At what point did baby hunger become the hot cultural topic? 2008 has been saturated with cinematic tales of women lusting after children, from the hilarious Baby Mama to the dour Then She Found Me. Now playwright Jennifer Maisel has tossed her hat into the kiddie ring with There or Here.

But not content to settle for just one hot topic, Maisel has her childless couple Robyn (Annie Meisels) and Ajay (Alok Tewari) opt for outsourcing their pregnancy in India. This gives Maisel plenty of opportunities to comment on culture clashes, the lengths some couples will go to for children, and even cancer.

Unfortunately, Maisel relies on temporal shifts too often to give her stale material the illusion of freshness. As scenes jump from the present to the past, keeping up with the narrative thread isn’t too difficult—but you wonder why you’re being forced to work at paying attention when what you’re watching is so thin.

One of the recurring motifs of There or Here (other than distracting monologues in which Robyn suddenly begins describing her past in the third-person) is Robyn and Ajay’s inability to communicate with one another. Both seek comfort in faceless voices on the other end of the phone line. Ajay turns to a comically inept phone sex operator (whose accent marks her as a foreigner; in Maisel’s world, anyone with an accent is automatically working from another country). Robyn, meanwhile, is the kind of monstrously self-absorbed woman who strikes up a phone friendship with a computer support worker. We’re supposed to believe that she and the voice on the phone forge a relationship, but boring indeed is the job that would make calls from Robyn into special treats. In both instances, Deepti Gupta does a nice job as the voice on the other end of the line, slightly confused about playing therapist to these two needy Americans.

But as anyone who has ever seen a plot dependent upon a surrogate should know, Robyn and Ajay’s brilliant idea—hatched when they selfishly decide that they can’t wait until Robyn’s cancer is definitely in remission to have children—doesn’t go according to plan. And watching Ajay and Robyn drift further and further apart as one finds solace from a life unraveling in a phone sex worker and the other battles insomnia with a computer technician, their scheme to become parents seems like a quick fix in a marriage that’s rapidly disintegrating. Robyn, in particular, is the kind of naïve woman who calls a relative stranger in the middle of the night to drive her around the parts of India she’s never before seen the night before she and Ajay return to the U.S. To Meisels’ credit, she refuses to sand off any of Robyn’s rough edges in a fearless performance that doesn’t beg for the audience’s sympathy. That’s a relief, because eliciting sympathy for Robyn would be a tough sell for any actress.

Photo by Amy Feinberg
 
Thru Sept. 28. The 14th Street Theater, 344 E. 14th St. (betw. 1st & 2nd Aves.), 212-352-3101; $18.