Melissa Harris-Perry: I'm Melissa Harris-Perry and this is The Takeaway. As we await the Supreme Court's decision on the constitutionality of Mississippi's 15-week abortion ban, individual states continue to restrict access. Florida recently approved a 15-week ban in Idaho and Oklahoma are poised to pass six-week abortion bans similar to the one in Texas. These laws have already had real effects on the health of women and raised alarm about the future of reproductive justice and women's capacity for self-determination, issues that are central to a new play entitled Billboard.

Natalie Moore: My name is Natalie Moore, author of The Billboard and reporter at WBEC Chicago.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Natalie Moore's play is fictional, but it's based on real events. Events whose consequences are now playing out in statehouses and at the Supreme Court. When I sat down with Natalie to talk about Billboard, I started by asking her what she thought when she first read Professor Imani Perry's forward to the play. A forward that likened the play to some of America's greatest playwrights, including Lorraine Hansberry.

Natalie Moore: My mouth dropped. I was honored that Imani even had the time to read it. When I read that, I'm a Chicago native, of course, Lorraine Hansberry means so much to me as a Black female writer on the Southside. Her lived experience, I wouldn't say is similar to mine, but just the housing segregation that I have lived, which was different, but still within this same malheur. It took my breath away.

Melissa Harris-Perry: It was really lovely and I like a good forward. Now let's get into the text itself. This play and I read it as text rather than seeing it performed. Although I'm excited to know that it's going to be performed. When will we be able to see it on stage for the first time?

Natalie Moore: It will have its world premiere in Chicago. The dates are June 23rd through July 17th and it's being produced by 16th Street Theater.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Until then, we can read it as text, and in reading it as text, let's just dive into this and walk through it a bit. Talk to me about the real-life events, the actual billboards that inspired this play.

Natalie Moore: My daily journalism often inspires my outside writing. About 10 years ago, there was an anti-Black Woman anti-abortion Billboard that popped up in Chicago and I covered it. It didn't get a lot of traction in the city. People protested against it, but it didn't make any ripple effect. Fast forward many years later, this campaign has gone on in cities all over the country, demonizing Black women saying things like the most dangerous place for a Black child is his mother's womb. One went up in Dallas and then a Black women's health clinic in Dallas put up their own billboard, affirming abortion as healthcare.

It was controversial because it had women on the billboard smiling and I think the way we talk about abortion in this country is that this is a very somber serious matter and it's private. We've also seen in recent years, people shouting their abortion stories, trying to get rid of the stigma. That's what I believe that billboard was trying to do and so with this play, I wanted to tease out some of those themes.

Melissa Harris-Perry: You absolutely bring us into that and so much more. Actually, let's just literally go to the corner. Let's go to the corner of 59th & Halstead, which is the corner in your play where both of these billboards that are at the center of the play are displayed. Can you tell us about 59th & Halsted in Chicago?

Natalie Moore: That is in the Englewood neighborhood, which is a virtually all-Black neighborhood that has suffered from decades of disinvestment. You see that with vacant lots with bordered-up buildings. The foreclosure crisis is still haunting the neighborhood, but there are block clubs in Englewood. There are artists that are there. There are people who are trying to beautify their community. We often tend to look at Black spaces through a deficit lens, as only poverty's stricken and there's much more complexity to that.

Setting a play in Chicago, I couldn't resist putting politics in it, the Chicago way. There's a character Demetrius Drew, who is running for City Council, and he puts up one of these Anti-Black Women Anti-Abortion Billboards on that corner. There happens to be a fictional Black women's health clinic that also does reproductive work including abortion and they decide that they want to shake things up and put up their own billboard. This is a billboard that's affirming self-care. Some people thought it looked like women at brunch with bottomless mimosas.

That really bothered people even those who would have identified as pro-choice.

Melissa Harris-Perry: It's fascinating because as you point out you couldn't help putting politics in it. It's after all Chicago people sometimes miss that the windy is about the politics, not about the weather. I want to go, though to this core of this linkage that is made by the character who is running for office. This Demetrius character who makes a claim linking gentrification to abortion, to this extermination of Black communities. Is this rooted in real conversations that you have witnessed?

Natalie Moore: Yes. There are people who believe that abortion does target Black women, and it is for Black women to abort babies to lessen our numbers racially. That you don't see pro-abortion billboards in White neighborhoods. There is some ugly history to Margaret Sanger, founder, Planned Parenthood and Eugenics. Although we don't have time to get into all of that, I do think that some of it is overstated if you really go back and read some of her writing and even how W.E.B. DuBois was in some of those conversations.

Largely, in a general sense, there is some concern that abortion is about exterminating Black families. That comes up in the play and also because of so much disinvestment in Englewood, this character running for City Council is saying, "Look, I can transform this neighborhood. I have all the answers for investment in promoting Black-owned businesses." He's also provocateur. He says, "You know what, here's a neighborhood that has had severe popular loss over the decades and I'm going to put up this billboard to try to make these linkages.

