 Thank you everyone for going with us. This feels like a really good space for us to continue on with the studio visit. The next part of this is Rachel and I invited Rachel to think about who she would want to invite as a critical respondent, as someone who engages with the work from another angle, and she was so excited to invite Julia Pelsonthall. It's been a real pleasure watching. I only got to partake in the early conversation, but I'm really excited to welcome Julia to the stage and she's going to share some thoughts with us please. I'm a nervous public speaker, something to know, and this is a very large theater. So I am a writer for Vogue, mostly for Vogue site, and I write mostly about more pop cultural things, and I don't write a lot about theaters, so when Rachel asked me to do this, I said sure, but to explain that, that would be sort of the angle that I would be coming from. So that's my fair warning to you guys. So when I agreed to write about the bumps, I began thinking in earnest about the cultural territory that pregnancy currently occupies. And on the one hand, we've come a very long way since the days when Lucille Ball wasn't permitted by CBS Brass to utter the word pregnant on Isle of Lucy, though she in her own way broke ground by writing her second pregnancy into the plotline of her show. On the other hand, we haven't come so far at all. We live in an age in which long held norms of what constitutes appropriate pregnant behavior are being renegotiated, and in some cases radically offended, and others simply monitored more closely and more broadly than ever before. In 2015, the comedian Allie Wong jumped from the B-less to the A-less when she filmed an exceptionally filthy stand-up special for Netflix at seven and a half months pregnant. Last spring, Serena Williams won the Australian Open while secretly in the first trimester of her pregnancy. Last winter, Beyonce, at the time pregnant with twins, performed at the Grammys for a stretch wearing only a bikini, fashioning herself as a sort of her fertility goddess. And some saw that less as a straight up performance than as a commentary on the performance itself, or rather on the expectations society places on pregnant women to be constantly enacting ideals of motherhood. The author to Amanda Ngozi Adichie took a different tack on the same matter when in an interview with The Financial Times last year, she slightly revealed a baby whose existence the world had never quite clocked. I just feel like we live in an age when women are supposed to perform pregnancy, Adichie explained of her choice to keep a very low profile. We don't expect fathers to perform fatherhood. In her memoir, The Argonauts, which Rachel made me read before giving this speech, Maggie Nelson put it like this, it's humdrum but relentless the obsession with who's pregnant and who's showing and whose life is transforming you to the imminent arrival of the all-miraculous, all coveted baby, all of which clips in the blink of an eye into an obsession with how soon all signs of bearing the life-transforming baby can evaporate, how soon the mother's career, sex life, weight can be restored, as if nothing ever happened here at all. Consider the body shaming that Kim Kardashian received during her first pregnancy. Consider just a couple weeks ago when rumors emerged that three Kardashian-Jenner sisters were simultaneously expecting and the internet could speak of nothing else. Our celebrity pregnancy obsession is a reflection of a broader preoccupation with monitoring women's behavior, with controlling the bodies. I can't speak up here and not mention that just this week, Republicans introduced yet another bill attempting to roll back protections enshrined by Roe or Swade and just this afternoon President Trump moved to remove federal requirements that employers include birth control coverage and their health insurance plans. Over the course of a week in early September, two events transpired that struck me as significant in this conversation. First, on September 8th, the designer Zoë Lada and my deckhouse of the line, Neckhouse Lada, staged their Spring 2018 fashion show in Bushwick and among those models they sent down the runway was the artist Maya Ruth Lee, who just so happened to have been eight months pregnant at the time. Lee was not the first pregnant model to make an appearance at a fashion week. Expecting mothers had walked before for Dolce and Gabbana, Chanel, Jean-Paul Gaultier, Victoria's Secret, but there was something different here. In the past, the vision of motherhood on display felt proper, restrained, buttoned up. Ashley Good walked in a wedding gown for Chanel, Bianca Balti wore an office-ready silk sheath for Dolce and Gabbana, and even a second trimester, Rina Shaik, walking for Victoria's Secret wore something that for Victoria's Secret was quite demure. There was a sense in each of these cases that we were witnessing a coincidence of poor timing. These women had been included in spite of not because of their altered state. Not so for Lee, who was dressed in a lilac-colored cardigan dress, literally left unbuttoned around her midsection to allow her naked belly to protrude through. She appeared simultaneously like the pregnant woman that she was and like a woman who was giving birth to her own pregnant belly. This was far more radical than maternity wear. It was idiosyncratic, subjective, empowered. The