It’s 1967, and Margaret Crane has been struck by the lightning of inspiration. That’s partly great, she acknowledges, “but it’s also terrifying, because I don’t know exactly what I’m supposed to do, or if it’s going to be difficult, and what if I mess it up?”
“Predictor,” now in a West Coast premiere at Sacramento’s Cap Stage, imagines the inner life of the unlikely inventor of the home pregnancy test. In Jennifer Blackmer’s script, which is directed by Imani Mitchell, the chief obstacle isn’t technological; it’s convincing powerful men that women should be able to take their bodies into their own hands, which has allowed women the world over to get life-changing news faster and less expensively and absorb the ensuing joy, relief, shock or grief in their own homes and on their own terms.
Many biographical or historical dramas can feel plodding; Blackmer’s sidesteps that pitfall with fluid, time-traveling writing that suggests whole dynamics with just a few lines of dialogue.