“I am large,” Walt Whitman famously wrote in his 1855 poem “Song of Myself.” “I contain multitudes.” In her breathtaking new work of theatrical autofiction, I Became We, the playwright Mona Pirnot conceives the multitude of voices in her head as a full-fledged 16-member choir. The young composer Jack D. Coen, who also directs the onstage ensemble and pianist Blair McMillen, has written an evocative score that delves into the thoughts of a thirtysomething playwright pondering the next steps in her life and whether she might be prepared to rethink her long-held indifference to having children.
The libretto, a collaboration between Pirnot and Coen, is projected on supertitles above the stage where the choir stands on risers in simple black outfits clutching folders. (Mimi Lien designed the minimalist set, while the costumes are credited to Louisa Thompson and Gylanni Carrington.) That makes it easy to glide along the streams of consciousness of the narrator’s thoughts, which veer from funny to ruminative to quirky. She starts with a joke, an observation about a segment on Jimmy Kimmel Live where a woman quizzes random men on the street about the female body to reveal their utter cluelessness — but then confesses that she didn’t know the answer to one of the televised questions: “How many eggs is a female born with?” (A Googling session reveals that she’s down to about 90,000 from the 1 to 2 million she had at birth.)
A subsequent backyard barbecue in Brooklyn where far too many of her friends are preoccupied by parenthood: “They only can talk of nursing and latching, crawling and standing, potty and daycare, teething and none of them ever sleeping.” She and her jumpy playwright husband sit off the side, he desperate to exit at the first possible moment while she has a moment in the kitchen holding the distracted hostess’s newborn. The baby bonding abruptly ends when her husband appears, asking to go home. (Pirnot is married to fellow playwright Lucas Hnath.)
Pirnot is planting seeds gradually, backed by Coen’s evocative score — which notably avoids individual voices in conversation with each other in favor of a melodic groupthink. There are rounds, nods to ’80s pop music, a barbershop-style quartet crooning a recurring lullaby, and an artful shift from bouncy, up-tempo numbers (which can be laugh-out-loud hilarious) to extended melodic contemplations on some of life’s bigger questions. Coen, who serves as music director at my Catholic parish in Gramercy (where I very briefly sang in the choir), has a knack for the clarity of his musical phrasing. He emphasizes crisp enunciation and sharp pauses whenever there’s a comma or period in the text. It’s an approach that highlights the punchlines but also the philosophical digressions (which sometimes include punchlines). There’s a precision here that matches the piece’s ambition, a resistance to sonic squishiness that’s bolstered by Sarah Benson’s understated staging, Palmer Hefferan’s sound design, and Tuçe Yasak’s lighting.
Pirnot has earned a reputation for quasi-memoirs where she holds herself at a distance from the audience. In her 2024 solo show I Love You So Much I Could Die recounting her pandemic-era ordeals, she performed with her back to theatergoers and filtered her voice through a computerized text-to-speech tool. Last year’s I’m Assuming You Know David Greenspan cast the downtown theater-maker to play four millennial female playwrights who (like Pirnot) admire Greenspan’s indie success and contemplate how to create a version of it for themselves. Here, though, she finds a device that doesn’t merely play with the material from a safe remove but actually elevates it.
Unlike Heather Christian’s Oratorio for Living Things, there’s a clear narrative throughline to this musical composition that draws you in from the start and carries you through its ebbs and flows. Pirnot and Coen’s approach has a light touch, where even momentous turns in the story are accompanied by comic observations delivered in an inviting, conversational tone. The narrator’s mother, an acclaimed math professor in Florida, decides to retire to northern Italy — prompting a riff on Bolzano (rhymes with soprano) and a flood of tears from the daughter as she watches a goofy, high-concept Adam Sandler movie on her flight back to New York. (“In my defense, it is scientifically proven that people cry more easily on airplanes,” she notes.) The narrator acknowledges all the ways in which she should be content: her career is taking off; she and her husband have escaped the noisy distractions of the city for a quiet, newly purchased house upstate; her mother seems settled and happy despite an even greater physical distance.
But Pirnot’s alter ego feels the tug of something missing, and the recognition that achieving her girlhood goals of success and independence might no longer be enough for her. Near the end of the 70-minute show, a seed planted in the opening moments bears fruit with the appearance of a 17th choir member (the preternaturally poised Paige Nesle at my performance) who shifts the material into a whole new direction: plaintive but hopeful, initiating a clear-voiced call-and-response with the full choir that will leave you dewy-eyed. It’s an astonishing moment of pure, goosebump-inducing beauty that taps into the pregnant possibilities of change. I Became We is a singular achievement, a choral masterpiece that is thoughtful, smart, funny, and frankly unforgettable. It contains multitudes. ★★★★★
I BECAME WE
Atlantic Theater Company, Off Broadway
Running time: 1 hour, 10 minutes (no intermission)
Tickets on sale through November 15 for $57 to $122