There’s a new play opening this week, and I’m a character in it. I have mixed feelings.
The play is called “The Birth of the Pill,” and it’s adapted from my 2014 book of the same name. Rather than merely transferring the story from book to stage, the playwright Jessica Huang explores what I left out — and calls me to task for it.
We all should embrace and even celebrate history’s messy nature: Question it, debate it, get down in the dirt and wrestle with it. When Ms. Huang asked if I would be a character in her play, I said yes. I said that I had never felt ownership of the story. How could I? History is a conversation, and I never intended to do all the talking. History is also an exercise in failure; the goal is to fail as little as possible, but those of us who write history will always get things wrong and leave things out.
Both the book and the play focus on the people who invented the birth control pill and delivered it to the world, largely in the 1950s when anti-birth control laws were still on the books and the idea of selling a drug designed to promote pleasurable sex, reproductive freedom and women’s equality was considered preposterous by many. My book focused on Margaret Sanger, the controversial visionary and activist; Katharine Dexter McCormick, the brilliant philanthropist; Gregory Pincus, the outcast biologist who figured out the science; and John Rock, the Catholic gynecologist who supervised the clinical trials. They were flawed rebels out to blow up the world.
In Ms. Huang’s adaptation, the star is a fictionalized young Puerto Rican woman named Ramona Delgado. As the play begins, it’s both 1950 and 2026, and the audience sees Ramona onstage reading my book. She’s not happy. She thinks the book should have centered on the Puerto Rican women upon whom the pill was tested before it was approved, when doses were much too high, when serious side effects ran rampant and when women in Puerto Rico and elsewhere were not told they were part of a clinical trial.
Ms. Sanger, Ms. McCormick, Dr. Pincus and Dr. Rock had their turns at shaping history. Jonathan Eig had his chance to tell the story. Now, courtesy of Ms. Huang, it’s Ramona’s turn, and she wants answers.
This is not the way I had dreamed of seeing one of my books onstage. On the other hand, Ramona raises issues that I’ve been wrestling with a long time. The older I get, the less I seem to know. And the older my books get, the more I can see what I’ve left out or not properly emphasized. I’ve come to understand that history never contains the whole of history. In my book on Jackie Robinson, I paid scant attention to the Negro League players who never made it to the major leagues. In my book on Martin Luther King Jr., I devoted little space to the role of the labor movement in the civil rights struggle. In my pill book, while I do talk about the treatment of Puerto Rican women in the trials, I failed to convey their suffering.
Feelings of hope, or loss, or grief, are especially vulnerable to omission from history, in part because they’re not so easily documented. The yearnings of pacifists, for example, seldom make their way into historical accounts of war. Is it possible that unrecorded history is just as important as recorded history? And if it is, what can we do about it? This is what Ms. Huang explores in her version of “The Birth of the Pill.”
I’ve read the play, and I admire it. It’s smart, funny and solidly grounded in history despite its imaginative leaps. At the same time, it hurts to see a spotlight shone (literally) on one of my book’s flaws. It makes me feel as if I failed my readers and some of my subjects. I suppose it’s inevitable that history focuses on the winners, on those bold and brilliant individuals who dare to push for human progress. But Ms. Huang’s play reminds us that suffering drives progress, too. An estimated 1,500 women in poverty-stricken sections of Puerto Rico participated in clinical trials for the pill. They suffered nausea, dizziness and vomiting. Some developed blood clots. Three died; no autopsies were ever done to find out why. My research taught me some of their stories, but Ms. Huang’s play made their experiences more vivid and more emotional than my own work managed to.
As I prepare to watch Ramona Delgado (played by María Victoria Martínez) step onstage at Chicago’s TimeLine Theatre Company this week to confront a character named Jonathan Eig, I’m both nervous and excited. I feel as if a ghost is floating out from between the lines of my book to haunt me.
Then again, I think history should haunt us. If it doesn’t, if we try to cut ourselves off from the past and live only in the present, avoiding the discomfort of difficult truths, we might as well return to the age of savagery. Only then is Ramona Delgado’s anguish in vain.
Jonathan Eig is the author of “King: A Life,” winner of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for biography, and other books.
Source photograph by SimoneN/Getty Images
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