CAMBRIDGE — During a reunion tour with his band Dispatch over a decade ago, Chadwick Stokes arrived in Amsterdam with his wife and their young children. They needed to hire a nanny.
The guy who showed up was fully “Gothed out,” recalled Stokes, flaunting ample piercings and tattoos. Being a shaggy rock ’n’ roll lifer himself, Stokes wouldn’t normally think twice about that. But he did find himself intrigued that the guy was an excellent caregiver.
In America, Stokes noted in a recent conversation, “no one would ever hire a man to be their baby sitter.” Yet it’s men that “we elect to power to quote, unquote ‘represent’ us and take care of us all.”
Women’s empowerment is at the heart of “1972,” the new work of musical theater that Stokes has been developing for years. After many twists and turns, the show is set for its world premiere at the American Repertory Theater.
Hannah, the main character, is on the run from an abusive relationship, seeking to terminate an unwanted pregnancy, months before the Supreme Court’s landmark Roe v. Wade decision legalized abortion in America in 1973. In search of a doctor willing to help her, she’s riding the rails — jumping aboard freight trains — as Stokes and his brother, Willy Urmston, did with two friends in the summer of 2008.
She eventually learns of the Jane Collective, a Chicago-based organization that helped thousands of women find support for their reproductive health care, including abortions, in the years before abortion was legalized. After Stokes learned about the Janes, he watched the Emmy Award-winning 2022 HBO documentary, “The Janes.” (The women in the collective were so named because they felt it necessary to disguise their identities.) That year was also the year the Supreme Court reversed the 50-year precedent for women’s reproductive choice in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, ruling that the Constitution did not guarantee the right to an abortion.
For Jessie Nelson, who is directing the ART’s production, the Janes were the key to completing Stokes’s story. Beginning in 2024, Nelson directed a series of workshops for the show at Joe’s Pub in New York City. They used those workshops “as a way of continuing to sculpt the material,” said Nelson.
The show has come to life as a kind of hybrid rock concert. Stokes and his current band, the Pintos, take a prominent place at center stage, advancing the story while backing the cast in the “sung-through” book. (With Sarah Jarosz and the producer T Bone Burnett, Stokes recently recorded a version of “Cry Out,” the show’s signature song. A soundtrack album is in the planning stages, he said.)
Ironically, Nelson had been approached several years before about writing a screenplay about the Janes. On top of that, she worked with the ART and the songwriter Sara Bareilles in 2015 on the theater’s musical adaptation of the 2007 film “Waitress,” which tells the story of a pregnant diner server in an abusive marriage.
Several theater companies came to the Joe’s Pub showcases, but it was Stokes’s hometown company, the ART, that expressed the most enthusiasm for the show.
“I’m so happy that the ART is so passionate about producing something that says ‘F you’ to taking away the arts and taking away our rights,” said Gracie McGraw, who has been cast as Hannah. “I couldn’t be more proud to be a part of it.”
McGraw, 29, is the eldest of three daughters born to the country music stars Tim McGraw and Faith Hill. After dropping out of New York University, she has performed in regional theater around Nashville for years, where she grew up. (Her longtime boyfriend, a bartender in New York City, is a graduate of Boston University, she said.)
Her father is an avid reader who instilled in his children a lifelong love of storytelling, she said.
“I love getting lost in the world of a book, trying to visualize what that would look like,” she said. Meanwhile, she and her mother listened to the “Les Misérables” soundtrack “all the time. ‘Phantom of the Opera, ‘Jesus Christ Superstar,’ ‘Evita,’ all the classics — I really dove in and discovered what I loved about the theater.”
McGraw has been outspoken on social media, proudly identifying as bisexual and discussing her struggles with weight loss. She has had “situations, as every woman has, with assault,” she said.
Given the recent fury over the Cornell rape case and other sexual assault allegations, McGraw said, she has felt a close connection to Hannah as they’ve worked on the show.
“Not feeling safe — I really resonated with that, because I don’t feel safe in the world we live in right now,” she said.
McGraw first heard about the show when she met Laurie David, the Martha’s Vineyard-based producer, at a birthday party. When McGraw explained that she was a theater actor (“You know how Barbra Streisand used to be, like, ‘I’m not a singer — I’m an actor,’ that’s what I always say,” she told the Globe with a laugh), David mentioned how she had recently become involved with a new show about women’s rights.
“‘Keep your eyes peeled for that,’” McGraw said David told her.
The connections among the principals run deep. David has been friends with Nelson for years. Nelson’s husband, Bryan Gordon, worked as a comedy writer on the sketch show “Fridays” in the early 1980s, where he met Larry David — Laurie David’s ex-husband.
Stokes and his wife, Sybil Gallagher, are longtime seasonal residents of Martha’s Vineyard, where they first met Laurie David. Gallagher runs Calling All Crows, the nonprofit feminist organization she cofounded with Stokes in 2008, which works to engage music fans on issues related to women’s rights. Alongside David, she is a co-producer of “1972.”
Throughout the process of developing his “rock opera,” as he prefers to call it, Stokes has relied upon his wife’s guidance.
“She’s been a total partner in all this from the beginning,” he said. “It’s awesome to work on a passion project with your wife.
“She’s very message-driven. She can say, ‘I’m getting nothing from this song — you gotta rewrite it.’”
When McGraw had questions about her character’s motives in the early days of rehearsal, she said, she approached Gallagher first.
“I’m not trying to step on any toes,” she said. Stokes “couldn’t be more respectful of the process and what people are needing,” she continued. “It’s been really intense for all of us to come together as a family, come together in a room and feel comfortable.”
“I know women who feel like there’s a war on them,” Stokes said, from sexual violation and the rollback of Roe to the fact that Americans still have not elected a woman president. They’ve felt invisible, he said — a feeling that’s reflected in an early scene in the show, in which Hannah’s dress literally blends with the wallpaper.
“That that kind of s— is still happening is so reprehensible,” Stokes said. “It’s so sad that it still has a place in our society.”
He, the cast, and crew all hope that audiences feel fired up after seeing the show, he said.
“If people can feel energized after seeing this, if they can do things in small ways that contribute to the tide turning in terms of going from ego and misogyny to shared empathy, we’d love to be a part of that,” he said.
“I hope the show has that zing to it when people are walking out.”
1972: A ROCK OPERA
Written by Chadwick Stokes. Directed by Jessie Nelson. Oct. 27-Nov. 22. Opening night Nov. 1. Presented by the ART at Farkas Hall, 12 Holyoke St., Cambridge. $83.80. americanrepertorytheater.org
James Sullivan can be reached at jamesgsullivan@gmail.com.