Getting Over Yourself
I mean no disrespect to the playwright Mona Pirnot when I say that the 70-minute, first-person monologue at the heart of her play I Became We would be utterly devoid of theatrical interest if delivered in plain speech by a solo actress. Thankfully, this monologue about a young woman’s anxieties over whether to have a child isn’t delivered that way. Instead, it’s sung by a dazzling 16-member choir performing exquisite melodies and harmonies composed by Jack D. Coen, to live piano accompaniment by Blair McMillen. In this form, it becomes magical, hauntingly beautiful and unforgettably expressive.
Pirnot has deliberately made the language for the piece banal and anti-lyrical. Much of it sounds like an unfiltered confessional by a 30-something playwright polishing off a bottle of wine with her BFF. It begins by describing a Jimmy Kimmel Live segment in which men on the street are interviewed about female anatomy, revealing their breathtaking ignorance, which prompts the speaker to look up some facts about female fertility after age 35 and then offer this remark:
Good thing I never wanted children. Good thing my husband doesn’t either. Good thing my husband feels the same. Good thing we’ve always been so sure that we don’t want kids. And that will never change.
For the rest of the piece, the audience of course assumes she will change her mind, and all the humor, humanity and suspense turn on that hint. The playwright’s “jumpy and nervous” husband, who hates “overcrowding,” “unpredictable movements,” and “changes in routine,” pleads to leave a Brooklyn barbecue teeming with kids. Friends with kids are described as “husks of who they used to be.”
But then the playwright grows reflective about her shrinking family when her mother—a trailblazing mathematician who raised her alone—says she plans to retire far away in Italy. She weeps on the flight home watching an Adam Sandler movie about a magical remote control that can fast-forward time (presumably Click), and resolves to broach a big nagging question when she rejoins her husband. This question turns out to be (wait for it) . . . whether to buy a house—a deflection that works to distract her and us for more than 20 minutes of stage time until, in a tender and stirring climax that I’ll refrain from spoiling (it’s truly a reason to see the show), the underlying question finally comes to the fore.
The narrative of I Became We is very simple and straightforward, focusing narrowly on the insular emotional journey of a single speaker whose descriptions of other people are all, it must be said, pretty thin and sketchy. That’s the main reason I believe the monologue—projected at the Atlantic as supertitles above the stage—would be unbearable as spoken language. Pirnot’s narrative isn’t just mundane; it’s uninterruptedly self-involved the way confessional talk always is, and the musical setting serves as a crucial foil for that situational narcissism. The music pluralizes the single voice in lovely and meaningful ways—a sort of multiplier effect that breathes air into a meditation that might be otherwise grow claustrophobic. Also, there’s unavoidably a religious dimension here, as there would be in any “play for a choir,” and this is especially evident in a deconsecrated church like the Atlantic Theater.
An example of the multiplier effect arrives right away in the Jimmy Kimmel section, whose music begins in choral unison, then expands to a duet for soprano and alto, and then expands further to a quartet for soprano, alto, tenor and bass. The absurdity of this arrangement—of using soaring, trained voices in soul-stirring, consonant harmony for the decidedly lowly purpose of explaining male ignorance—makes the audience laugh.
One man points to the cervix and calls it a uterus.
One man points to the bladder and calls it a vagina.
One man points to the rectum (the rectum) and says he’s pretty sure that it’s a baby (a baby.)
Yet there’s more than absurd humor here. The duets and quartets effectively multiply the identity of the observing speaker (as well as the observed idiots, for that matter) and in that way they implicate us all, whoever we are, in the scene.
The choir stands still on risers the entire time, dressed in sober black concert attire designed by Louisa Thompson, and no effort is ever made to characterize individual singers or stage interactions as enacted dialogue. Nevertheless, Coen sets a specific mood with music in every scene, and also punctuates character exchanges. In the barbecue scene, for instance, a farrago of clashing duets, trios and quartets mimics the cacophony of kids running around. Then, suddenly, a solo soprano takes over softly and sweetly as the narrator finds herself holding the host’s baby in the kitchen:
She’s so small/Her whole head in my hand/Her body/Her little body/In my arms/In one of my arms/Her hand curls/Around my finger/My smallest finger/Her whole hand/My breathing in sync with her breathing/Our inhales/Our exhales
The poignancy of this moment is so simple and also not. It obviously originates in Pirnot’s individual experience but in the play the music expands it into a generalized occasion. That is the effect of the choir. A solo voice is by definition singular but in performance any persona it conveys, as part of a group, is effectively a surrogate for us all. Pirnot’s title puts it well: “I” in this environment inevitably slips into “we.” And given that the question of propagation sits at the heart of the play, that multiplier effect becomes a tacit self-observation for the narrator too.
There’s much more to say about how this humbly gorgeous play works, but I fear that explaining too much will ruin its magic if you go. Leaving the Atlantic, I found myself (in shamelessly professorial fashion) reflecting on the history of plays with speech choirs, which is long and complicated. Its roots are in ancient religious dramas but it also includes more recent, insidious works like the Soviet Proletkult plays and Nazi Thingspiele that deliberately tapped the age-old emotional power of choirs to manipulate and indoctrinate mass audiences. Given how touchy we all know childbearing to be among the Millennial generation Pirnot belongs to, I couldn’t help wondering whether her peers will embrace this piece as warmly as I do, or possibly spurn it as musical coercion.
I Became We By Mona Pirnot Music by Jack D. Coen Lyrics by Mona Pirnot and Jack D. Coen Directed by Sarah Benson Atlantic Theater
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