The Birth of the Pill at Timeline Theatre’s New Building

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“A Timeline World Premiere History With a Side of Reckoning” - Review By: Paul Lisnek

***1/2 /4

“A Timeline World Premiere History With a Side of Reckoning”

The Birth of the Pill by Jessica Huang based on the book by Jonathan Eig, is a thoughtful, timely and ethically challenging addition to Chicago’s fall theater season. It’s an account that both honors the ingenuity behind a scientific revolution, but puts a reckoning with ethical considerations and the human price paid on the front burner. As always, it’s a story best told by Timeline whose mission is bringing history alive and always with an incredibly talented cast. 

Huang’s work can best be described as a conversation with Eig’s book; it is more than a dramatization of the original work. While she maintains the historical figures who frame the story, she shifts the real center of the story to a fictional, but clearly representative Puerto Rican woman, here called Ramona Delgado, who reads Eig’s book in 2026 and seeks some answers. Indeed, Eig (played by the wonderful Mitchell Fain) appears as a character in the show both to acknowledge and concede the human pain (a result of high-dose trials, lack of consent of the subjects and resulting side effects of the drug) he may have allowed to get overshadowed in the book. Delgado symbolizes the many trial subjects of the actual research that took place in the mid-1950s. Women are not the rabbits and rats we first see exploring this area of research; or are they? 

In short, Eig is now called to task and given that he was in the audience for opening night, he is clearly up to facing the music of both the brilliance of his work, and its limitations. The ethical issues and exploitation of these unknowing women cannot be ignored. The play transitions the book into a character driven re-telling of the history by adding a level of suffering that, with respect, the book does not completely convey.

NOTE: Full disclosure, I’m a huge fan of Jon’s body of unparalleled works. If you have not read his works on MLK, Jr. or Mohammad Ali, you should! 

Eig’s book tells us how the pill came to be; Huang’s play asks us to consider at whose expense. In other words, you can’t talk about the “how” without a full consideration of the “who.” By moving the Puerto Rican women trial participants off the sideline and to center, Huang updates history to reflect contemporary concerns about consent, and yes, colonialism just whose stories do and should count as history?

Huang’s adaptation is more than a re-telling of Eig’s account of the “four principals” (Margaret Sanger, Katharine McCormick, Gregory Pincus, and John Rock); it becomes a challenge to Eig’s initial work, candidly by adding what his narrative left out. Huang asks: To what extent will society surrender safety and ethics for the sake of progress? 

The cast, as always at Timeline, excels at portraying the important figures in this story, both the historically famous and the forgotten (even if fictional). Chicago legend Janet Ulrich Brooks perfectly portrays the complex Margaret Sanger, capturing both her vision and accompanying blind spots. Chicago treasure Mary Beth Fisher, as Chicago philanthropist Katharine McCormick, is perfect as a woman of wealth (thanks mostly to her husband’s passing) who is quite ready to leverage that wealth and its accompanying power to fund what others thought to be impossible. And Maria Victoria Martinez, as the fictional but critical Ramona Delgado, is an excellent anchor for the play’s moral center; she portrays wit and anger which not only keeps the play moving but reminds us of the cost and pain of the project. Martinez makes it personal and impactful. 

Huang’s script finds humor in the archaic restrictions on women’s rights and bodies of the early to mid 20th century. But that humor never overshadows the huge stakes that underlie the research, the required intellect and the risks taken.

This play may not find a future home on Broadway, but it is sure to see many stages in regional theater in the coming years. The history and the impact on our very existence, not to mention the incredible performances of this cast, clearly earn “The Birth of The Pill” an important place as essential must-see theater. This story does not end with the curtain call. It makes it clear that the historical issues demand an ongoing conversation which can extend to today’s issues like the power of AI. These are issues for us, and which must be passed on to future generations. Of course, this is what Timeline Theatre does best.

Running thru October 11th. Tickets at: www.TimelineTheatre.com