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.
