BIRTHLAND

BIRTHLAND
Good Girls Don’t Talk About These Things
by Mina Petrić, in collaboration with Venia Stamatiadi & Eleni Apostolopoulou

Eleni Apostolopoulou and Venia Stamatiadi collaborate with playwright Mina Petrić to create the theatrical piece BIRTHLAND: Good Girls Don’t Talk About These Things. Rooted in lived experience, the play centers on how a woman artist is treated during pregnancy.

In the film Good Girls Don’t Talk About These Things, Beatrice plays a woman who is at risk of losing her job because of her pregnancy. However, as filming progresses, the characters begin to unravel, the story collapses, and the script starts to resemble her own life more and more. Can fiction really come so close to reality?

A note from the creators
How openly do we talk about workplace discrimination that women face due to pregnancy? How often are abortions not a choice, but a forced decision to keep a job? How freely do we speak about the difficult sides of motherhood?

The play Birthland: Good Girls Don’t Talk About These Things speaks to and about women who struggle to decide whether or not they want to have children. About others who regret the choice and can’t even admit it to their own reflection. About time—how it ticks by and turns against you. About that looming NOW OR NEVER that weighs heavily on women around the ages of 35 to 40.

Because even though many of us now choose to walk away from social expectations, we still carry the anxiety. About our jobs. About whether we’ll have a family—and what shape that family will take. We constantly face dilemmas.

We believe this anxiety is something our whole generation feels. And we wanted to write a play about that: about the fear of trying to remain professionally active while facing the question of motherhood. And whether a child can grow up happy in the midst of all this chaos.