fashion wasn't wearing the model. The model was hacking the fashion. The other thing, and I apologize because I'm about to spoil the movie Mother for you, but the other thing that happened about a week later is that the director Darren Aronofsky released his new movie Mother. Aronofsky's film is a mash-up of Old Testament plot lines. Creation, Cain and Abel knows Ark, folded into a merkley allegorical tale about a famous poet played by Javier Bardin and his beautiful young wife played by Jennifer Lawrence who lived together in the generically remote countryside in a rambling old house that he owns and that she has remodeled to perfection mostly so that he has a nice place to write his next collection of poetry. Things go awry when unwelcome guests arrive who turn out to be super fans of the poet and who disrupt Lawrence's insistent home-making efforts. Things go really haywire when she gets pregnant and in a wonderful term, is horrified to discover that her husband has invited hordes of the Isicca fans to take up residence in their house. Thus begins a hellish montage of destruction as the outside world intrudes on this woman-made paradise appends Lawrence's attempts at domesticity and shortly after she gets birth, speaking in the metaphors that Aronofsky favors, destroys the fruits of that labor as well. That's the film's most controversial scene. Its most progressive scene is probably the last reveal that Lawrence, the Obi-Wan baby, the whole of this universe are really just the poet's creation. Eve, even the stepford version of Eve, may fancy herself an architect of her own destiny, may imagine herself an actor in her own narrative, but in Aronofsky's vision, she's really just a literary device, an object in a man's story, the product of a business deal between God and Adam. Critics have posited many theories of mother, but most acknowledge the strangely antique and quite frankly masculine as politics that undergird the film. Man makes woman, woman makes baby. Man makes art, man's enormous ego destroys woman and baby. No space exists for female ambition, for female subjectivity. In an interview, Aronofsky explained that mother was meant to be a parable about climate change. Bardem is God, Lawrence is Mother Earth, humanity as well, humanity. Maybe. Maybe. In any case, it's clear that we're supposed to see the poet as a foil for the director, the auteur, that this film itself is the product of an enormous male ego bolstered by Paramount, which gave Aronofsky $30 million to realize his vision and is presumably meant to be part of the joke. That the film bombed both with critics and at the box office, and Aronofsky will nonetheless likely receive a blank check on Paramount or another major studio to make his next film seems like a broader cosmic joke on women. Consider that against the backdrop of a recent New Yorker story by Jessica Winter titled Why Aren't Others Worth Anything to Venture Capitalists. Winter wrote about the $700 million breast pump market long dominated by a single and perfect product and the attempts of an entrepreneur named Janica Alvarez to build a company around a more innovative offering. During fundraising, Alvarez reported that she endured comments from possible investors about her body and questions about her ability to run a startup with three young children. She was only able to raise $6.5 million and measly some in the world of venture capital. Venture Capitalists, Winter writes, do not appear to share my enthusiasm for breast pump hashtag disruption, perhaps because the industry is 93% male. What are the takeaways here? We live in a capitalist society in which it is assumed that the logic of markets will prevail, but often it does not. We live in a patriarchal society in which we assume that the way things have been done is the way they should be done and always must be done and we probably should not. Too often we fail to question who assigns value and who wrote the rules we live by, whether those rules are ones we ought to keep on obeying. Which brings me to the bumps and its radical vision. I first saw Rachel's play last summer when she invited me to a staged reading put on as a fundraiser for Planned Parenthood by a pregnant Broadway actor who's Googling around looking for something she could perform and who stumbled on this project. In some ways, that was the perfect introduction to the bumps because it demonstrates the way that a really provocative idea like this one can take on a life of its own. A lot of plays are political in their content. Rachel told me when we sat down to discuss her project a few weeks ago, but I think it's more interesting when they're structurally subversive. The bumps is both. When the play opens we see three pregnant women waiting in a waiting room. It exactly jumps to the conclusion that this must be a doctor's office because why else would three pregnant strangers be in a room together? It is not a doctor's office, of course, as you saw, and that assumption is the type of circuit that the bumps works hard to the short. First and foremost, this is a play about pregnancy written in consultation with pregnant women that reflects the anxieties and realities and joys of expectant motherhood. Zoom out a little bit and you'll see that this is a play written specifically for pregnant women to act in and in an attempt to redress a wrong, a system that essentially writes women actors out of the workforce