Playwright Alice Eve Cohen Asks Us to Reconsider What We Think We Know about Pregnancy and Motherhoo
“What makes a mother real?” asks writer and performer Alice Eve Cohen in her newly-published play, What I Thought I Knew. In 1999, Cohen experienced the most improbably and bizarrely complicated pregnancy imaginable. Her play is a crystallization of her stranger-than-fiction pregnancy memoir that was acclaimed at its 2009 publication with book-of-the-year awards from Salon to Oprah. Cohen’s saga touches on an amazing range of twentieth-century reproductive history and politics, from the birth defects caused by the drug diethylstilbestrol (DES) prescribed to pregnant women in the 1950s, to surgical approaches to intersex, to “wrongful life” litigation. Through it all, she never lets her audience rest on their assumptions about motherhood…
#DES #postpartumdepression #GeorgeTiller #adoption #intensivemothering #INFERTILITY #theater #AliceEveCohen #intersex #wrongfullifelitigation