Review: Set in 1914, 'What Every Girl Should Know' is as relevant as ever

Margaret Sanger saw that as a problem. So in the early days of the last century, she used her her short-lived newspaper column “What Every Girl Should Know,” her pamphlets and her proselytizing to educate girls and women about sex, their bodies, sexually transmitted diseases — anything they needed to know to prevent them, as Sanger said, “from entering into sexual relations whether in marriage or out of it, without thinking and knowing.”

The wise woman, the founder of Planned Parenthood, was condemned by many.

But in the case of the teen girls in Something Something Theatre’s production of Monica Byrne’s “What Every Girl Should Know,” she was worshiped.

Three young women share a room at a Catholic reformatory school in 1914 New York City. Their room has dirty walls, uncomfortable-looking metal beds, a crucifix, and pictures of their patron saints looking over them.

When a fourth teen joins them, she brings news of the outside — specifically, she schools them on the revolutionary Sanger, who becomes the new patron saint for the young girls.

Before Sanger, the girls had been content going to Mass in the morning and masturbating at night.

Post Sanger, they begin to look more askance at the abuses they had been subjected to in the past. They create stories to free their minds while they are imprisoned in the school. They develop a cult around Sanger, who seems to have the power to whip them into frenetic dances to mark their conversion to Sanger’s way of thinking, or to act out the death of a former roommate who died as the result, presumably, of a botched abortion.

There’s an innocence about the girls in this play, even as they try to verbally explain the steps to self gratification to one who’s having trouble reaching it, or talking about an abusive father, or a brother who is a sexual predator, or imagining stories in which they kill their oppressor.

The play is self-conscious at times, and a tad too obscure at other times, but it never stops mesmerizing, thanks to the insightful work of director Jasmine Roth. She put together a cast that embodies the innocence and struggles of young women: Ellie Boyles, Kate Cannon, Robin Carson and Christine Peterson. There was not a false moment among them.

It’s been more than a century since Sanger tried to insert some common sense into information about women’s health. With the threat to Planned Parenthood increasing daily, it seems as though we are still struggling for that common sense.

This play never preaches, but it’s a compelling story that underscores that what Sanger said back then is so relevant now.