for at the very least two trimesters of their pregnancies and in many cases for the first years of motherhood as well. Zoom out again or get your hand on the script and you'll see that this is a play not only about the experience of pregnancy but one meant to be shaped by the vagaries of being pregnant. As Rachel writes of her approach, if our rehearsals have a mantra that would sound like this, this play doesn't exist in the immutable abstract. Zoom out again and you'll see that Rachel has drawn an urgent connection between the ephemerality of live performance the very reason we might seek it out over television or film and the ephemerality of childbearing and in so doing questions why pregnancy with its built-in sense of drama wouldn't be actually the ideal backdrop for theater. Zoom out one last time and you'll realize that the Bumsoft offers a template for how we might radically renovate the structure of any industry to make it work better for women. It's probably worth mentioning that this is an idea that very much speaks to me. I'm about to turn 34 I'm facing the narrowing window of my own fertility the open question of what I will have to give up to become a mother. I'm a workaholic journalist who wonders if I can possibly balance my career with a baby. I'm the daughter of a workaholic journalist who wonders if I can improve upon the version of motherhood that my own mother was able to provide and I'm a person who's very much absorbed from our culture the fear that it may not be possible to nurture both my creative ambitions and the child what kind of messages would I have absorbed in a world that better reflected the values embedded in the bumps. Who knows, maybe my kids or at the very least your kids will be better equipped to sit. Thank you. That was wonderful and we're actually going to invite the team up to the stage. I think the actresses can join us now as well if they'd like to. We're going to take just 10 minutes to have a little conversation between everyone here. I actually want to start with I'll grab that so that you all can talk because that's who they're here to see. I'm wondering if the two of you Rachel and Julia have any questions for each other since this was a moment for you to share something with each other. I don't think she read what you wrote beforehand, right? I have a question I have. I was so moved by your personal story that you shared at the end with your really beautiful essay and something that I think happens through the bumps is that we all end up talking a lot about ourselves and where we're at and I just wonder if your own writing is that something that you always do or is that something that has been as I said the bumps as it has I think been for all of that. Yeah. So you mean do I always reflect personally? Yeah. I don't always reflect personally. This felt like an opportunity to do so but also there was an expectation that I would do so but it's a very very personal piece and we talked a lot about personal stuff when we sat down and had coffee to talk about this project but I also do try to I think one of the advantages of writing on the internet where words are not in where you have as much space as you want is that if you want to frame something in terms of your own experience there's space to do that and I think that people generally speaking respond more to that than if you try to speak from some voice from on high which I feel uncomfortable doing to begin with. I don't know if that answers that. Yeah. I'm just really great I'm really grateful for that and I think through this whole process with each of you guys you know it's not something that we were asked before in an audition but it is so meaningful that you guys have gone along with the bumps journey and like shared your vulnerabilities your hard days what does the hard day of pregnancy look like I feel like this is a project where the least amount of professional language comes into the conversation and it's so good I mean like pregnancy just is undeniably real and emotional and vulnerable and personal and so I just I was so moved to see that come through in your essay too so now you guys all have to share about it with other personal apps and that was my question for you Okay I don't have a question to heat up process one Does anyone in the audience have any questions for anyone that we're still left to have here? I'm just wondering Rachel what's behind the movement What's behind the movement? Yeah and Dina I think Do you want to answer this question Dina? I can give it a crack first So first I think Dina and I both knew that this project couldn't just be language based process Dina has very wisely been reminding me of that because I'm coming from a place of language but so when we were first designing this project we knew there ought to be a balance but those movement moments are about so the larger play does kind of ask you to think about the generations of pregnancy so you have one after playing themselves they're an unborn child in a way looking from that point and then playing your own daughters grown up so there are these interludes movement interludes where you kind of see actors as themselves and you see actors playing all of these people at the same time and these movements become kind of motifs that we play so that we are reminded of when we're in the second act of parents and then the third act yes they become connectors between all