There's been a lot of talk about playwright Elizabeth Heffron's decision to use "abortion" in the title of her play. We're concerned about the use of the name "Mitzi." As you no doubt know, Mitzi reached its height of popularity in the 1960s (481st out of the top 1,000 girls' names), then fell off a cliff by the 1980s, no longer in the top 1,000 at all. What was Heffron thinking, picking such an unpopular name?

It's a shame if people are turned off by that choice, because if there was ever a play written for Seattle audiences, this is it. Besides all the references to Seattle landmarks (I-5, Burien, the local PugetCare HMO), it features a good deal of educational lecturing, input from a wide variety of perspectives, and an agonizing inability to get anything done in a timely fashion. Mitzi's Abortion just opened at ACT, and runs through August 20. Tickets range from $10 (for students and anyone under 25) to the usual $54. There's a Pay-What-You-Can matinee scheduled for Thursday, August 3, at 2pm. Our caveat is that you probably do not want to see this play if you are recently, happily pregnant yourself. Do yourself a favor, stay in and watch Ghost Whisperer instead.

In brief, 22-year-old Mitzi (played with sweetness and grit by the teensy Sharia Pierce) and her shipping-out-tomorrow soldier boyfriend Chuck (Sean Cook as a nice boy with red-state inclinations) discover that Mitzi is pregnant. Exeunt Cook to the Middle East. Enter Mitzi's family and friends, who respond to the news with poignantly comic ambivalence. Throw in St. Thomas Aquinas, a Scottish midwife named Reckless Mary, and a substantial birth defect, and you've got yourself a show. Though you might guess this is a play "about" a young woman with an unpopular name and a difficult decision to make, it's deeply concerned with a whole community's wriggling, trying to fit the square pegs of preconceptions into the unusually round holes of reality.

We're not kidding about the educational component, by the way. Besides a briefing on Thomas Aquinas and his philosophy, the play provides a psychological/physiological breakdown of a pregnancy's developments on a week-by-week basis (complete with overhead projections), and background on the historical role of midwives. Even for a play about a moral-emotional-ethical dilemma, this would be dry slogging dramatically (though as we note, Seattle audiences will lean eagerly forward in their seats to snap up data points), so Heffron's comic timing is appreciated.

Aquinas is having trouble sticking to Subway's Jared diet, the medical lecturer keeps getting cell phone calls from his wife because the wrong kind of beauty bark is being delivered, and Reckless Mary (besides proving once again that Scottish accents are comic gold) swears a blue streak (reminding us more than a bit of Deadwood's Calamity Jane when she began going on about limp dicks).

The play has a terrific pottymouth, by the way; that's our other caveat, now that we think of it. That, and sometimes the pop-culture comedy becomes too [insert laugh here]-oriented. (We're thinking of Aquinas's infatuation with CNN's Anderson Cooper).

To return to our fixation on the name Mitzi, we initially though she'd be a mall-shopping, gum-snapping airhead who learns some tough lessons. But this Mitzi is working for minimum wage, dating a military man (right away you sense he's mismatched with her), and has a few touchingly small-horizoned dreams: to learn Esperanto, study the Great Books, and finish her introduction to Catholicism. The flame of her ambition is set to Lo. When we meet her family, we understand a bit more about her expectations. Mitzi's mother Vera has lived several miles of bad road herself.

In the latter part of the play, when Mitzi is in shock after hearing that her baby has severe developmental complications, the people around her step into the spotlight, and this gives the play a persuasive, moving authenticity -- it may be Mitzi's choice, but as the play illustrates, it impinges on everyone else in some way. Kit Harris as Vera brings this home in a scene in a church, desperately begging for money to cover the abortion the U.S military won't. We could try to describe Harris's majestic, wounded performance, her rough-around-the-edges compassion and -- oh, there we started doing it. Look, Harris is fantastic.

She's in good company: Eric Ray Anderson's Aquinas is large-souled, true-to-life in his misogynistic squeamishness and fondness for the mean rather than the extreme. Even the fact that his tonsure smells slicked with Brylcreem seems true. We can't say we enjoyed having to read his Summa Theologica in college, but if Anderson had acted it out for us things might have been different. He also appears as Tim. We think Mitzi met the gay Tim and bisexual Nita (Shelley Reynolds) at her Esperanto class -- and for once sexual preference doesn't just stand for itself. It provides inflections on attitudes (Nita's toward motherhood and choice, Tim's toward the idea that parents may one day be able to choose the kind of child they want -- or don't want).

Leslie Law's Reckless Mary (whose besmoked entrances occasioned the coldest burning-at-the-stake joke we've ever heard: "What smells like bacon?") isn't afraid to play with the humor of her appearance, but she's got the steely fire of an original suffragette, too -- which makes her double-casting as the unhelpful insurance representative that much more interesting. Because she so completely sells the audience on a fate we've hopefully never seen (a human bonfire), she earns the biggest laugh of the evening with this line: "Oh...ooh...oooh!" Brilliant. (It's funnier if you see it.)

All of this works so well, we're tempted to forget that there was a director involved, ACT's Kurt Beattie, who deserves applause for making us question his existence. We love when a director is so involved with telling the story they become invisible. That's real stage magic .

Photos © 2006 Chris Bennion