‘Choice’ Review: Winnie Holzman’s Play Deals With Life’s Big Decisions — Including Abortion
Making life-altering decisions is no small matter, especially for the characters in “Choice,” Winnie Holzman’s provocative but imperfect play, which just completed a run at Princeton’s McCarter Theatre Center.
At the center of “Choice” is Zipporah “Zippy” Zunder (Ilana Levine), a journalist in her late 50s who is writing a Vanity Fair article about a famous film producer who believes that the souls of the aborted are re-incarnated into children who are born months later. This fictionalized belief is called “CLAF,” an acronym for “Children Lost and Found,” and the motif of endings and renewals is woven through every part of the play — to a fault.
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Zippy’s assignment causes her to revisit her own decision to have an abortion early in her career, one she does not regret but one that opens her to the need to understand the difficult — and different — experiences of those choices.
That openness is anathema to her best friend Erica (Kate A. Mulligan), who fears Zippy’s piece will only fuel the anti-choice movement. (The play is set during the last year in the Trump administration, as the Supreme Court’s makeup turned further rightward.)
Avoiding polemics, Holzman, the writer of “My So-Called Life” and Broadway’s “Wicked” (as well as its upcoming movie adaptation), takes on the polarizing topic of abortion in a way that explores, in real and surreal ways, the various complexities and perspectives around the issue — and its personal, political and spiritual ramifications — with empathy and a welcome dose of humor.
But this revised work (first presented at Boston’s Huntington Theatre Company in 2015) is often cumbersome and confusing, becoming a pile-up of existential themes, credibility issues and some heavy-handed symbolism. The play would benefit from editing, sharpening, and perhaps recasting as it goes forward.
Zippy is not the only character examining their life’s journey. There’s her much-older, renowned writer husband Clark Plumly (Dakin Matthews, marvelously droll), who is writing his memoir and well aware of his own final chapters. (“You don’t get to finish everything,” he says when his wife urges him to write on.)
Her twentysomething daughter Zoe (Caitlin Kinnunen) is in a kind of limbo, living at home and unsure of her future or her sexual identity. “I repel all genders equally,” she quips, one of Holzman’s many bright lines of dialogue.
Adding to the play’s metaphysics are strange scratchings that only Zippy seems to hear; a mysterious cat that she confronts; portals that are curiously unclosed; and a reimagined visit to the health clinic where Zippy had her procedure. For good measure, there are plenty of literary and philosophical references to D.H. Lawrence, Kierkegaard and the Tibetan Book of the Dead.
Adding a further, surreal element to the story is the arrival of Hunter Rush (Jake Cannavale), a young writer who desperately seeks to be Zippy’s research assistant — and who is about the same age of the child she would have born.
The character of Erica’s nice-guy but soon-jettisoned boyfriend Mark (Barzin Akhavan) adds little to the dynamic other than to offer a sweet counter to Erica’s astringency. Akhavan returns, however, as “The Other Mark,” the man who impregnated Zippy many years ago, whom Zippy seeks out when she decides to insert her personal experience into the feature story.
But in this production, staged by the theater’s artistic director Sarah Rasmussen, the calibrations are off in a script that needs focus, especially in sorting out the play’s ambiguities, symbols and cosmic musings, which threaten to overwhelm the story.
Levine (Broadway’s “You’re a Good Man Charlie Brown”) plays Zippy not so much as smart and sophisticated but as chirpy and naive, qualities one would not associate with a successful investigative journalist. Cannavale is a compelling presence, but as written the character isn’t intriguing so much as disturbing, if not creepy. Kinnunen (“The Prom”) is also strong in an underwritten part. A flirtation with Hunter is awkward, and a reference to Zoe’s previous suicide attempt feels like more of a careless aside than a significant event.
Hovering over the play — and beyond the narrative’s 2020 setting — is the audience’s present-day awareness of the end of Roe V. Wade and the increasing threats to reproductive freedom. In “Choice,” flaws and all, Holtzman seeks to address the personal above the political with something that searches for grace, with choice framed not as a conclusion but a continuation. After all, as Zippy says, “It’s not nothing.”
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