Indiana playwright and Ball State University professor Jennifer Blackmer is no stranger to writing about women’s history. Her most recent play, “Predictor,” which recently ran off-Broadway, follows the story of the woman who invented the first home pregnancy test, Meg Crane.
Now, her play “Borrowed Babies” shares a surprising piece of Indiana and U.S. history.
“When I tell people what the play’s about, they sort of get this look on their face, like, ‘wait, what? That was a thing?’ And I’m like, ‘yeah, it was a thing,’” Blackmer said.
The play chronicles the phenomenon of practice babies, in which university home economics programs would partner with orphanages to “borrow” babies for students to practice taking care of. The play is receiving its world premiere through American Lives Theatre Feb. 4.
Ball State Professor Jill Christman’s 2014 nonfiction book of the same title forms the basis of the play.
According to Blackmer, Christman spent a semester in Ithaca, New York, researching for the book. But due to poor recordkeeping from many of the institutions that participated in these programs, she hit “brick wall after brick wall.” However, she did learn enough to publish her findings in a book that combined the history of practice babies with her own experience researching the topic while pregnant with her first child.
If you go
Borrowed Babies
🗓️ Feb. 5-22
📍 Phoenix Theatre Cultural Centre
🎟️ $15+
On Feb. 15, there’s a post-show talk with playwright Jennifer Blackmer and fellow Ball State professor Jill Christman, who wrote a book about the use of “practice babies.”
Blackmer used Christman’s book as a baseline and continued with her own research, mainly on home economics programs and why they existed. The fictional play jumps between 1952 and 1982 as character Judy London, who created the practice babies program at her university, sees it fall apart.
“We see [London] at the beginning of her career, and we see her near the end of her career,” Blackmer said. “And we’re able to think about what feminism was [in the 50s], and what it [was in the 80s], and how women began to think about college versus how they [thought] about it [in the 80s], and really kind of compare and contrast those two moments in history.”
Although the most well-known practice baby program was in Ithaca, there were plenty of examples in the Midwest, including in Indiana. One of Blackmer’s favorite moments in the development of the play was the unexpected discovery of one of these programs at Ball State in 2019. She had been asked to do a reading of the play for the Family and Consumer Science Program (formerly the Home Economics Program)’s 100th anniversary.
“Afterward, [Christman] and I did a Q&A, and [Christman] said, ‘yeah, I was kinda disappointed that I had to travel, because, you know, Ball State didn’t have a baby program,’” Blackmer said. “And then a woman in the audience interrupted her and said, ‘What are you talking about? Ball State had a baby program.’”
It turned out that several of the audience members had been involved with Ball State’s baby program, which was not connected to an orphanage but instead brought in the babies of graduate students. The graduate students would live in grad student housing and the babies would live in the same graduate student housing.
“The thing that I will never forget is they said that they had several instances where, you know, they wanted to go out, or they wanted to go to a party, and so they would pay the baby’s mother to come and babysit,” Blackmer said.
Indiana University Bloomington had a similar program called the Home Management House, where students practiced caring for the children of faculty and staff for months at a time.
Blackmer was drawn to the subject matter of practice babies in part due to the moral complexity of the issue. “At first, you think it’s terrible, because of the idea of borrowing another human being to teach somebody,” Blackmer said. “But then you’re like, ‘but wait a minute, they were in orphanages. They were in state institutions where there’s never enough people to care for them. Okay, so that’s not good. But now they’re being used, and they can’t attach to anybody, so that’s not good.’”
This will be the second time American Lives Theatre has produced a play by Blackmer, having produced “Predictor” in 2023. They’ve only had one other repeat playwright in the history of their company (Martyna Majok), and according to American Lives Theatre Artistic Director Chris Saunders, they’d be happy to produce a third play by Blackmer in the future.
“A Jennifer Blackmer play reminds you what theater can do,” Saunders said. “She deeply understands the stage as a medium, and she never ever talks down to her audience.”
The American Lives Theatre 2025-26 season is titled “Our American Legacy.”
“What do we leave behind? What will future generations think of what we do now? What do we think about our past? This idea of legacy — individual, familial, national, cultural — is evident in each play we are producing this season,” Saunders said.
Borrowed Babies runs Feb. 5-22 at the Phoenix Theatre Cultural Centre. Tickets start at $15.
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Emily Worrell is a Mirror Indy freelance contributor. You can reach her at emily.worrell@mirrorindy.org.
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