There’s a woman on stage at the Green Lake Bathhouse Theater, and she’s giving birth. Agonizingly. Dramatically. And very, very loudly.

“Aaaaaaaoooooorrrrrgghhhhh!!!!” Deep breath. “Aaaaaaaaaaoooooorrrrgghh!”

The audience is packed with midwives, but no one gets up to help. Instead, they clap, teary-eyed. Because this isn’t a birth, it’s “Birth” – the Karen Brody play that began last year in Seattle as a one-night show on Labor Day and has blossomed into a month of Puget Sound-area performances and community events, and spread from Alaska to Australia. It’ll be in Tacoma on Saturday.

“The play is as much about educating women as performing,” explains Walayn Sharples, a Seattle actor whose credits include shows at Intiman Theater as well as last year’s “Birth” production in Seattle, and who’s directing and acting in this year’s “Birth” in the Puget Sound region. “I want women to be aware of their options (for giving birth), that women feel empowered to make choices.”

Ironically, it’s the fact that so many of the characters in “Birth” have so little choice about their birth options that underlines Sharples’ point.

The play tells the stories of eight women – including Jillian, Sharples’ own role – whose birth experiences run the gamut from planned C-sections through nightmare episiotomies and breech deliveries all the way to serene home water births.

During 2004, New York-based writer and former midwife Karen Brody interviewed hundreds of women across America who responded to her call through magazines, midwifery associations, online listservs and even supermarkets for birth stories.

Out of those, she chose eight, retelling them as a narrative-based play that premiered on Labor Day 2006. She hoped it would tell the truth of maternity care in America: “The Vagina Monologues” of giving birth, if you like.

Like birth itself, the stories are powerful. And, like “The Vagina Monologues,” “Birth” isn’t shy. Brody covers topics like poop cramps, projectile vomiting, masturbation and the burning “ring of fire” with bluntness, sympathy and a sly humor that elevates the piece above mere pity party. She also infuses her characters with a believable humanity.

There’s Vanessa (Laura Persaud), a tough gal who drags her family from their TV sports to cheer her on like football coaches, despite her incredibly painful Pitocin labor induction. There’s Sandy (Judah Joy Easley), who trusts her OB/GYN blindly, and who is led through ever-nightmarish interventions into an emergency C-section that devastates her for the next year.

There’s water-birthing granola Amanda (Tami Brockway Joyce) with her mantra “My body rocks!” and Natalie (Robyn Coffin), who manages to retain her dancing joy of birth despite fiercely unsupportive nurses only to be cut, against her wishes, with a rough episiotomy.

Onstage at the Green Lake Bathhouse, the cast members are doing a great job. Coffin gives Natalie a tragic naiveté, Joyce’s Amanda is hilariously feminist, and Persaud delivers Brody’s lines with a mean punch (“No! I can’t sit still! You try to sit still with a baby comin’ outta yo’ butt!”) As the only man in the show, Brad Cerenzia imbues the often-one-dimensional husband characters with earnestness.

The cast members read from scripts, which occasionally stilts the flow, but they interact engagingly and the emotion is, frankly, gripping. The heartfelt comments of women and men – yes, there are a few in this audience – in the after-show talkback prove the play’s power.

Don’t go to “Birth” expecting comfortable theater, however. Even beyond the squeamish (for some) aspects, there’s the stark reality of hospital birth care that Brody presents. There are some supportive doctors and nurses, and some unsupportive midwives, but in general the play’s stories tell a nasty narrative of emotional coldness, physically invasive procedures, and a lack of both knowledge and choice for the women and their families. For instance: America’s C-section rate is now over 29 percent, some 20 percent higher than the World Health Organization recommendation.

And this is precisely what Brody, and the local cast, wants to make known via “Birth.”

“Everyone hates me for this play – doctors, nurses, midwives,” says Brody, laughing. “But as any doctor will tell you, it’s hard to be compassionate. There’s power at play in the system. We want to help women learn how to navigate that power.”

Adds Sharples: “When I first did ‘Birth’ last year, I was shocked to find out how far backwards birthing had gone since I had my babies in the ’80s. I want women to be aware of their options, to feel empowered.”

It’s that mission that’s behind the astonishing explosion of “Birth” performances around the world. Last year Seattle had just one. This year there are 10, and two Red Tents, community gatherings to tell birth stories.

Performances and Red Tents are happening as far afield as the Netherlands, Australia, Uganda and India. The Puget Sound-area cast and producer Lynn Hughes plan to take the production through the year to schools and colleges.

Tacoma midwife Dawn Wadleigh, who saw the Green Lake performance, explains the popularity from an audience perspective: “It’s a great educational tool. Most women don’t realize they have other options (to standard hospital birth), and there’s a lot of fear. We’ve lost touch with our bodies.”

Tami Joyce, who plays granola mom Amanda, puts it succinctly: “This play speaks to all of us. After all, we’ve all been birthed.”

Rosemary Ponnekanti: 253-597-8568

rosemary.ponnekanti@ thenewstribune.com

What: “Birth,” a play by Karen Brody

When: 8 p.m. today, Vashon Island High School Theatre, 20120 Vashon Highway S.W., Vashon Island; 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Theater on the Square, 915 Broadway, Tacoma, ASL interpreted

Tickets: $15

Reservations: 1-800-385-9704, www.boldinseattle.com

Information: www.birthonlaborday.com