As tenuous as they may be, he does have an amen corner.

Melissa Harris-Perry: There are at least three very different, but I think in many ways, representative abortion stories that emerge very naturally in the context of the play. I think very much like the point you're making about trying to reclaim narrative, they don't sit necessarily at the center of the play as a great moral angst around these stories. We just learn of three characters, all Black women of different ages, all of whom have chosen abortion for different reasons. I don't want to give too much away here because I think those stories are really important when they show up.

Talk to me a bit about, as you were writing, obviously there are as many different abortion stories as there are women who have chosen abortion. These three though, are again in many ways I think representative of the kinds of reasons that women make this choice. How did you decide which characters to give these two, how to draw them out in the context of the play and the action?

Natalie Moore: I thought about that a lot because I couldn't do a play about abortion and not have any abortion story in it. That to me is a through-line throughout the text where these women who all had different reasons and they share their story. Now I have to admit in the first writing phases, they were much longer monologue and in the workshop thing, it's like, "Okay, let's tone this down." Not because of the content, but how you're balancing this with the writing.

I wanted all of these women to tell their stories and for them to be very different, because like you said, there is no single abortion story. There is a critique that I'm making there, about how popular culture or even a lot of television or movies depict abortion. This downtrodden person, or maybe they can't afford a child. Sometimes people just don't want to be pregnant. I mentioned the characters talk in the play about the 1990s, where it was, keep abortion safe, legal, and rare. How that rare tagline was also a stigma that was there, that you have to be justified in your reason for having an abortion.

The justification comes from the individual who is making that choice, not society, not others.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I am not a fan of the concept of self-care. For some of the reasons actually that some of your characters talk about in the book that self-care gets described in ways that are very commercial. That it's about, get a manicure, take a bubble-bath like you go out and buy things to care for yourself. You are really disrupting that idea of self-care in this play. Tell me more about that decision. Not only are you disrupting our understandings about abortion, not only are you disrupting understandings about politics, but you went ahead and went for the self-care as well.

Natalie Moore: I'm all for self-care, however that looks for you, but it does tend to be a commercialized capitalistic way. Let's be clear, I love going to the spa. That is just one aspect of taking care of myself, but we have to look at healthcare. Whether that's going to a primary care doctor or seeing a mental health professional. In some instances, having an abortion is a woman taking care of herself. There's a message in there too, that a character says that Black women can't take care of their families if they can't take care of themselves.

There is a heavy scene in there about self-care. I think that one of the characters has to concede, "Okay, you're right." How has self-care been framed? Really as a upper-middle-class pursuit?

Melissa Harris-Perry: I'll say that for me, part of my pushback against self-care is the idea that we need collective care, we need squad care. We need our girls to have our backs. That's another piece that you give us here is, there are moments when in the challenging realities that emerge in the play. Particularly those classic strong Black woman characters, professional, capable, smart, self-reliant have to turn to other women. Sometimes even younger women like almost girls.

You have one character who's right on that 19 to 20-year-old transition from girlhood to womanhood and yet becomes one of the wisest characters in the play. Talk to me a little bit about your decision to have Black women show up in sisterhood for each other in this play.

Natalie Moore: Melissa, I do think about your work too, on the myth of the-- I've heard you lecture about this [laughs] when you were in Chicago. Most Black women like to be told that they are strong, but they also know that there are cracks that are there. That they need support. The character Kayla who you're referring to the young woman. In some of the early readings, she has become a favorite among the readers because in the workshopping, because she is-- I don't want to just say wise beyond her years.

I wanted to create a character who was young and smart, who people would listen to. She's around the way girl, she's not someone who has started a long education journey. She probably will, but she brings life experience, neighborhood experience. I wanted to play off of the intergenerational aspect and people. The characters don't look down on her. It's not like she's being behind the scenes and everyone ignored her and she emerges. She is a voice of reason and intellect throughout.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I enjoy her so much. I am not surprised that she has emerged as a favorite. She certainly caught my heart from the beginning. Last question. Any chance that we're going to get a chance to see the billboard on Broadway?

Natalie Moore: Ooh, Melissa, put it out there. I'm going to claim it.[laughs] I would love that. Any producers out there listening or anyone who wants to make a trip to Chicago to see the world premiere and make that happen, I am all for it.

Melissa Harris-Perry: As I said, my family on my dad's side is hosting our family reunion in Chicago this year. For sure, I think we are going to be putting the billboard on our list of things that we are doing this summer. Natalie Moore is the author of the new book, The Billboard, a play about abortion. Thank you so much for joining us.

Natalie Moore: Thank you, Melissa.

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