I thoroughly enjoyed the play, both in the reading at home and the live performance. I enjoyed it because it made me think. I knew there had to be a deeper idea than a mutated child at play. Reading the play through I did notice that there was an undertone of gendered mistreatment on the part of the husband. Mary claimed that Joshua had incessantly attempted to impregnate her even when she was not interested in having sex. Upon further examination, I posited that Joshua had objectified her and reduced her to a breeding animal, which is why the product of his endeavors was an actual animal. After watching the performance and hearing the playwright discuss the play, this thematic analysis still works but there is an even stronger thread of gendered themes at work. First, in the way that the actress who played Mary acted, she really brought out the life of the woman who this play is really about. She was very firm and spoke powerfully toward her husband about the abuse he had subjected her to. Additionally, there was an effort to make light of and ignore the struggle that Mary was discussing by the other people who were drinking and coming up with theories about the rabbit. This felt like a perfect demonstration of the idea that there are women who speak up about their discriminatory experiences but are silenced and shot down. Second, as the playwright made clear in the q&a, the play is based on a true story of a hoax of a woman who said she gave birth to rabbits. The question for him was why she would make something like that up. In the play, he explores the hypothesis that the kind of pressure which is placed on women by their husbands to become pregnant-at the loss of their bodily autonomy due to unlimited intercourse-is a probable cause as to why Mary made up this rabbit birth problem. One other part of the play I found intriguing, especially in the performance was how Joshua comes off as immensely naive about how his wife is feeling. He is concerned with his reputation and his child, not her well-being, and does not seem to recognize her feelings. Joshua is a good stand in for the social norms at the time, which were unconcerned with the concerns of women, but it is difficult for an audience to sympathize with him beyond his being a kind of tool of patriarchy who lacks the agency to move beyond the gender norms in which he lives. As far as the acting performance, I thought Thomas was going to be portrayed as a smug British guy but the actor reading for him interpreted his attitude as resembling more of a nonchalant, chill American. It is intriguing that every person develops their own vision of the characters in plays they read and those that actors see may be slightly different. 

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