the generations it's kind of a subconscious place in the same way that we are subconsciously connected to our mothers the next generation in a way that we don't believe know act two of this piece which we this is the fifth group of bumps that we've worked with over the last two years so we've done one full full saving of it act two they are at bikinis and snorkels and goggles and head gear and they're literally they're daughters in utero and it's essentially a 15 minute dance piece of women and bikinis being amazing and so what you're seeing what we're hinting at in this over one week period what we're hinting at is what you end up seeing in act two so the idea is you might act one and be like what are they doing but a couple minutes late or wait 20 minutes and all of a sudden you go oh that's what their kids are doing in that impact moment so it's kind of like a flash forward don't reel in the context for for a half hour this is a question that I'm so excited to ask because this go around Dina is actually going through pregnancy yourself and this makes this experience so meaningful for all of us and so I want to know just how is directing felt for you this go around has it changed um yeah my mom I think is watching the live stream so she's very excited she knows terrible it's interesting we did the benefit for Planned Parenthood in August and I was pregnant also but couldn't say anything about it because of the statistic and one in four doesn't come through so I was just trying not to puke and we're cursing at all times so this time it was really special I mean I was joking the other day he came with the big girls just being able to ask questions and being part of a process in a way that I haven't been before as a director that's really important to me to be vulnerable and to ask questions and to be in a place where many questions as the actors might be and so for me it was just really exciting because we've been in this for so long and yeah it was experiencing in a new way feeling things in a new way and certain lines of just stuck out more it grows boo and watching and just like her feelings that have been in her like oh I know what that is now but I can explain and I think just in general for the recording audience that you might share with me that challenge of when you're directing something that you haven't experienced and yeah I appreciated that in your introduction you talked about your book and the projection of the feminist utopia that helped me in watching the piece hearing you talk about the piece designed utopian vision and what I would love to hear from any of you on the team is how does that project onward how does that rehearsal room, how does that way of working that seems so important to the way you make this work can you carry that into other projects have you found that you were able to do yes so I'm not an actor I want to start with that the first thing that I've acted in as an adult outside of being an elementary school play and so but as an artist a lot of my work especially as it recently has involved me being on camera and so before I started the bumps I shot a pilot for something and I was like oh god I'm like three months pregnant it's still cute now if this show gets picked up what's going to happen are they still going to want me to come back are they going to let me be on camera and be pregnant so it's interesting that you brought up Lucille Ball because I made it a point during shooting to talk about Carol Burnett being pregnant on television or maybe it was Joan Rivers being the first pregnant comedian and I made it a point to be like yeah pregnant women have been discriminated against and they can't be on TV but now they can so don't be assholes and trying to manifest this utopian ideal of being a working pregnant woman and it doesn't even have to be a part of what you're doing you just have to be pregnant because we have to show it for ourselves and our child and everyone else every single day so yes this really gave me I might be deviating from whatever you asked and this really gave me the strength and the good support system of women to see other creatives do it and show up and know that it can't be done and know that we can still be ourselves in the midst of not being ourselves at all but being whole good people so this has been fantastic and I'll conclude with this I had a friend who asked me like are you a therapy? because you got a lot going on you're doing all these things as we do as women especially to compound that with being artists and I said well my work is my therapy coming here and being able to be at work and also talk about the fact that I've got that weird tingly thing at the top and this hurts and oh my god my doctor just called me and said I'm anemic and you know that I can do all of that and still be working and still be respected and still working like that and expanding is really ideal Thank you for sharing that something that in answer to your question Andrew that I know Dean and I talk a lot about is childcare for the audience which is something that we work together before the bumps but is something that we brought on with this project and since that's happened both of us have started wondering why is that just for a project about pregnancy should that be for every single play for every single cultural activity I think every lesson that I've learned through the bumps we can't unsee similarly caring