An audience with Australia’s first pregnant man

The Powerhouse played host to a theatre piece for our recent Ultimo Science Festival, titled ‘An audience with Australia’s first pregnant man’. A staged press conference with a character actor playing Adam Jones, a pregnant man, the piece is designed to explore the possibilities offered by science and to allow the audience to informally question the ethical dilemmas raised by those possibilities.

The piece involved a 20-minute interview of our pregnant man by an education officer at the museum, in which Adam explained why he became pregnant, how it was possible, the public reaction and the complications posed by the procedure. Then the audience had an opportunity to ask Adam questions.

There were a number of surprising outcomes from this program:

• Firstly, the audience was completely accepting of the possibility of science enabling a man to carry a baby. I had expected at least some people to have a problem with the concept on moral or ethical grounds, but no.
• Secondly, the audience went far further with this piece of theatre than I had expected, to the point where the questions from the audience really challenged our poor actor whose script – though well researched – didn’t cover things like… How would he explain the procedure to the child as it grew up? Could/would he breastfeed the baby? What about his maleness after the procedure?
• Thirdly, people had difficulty separating fact and fiction. Although not explicitly stated during or before the performance, we had asssumed that people would know this was theatre. But in each session there were a number of people who eventually piped up with the question – is this real?

These observations have raised what I think are important questions that we could consider here at Assembly:

• How careful need we be with the fiction/fact boundary in the museum setting? Should we have stated that this was an actor playing a part before the show – or after the show?
• How much prior knowledge can we assume for our audience? How much should we let the content interfere with people’s interaction with a program as a piece of theatre? After one audience – in which the fact/fiction boundary had been explained to the best of our ability and elderly man walking out the door walked up to our actor and wished him all the best with the imminent birth.

We never knew quite where people were at between belief and suspension of disbelief, as thespians say.

Does any of this matter?

Thanks to Spectrum Theatre UK who first developed this piece for roving performances at the Science Museum, London.