Theatre in Review: The New One (Cherry Lane Theatre)

	Mike Birbiglia. Photo: Joan Marcus

The New One, the latest chapter of Mike Birbiglia's life inventory, begins with a couch and ends with another couch; these two moments of repose bookend a series of events that will thoroughly upend his life. The trigger is something that happens to people every day, but longtime fans are aware that Birbiglia's existence is a minefield of calamities and mortifications, and so when his wife, Jen, announces that, contra their original agreement, she thinks they should have a child, mayhem will follow. As is usually the case with him, his agony is comedy gold.

Birbiglia's initial response is to deliver his "seven specific reasons" for not wanting to reproduce, beginning with number one: "I've never felt like there should more of me in the world." It's typical of his signature self-deprecating style that this reason is explored at exhaustive length. Among other things, as a professional comedian, he is perpetually on the road: "I do this in sometimes a hundred cities in a year-- which is more cities than there are." The tiny, but perfect, exercise in deflation is prime Birbiglia, a comic who is descended from such experts in the underwhelming as Bob Newhart and Bob and Ray. Topping it off, he adds, "Some of them are just an Applebee's with a dream."

For all his manufactured panic, Birbiglia has at least one excellent reason for not wanting to reproduce: His medical history is an unbroken series of disasters. Fans of his previous shows know about his bout with cancer and the sleep disorder that was the main topic of his breakthrough debut piece, Sleepwalk with Me, which culminated with him stepping unconsciously through a second-floor window and plunging to his near-death. As a result, he must sleep zipped up tight in a sleeping bag and wearing mittens, lest he accidentally endanger himself or his loved ones. In The New One, he adds Type II diabetes to his list of woes. (This one may be his fault; queried about his dietary habits, he concedes, "Sometimes I eat pizza until I'm unconscious.")

Despite his legion of qualms -- is it really prudent to pass on genes like these? -- Jen, whose voice, he notes, "has a thread count of six hundred," wins him over to the idea that fatherhood wouldn't be so bad. Of course, nothing goes smoothly. When conception proves elusive, he is discovered to have fertility issues, and must submit to an operation, the details of which make me tremble as I type. Once Jen is pregnant, his anxieties take off. In one of the slyest spoofs of his self-absorption, he announces, "It was a brutal pregnancy. It was hard for her, too." Commenting on his unpreparedness for fatherhood, he adds that, in the hospital, following the birth, he realized, "You have to take it home. It's completely frowned upon to leave it there."

The crises continue to multiply as the baby defies sleep, Jen slips into a seemingly permanent state of exhaustion, and Birbiglia is exiled to a second bedroom with the family's temperamental, and occasionally incontinent, cat. Can this marriage be saved? Yes, but not before Birbiglia comes face to face with his feelings of displacement and jealousy. Watching from the sidelines as his domestic life reshapes itself without his participation, he learns to keep his mouth shut. "I had an opinion once, which was a huge mistake."

All of this is recounted in Birbiglia's signature laconic drawl, interrupted, as per usual, by brief bouts of fury and panic, all of it capable of sending one helplessly into a laughing jag. Along the way, there are many digressions and cul-de-sacs, including a meditation on "baby-canceling headphones" to make air travel pleasant again, a priceless imitation of friends urging him to have kids ("They're like zombies, like, 'You should eat brains!'"), a recollection of a peerlessly embarrassing youthful encounter with a prostitute in Amsterdam, and an instructive discussion of oral sex as a treatment for morning sickness. This time, however, Birbiglia digs more deeply, subjecting his flaws to hilariously ruthless examination and getting to the heart of marriage and fatherhood and what they mean to him. As always, he is the most elusive of targets, defying categorization even as he lands laugh after laugh.

No doubt thanks in part to the guidance of Seth Barrish, Birbiglia's regular director, The New One unfolds as smoothly as its predecessors, aided by a thoroughly professional design package, including a set design by Beowulf Boritt that extends the look of the Cherry Lane auditorium onto the stage, and solid lighting and sound by Aaron Copp and Leon Rothenberg, respectively.

Perhaps because Jennifer Hope Stein, aka Mrs. Birbiglia, contributed to the script, The New One treads nimbly on more profound matters; in any case, this approach has done nothing to diminish the laugh count. The end of The New One finds Birbiglia on another couch -- he is a connoisseur of couches, being a naturally lazy middle-aged male -- but this time he has an epiphany that can bring a tear to your eye. With talent like this, maybe it's a good thing that he decided to risk passing his genes on after all. -- David Barbour