for the body caring for people's emotions there's no getting around that with the bump that has to be a part of it but I think it makes everything better starting from that starting from that point yeah I know I think yeah it connects to everything we do with theater I think it doesn't spend this project yeah I know I've carried it and it's something that I asked where I found out oh you have a child okay well are you cool do they want to come back it's a conversation that needs to happen it is a question and it's interesting both here and at this Cultural Center in Los Angeles when we mentioned it it wasn't a big deal we can figure something out I don't know I know a lot of work I don't want to pretend it doesn't but and Jennifer Chang was a director she was from the acting program at UCSD she was on a panel we did at around two of the bumps and she was saying she and her husband met and fell in love doing cultural activities and that was what they did they went and saw things together they had children they had to take turns so dates weren't happening anymore and she was the one she brought her kid and one of them wanted to color her back with childcare and the other one wanted to sit on flat so if you did but it was really interesting just even talking about the dynamic between partners I know my partner and I were talking about that we were talking about it the other day and how as cultural institutions when I see leaders in this audience what can we do to help date night keep happening I first have to say I know that my wife is watching the stream right now because she's home with our kids and I was really sad that she couldn't see this I don't know if she'd love it it's well past that any other questions? yeah I'm thinking I'm just thinking through how you are at this course of gender lineage and you told me about I don't know I don't know if it sounds like you're a three-dollar I'm wondering I'm wondering how what critiques around that how you feel that there are all those moments of rapture maybe failure creating community this space could put up what we've seen for a fact and I'm wondering where your thinking was about critiques of gender community or femininity as a gender generation visible that's a great question the question was where in the project are there critiques of Utopia or of how to do what was your exact language but like feminine utopias community say so first just a plot clarification in the first act all the characters identify very neatly in a kind of like 80s gender binary and then in the second act it's just about bodies and no definitions of gender and then in the third act which is set today you see their children all grown up and their gender identities aren't so skipped I should say but I will say that something I think a lot about with Utopias from having worked on the feminist utopia project this comes directly from an idea from James Baldwin is that Utopias are definitely a reflection of you and your dreams and our current reality you can only see so far and behind every Utopia you never arrive at Utopia because once you get there there's a new Utopian vision and so in this play in the first act you kind of see this a little bit but all of the characters have dreams and those dreams are reflections of a very capitalist society and I think we take those dreams seriously but also it's much easier to see in the first act how flawed those dreams are you know they they want property they want they want families they want nuclear families they want financials you know the idea of having a big like being affiliated with a big company and being able to move to these dreams that I think we now know are not necessarily the dreams of the dreams to strive for so in the third act the characters also have dreams but they are structured in parallel to those dreams in the first act so my hope is that you would watch those and know that in some ways they're also not necessarily false but incomplete that they'll continue to evolve and that those aren't like objective dreams or like goals that we should all have necessarily that dreams continue to evolve I think something that this project asks is what does it mean to wait what does it mean to want something to want something of our future so your question like is the question and I hope this doesn't feel like an answer by the way to ask or not yes but I hope that Bums doesn't feel like an answer but it's like engaging with that question yeah I feel like that's actually a really great place to wrap things up I want to thank you all I feel really honored that you took tonight to bring this project to share a moment of it to situate it for us to give you your critical thoughts and all of you for joining us so thank you so much there's no graceful way to segue from such thoughtful beauty to what I'm about to say but we have to have a closing night party to this festival and it just happens to be at a virtual reality bar an arcade right around the corner called VR World so I'm sorry I can't even believe I did that so we want you all after you take a moment to talk to each other to talk to the artists to just grab your things and you're going to join us around the corner at VR World it's on 34th street and there we're going to celebrate this festival these three days that have been such a joy so I hope we'll see you there and again thank you to the artists for closing us out so long and great