Rachel Cairns as performed her solo play Hypothetical Baby many times, with the titular baby always being quite hypothetical. Until recently! Now a mum, Cairns is doing a limited engagement of Hypothetical Baby at Here For Now Theatre. I get to ask her about that production, how her life has changed, and what’s next for Hypothetical Baby.

1. For some of my readers who might not have heard your A View from the Box – The Podcast episode, could you please (re)introduce yourself and tell us about your role with Hypothetical Baby?

Certainly! My name is Rachel Cairns, and I’m an actor and writer. This solo show is based on a true story; I had a Christmas Eve abortion in my mom’s bathroom in 2019, and then I wrote a play about it. From the very beginning of the experience—quite literally, sitting in my doctor’s office and asking, “How do I get an abortion?” and not getting a helpful answer—there were conversations, interactions and moments that, while I was living through them, made a part of my brain light up with the thought, this is a scene. In the play, I acknowledge that this is admittedly an annoying quality in many actors and writers—we move through the world with a lot of main-character energy—but these “scenes” kept happening to me again and again throughout my abortion experience. I was also struck by how much I didn’t know! By that I mean, I had always identified as a pro-choice feminist, but there was so much about abortion that having one made me realize I knew nothing about. I eventually strung all of those moments together and they became Hypothetical Baby. And beyond sharing my story, I wanted to create something about the myriad of considerations surrounding parenthood. Over the past decade, questions about how, when, and whether to have children have occupied so much real estate in conversations with my friends, my partner, my parents, my therapist, complete strangers, and in the cultural messaging directed at me as a millennial woman. And yet I rarely saw the complexity and profundity of those conversations reflected in the entertainment I loved. So this show is my contribution to eking out a little more space for just that.

2. Okay, so now there’s actually a (very real) baby! This is so exciting, and congratulations! How have you been since giving birth?

Thank you for asking! I feel extremely fortunate that I had a relatively “easy go” of pregnancy and post-partum, in large part because I was prepared and had a strong support system around me. My son is now four months old, and so far it’s been incredibly joyful. We are mutually obsessed with each other.

From this side of parenthood, I can say with even more emphatic certainty how essential it is that people bring their children into the world on their own terms. I’ve always wanted to be a parent, and I also absolutely wasn’t ready for a child when I was pregnant in 2019. And I see that tension—of wanting a baby, but not wanting a baby now or like this—as something that’s at the heart of the play. The decision to become a parent is enormous, and so much of that decision depends on whether the world around you will support you when you do.

I can also confirm that all of the anxieties and questions I had about considering parenthood were things I was right to take seriously. Becoming responsible for a new life requires a huge amount of work, preparation and help, and I’m incredibly grateful that, when the time came, I was able to build the circumstances that made it possible for me to care for a child in the way that I want to. 

3. I love how every iteration of Hypothetical Baby is a little bit different depending on social developments and your own life experiences. What has this new life change brought to the work for this production?

Thank you for noticing! For me, this feels like the latest chapter in the question the play has been asking all along—and one that I feel is increasingly defining modern adulthood—which is, how are we supposed to have kids in a world like this?

The play has always been interested in how contingent parenthood is, not just on whether you want to be one, but also whether you have the circumstances that allow you to become one. If anything, having a child has given me new, very personal evidence of this. My partner and I didn’t just “decide” to become parents. A whole constellation of circumstances made it possible: family support, financial circumstances, timing, relationships and, frankly, luck. We’ve benefited from things our families were able to give us, some of them shaped by choices our parents made even before we were born. Because the show is autobiographical, I wanted to include that new chapter—so, without spoiling the updated ending, I’ve incorporated some of what made parenthood possible for us, and how different, or even impossible, it can be without those circumstances. I would love to live in a society where children aren’t essentially luxury items, where people who want to become parents have the support they need to do it, and where choosing not to become a parent is equally respected. That’s what “reproductive choice” actually requires, not just the freedom to decide whether to have a child, but having the circumstances and support to make that decision meaningfully your own.

4. Hypothetical Baby has always been very compassionate towards mothers and motherhood. Has becoming a mother fundamentally changed any of those perspectives?

I’d say it has only reaffirmed and strengthened that outlook because now I feel the stakes of that compassion even more viscerally. And not just for mothers, but anyone involved in caregiving. 

I recently heard Abdul El-Sayed on the campaign trail say that we should create a world where we treat everyone’s children like our own. That’s something I already believed before becoming a parent, but now that I’m a mom, I’m just like… literally all of the problems in the world would be solved if we abided by this principle. 

The play actually asks the audience at the beginning and end to consider what it means to live in a world where everyone has what they need to survive. Becoming a parent has made that question feel even more urgent to me. We’re all vulnerable at different points in our lives, and I think we owe each other a world that treats human vulnerability as something we’re collectively responsible for. “There but for the grace of God go I,” you know? 

5. What can folks look forward to in this iteration of Hypothetical Baby?

This is the last time I’ll perform the play before turning it into a feature film, so there’s a real sense of a chapter coming to a close before an exciting new beginning. Theatre takes SO much work to make, and then you create this ephemeral thing that only exists for the length of a run—it’s a very “if a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, did it even happen?” kinda medium. I’ve always wanted to give this story a life beyond the stage. So I’m very happy to say that I’ve adapted Hypothetical Baby into a feature screenplay, and I’m really excited about how the story has transformed in moving from the stage to the screen. I won’t be reprising my role as Boyfriend, Mom, etc—there will be other actors playing those characters—and it’s been very enjoyable to imagine the world of the play visually. We’re heading to camera in the new year, and I’m so excited to see what it becomes. It has really turned into the abortion that just keeps on giving. But, seriously, I’m so grateful for the hunger for stories like this, and that Hypothetical Baby gets to keep finding new audiences in new forms.

I want to thank Rachel for taking the time to answer my questions. Hypothetical Baby runs at Here For Now Theatre from September 2 – 13. For more information and tickets, visit: https://www.herefornowtheatre.com/limited-engagements

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