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The Crowd You’re in With at 16th Street Theater | Theater review
The stakes in 16th Street’s remount of Rebecca Gilman’s smugfest, about liberal couples arguing the merits of having children, remain as low as they were in the play’s 2009 Goodman debut.
Sorin Brouwers and Michelle Courvais in The Crowd You're In With at 16th Street Theater
Gilman’s 2007 one-act is one of those argument plays where a group of people representing several sides of an issue gathers to hash it out; George Bernard Shaw wrote a million of them. In this case, seven white, impeccably liberal North Siders at a Fourth of July barbecue argue the pros and cons of having children. The pros, which get short shrift, are that you “have more of the people you love in the world.” The cons, which are numerous, include career stagnation, less time to spend with your spouse and less time to try out interesting ethnic restaurants. It’s sort of like a stage adaptation of the White Girl Problems Twitter feed.
Gilman peoples her play with three couples: a thirtysomething pair about to have a baby, another thirtysomething pair trying to have a baby, and an older couple who never had babies, never wanted them, and scoff at the notion with the insufferable smugness of a proselytizing vegan. The seventh character, a single man who earns his living as a waiter, arrives to deliver a humorous monologue about those plastic containers full of Cheerios that parents of toddlers are always carrying around.
When the Goodman Theatre staged the play in 2009, its emotional center was Melinda, the character desperate to get pregnant. In Jethmalani’s version, the focus shifts to her husband, Jasper (Brouwers), who isn’t so sure. His low-intensity waffling seems to infect the whole mood of the show. The party feels fittingly awkward, but we rarely get the sense that something important is at stake.
