds in 2015, the final years of the Obama administration, when the nation’s immigration policy embodied contradictions. While Obama extended compassion through programs like DACA, his administration also deported more immigrants than any before it. It’s within that fraught atmosphere that Clara’s life unravels. As she plans an overseas trip, a bureaucratic hiccup exposes a youthful misstep from her past, threatening her livelihood, family, and even her right to remain in the country she calls home. What follows is both a bureaucratic nightmare and a spiritual reckoning, as Clara gazes skyward — toward “hundreds and hundreds of stars” — seeking guidance, belonging, and deliverance.

Senior’s direction is restrained and elegant, allowing Delgado’s writing to shimmer through the emotional and political layers of the story. The ensemble’s performances are uniformly grounded and generous. Ramón Camin gives Papi, Clara’s father, a stoic dignity — a man bound by nostalgia yet dependent on his daughter to navigate his new reality. Joshua David Thomas brings humor and restless charm to Ruben, Clara’s cousin, who juggles nursing school and low-level marijuana dealing with a kind of defiant optimism. Charlotte Arias’s Stella, Clara’s tween daughter with dreams of Paris, radiates a mix of giddy excitement at learning a new language and the tender angst of adolescence, embodying a generation eager to explore the world yet uncertain of their place within it. Charin Alvarez, playing every other woman in Clara’s orbit — from her attorney to her mother — threads the production together with wit, wisdom, and warmth.

Visually, the production achieves a graceful fluidity. Regina Garcia’s open set transforms seamlessly into apartments, offices, and memory spaces with minimal rearrangement, while Christine Binder’s lighting washes scenes in mood and emotion — from sterile bureaucratic glare to dreamlike luminescence. Willow James’s sound design and music further enrich the experience, grounding the play’s political urgency in emotional resonance.

Hundreds and Hundreds of Stars succeed because it is not a lecture on immigration policy, but a human portrait drawn from it. Delgado reminds us that behind every policy statistic — behind every deportation — lies a web of families, debts, dreams, and love stories. Clara’s story is one of endurance and faith, a meditation on identity and the invisible lines that divide “citizen” from “other.” In blending the personal and the political, TimeLine Theatre has once again illuminated how history lives — and aches — within the human heart.

Highly Recommended

When: Through November 9th

Where: Lookingglass Theatre, 163 E. Pearson Street

Running time: 90 minutes

Tickets: $40 - $95

(773)-287-8463

www.Timelinetheatre.com