The last time the rock musician Chadwick Stokes performed in a musical, he was in high school. Born in 1976, he wasn’t even alive when Roe v. Wade was decided, in 1973, and abortion became legal throughout the United States. Even so, Stokes has co-written 1972, a riveting rock opera about abortion.
“I’ve always played with the idea of doing a rock opera,” Stokes says over the phone from his home in the West Chop neighborhood of Tisbury, Massachusetts. And he always envisioned it involving freight trains. Growing up, Stokes jumped cargos across the country, once traveling to Denver to open for Rage Against the Machine.
When Roe v. Wade was overturned, in 2022, a plotline came into focus. Stokes and his wife, Sybil Gallagher, had long been involved in Calling All Crows, a nonprofit that uses music to address pressing feminist issues. “We realized we had to do something around the disaster.”
1972 currently consists of 25 songs, though “it’s still very much a work in progress,” says Stokes. The cast of 10 includes members of his band, the Pintos—Jon Reilly, Tommy Ng, Sandra Williams, and Stokes’s younger brother, Willy Urmston—and they convene every few weeks in Boston for intensive, seven-day practice sessions. The writer, director, and actress Jessie Nelson is directing and co-writing a book version with Stokes. Though the opera is still in the workshop phase, it already has crucial backers. And producing alongside Gallagher is the activist Laurie David, the former wife of Larry David.
It’s not hard to see why. Even without costumes, makeup, or scenography, the 90-minute show is compelling. Set a few months before Roe v. Wade gave women sovereignty over their own bodies, it tells the story of 19-year-old Hannah (played by the music therapist Hannah Foxman), who lives in Maryland in an abusive relationship. Determined to get an illegal abortion, she hops a freight train heading west. After a near-death experience with an ominous male doctor (played by the art teacher Darren Buck), she finds refuge with the Jane Collective—a group of activists who’ve built an underground network that provides low-cost abortions for women with unwanted pregnancies.
In late November, after short runs in Boston and Chicago, the crew performed a three-night run of 1972 at Joe’s Pub, on Lafayette Street in New York. I attended on November 21, when an audience that included the journalist Katie Couric burst into a standing ovation. Now, Stokes says, a theater company should take it to the next level.
The subject matter is controversial, and there are difficult moments. A patient at the first illegal facility dies. A few male characters are memorably unsettling. And Foxman’s tone conveys haunting vulnerability. Some songs are so somber you can hear a pin drop. But toward the end, the cast bursts into joyous song. The message is clear: as long as there are Good Samaritans, there’s hope.
Three real-life members of the Jane Collective attended the November 22 performance of 1972—Abby Pariser, Sheila Smith Avruch, and Jeanne Galazter-Levy—and were deeply touched. “I turn to music in my darkest or saddest moments,” Stokes says, “and I’m so glad it resonated. It was such an emotional night. We’re excited. We really don’t know what’s next.”
Elena Clavarino is a Senior Editor at air mail
