PRO CHOICE

"The Appointment" skewers the hypocrisy of the abortion debate.

- VINSON CUNNINGHAM

It’s usually the anti-abortion activists—the sign-wavers outside clinics, the tellers of post-op horror stories—who want to show you, in great detail, what a fetus looks like. There’s something about the peach-and-hibiscus shock of flesh and blood, about the smallness of that embryonic presence: the picture is supposed to appall you into some new way of thinking and feeling about the politics of birth. It’s only right, then, that the first big laugh of the raucously pro-choice musical “The Appointment,” by the Philadelphia-based theatre collective Lightning Rod Special, directed by Eva Steinmetz at WP Theatre, is earned with a similar kind of representation.

When the curtain opens, there’s a fetus onstage, moving slowly and subtly, as if bobbing in fluid. It’s soon joined by several others. We know they’re fetuses precisely because of those images we’ve seen used as agitprop, even if we’ve strained to avoid them. The fetuses are played by members of Lightning Rod Special— Katie Gould, Jaime Maseda, Lee Minora, Brett Ashley Robinson, Scott R. Sheppard, Alice Yorke, and Danny Wilfred, all vibrating with talent and hip smarts— wearing skintight, skin-colored suits marbled with purplish-gray veins. From their tummies sprout ropelike umbilical cords.