MEASURING CHOICE
by Lucia Scheckner

Rebecca Gilman's new play The Crowd You're In With has a straightforward arrival-and-departure structure that provides the framework for the story. This arrangement of continuous action represents a shift in Gilman’s usual dramaturgical style, which has been episodic or cinematic in nature. In addition, the core issues of the play are also presented less explicitly and more metaphorically than in her previous work.
           
Crowd begins with two young couples enjoying the trimmings of domesticated life at a Fourth of July BBQ. Then their older neighbors arrive. Thereafter this innocuous backyard party transforms into an ideological confrontation about the recognizable signposts of success: marriage, property, and children. The play questions whether individual choices are truly personal or shaped by social and commercial expectations. Gilman also addresses the issue of complacency at this tumultuous moment in American history, even if this larger reality is only obliquely referenced.

Much like the art of calligraphy, the play’s complex and multidimensional landscape - the emotional turbulence and unarticulated passions - is only implied by a few brush strokes. It is the sound and fury of the quotidian details. The characters’ conflicting desires and existential wails live within the pregnant spaces of what is not said. Gilman uses ordinary conversations, pauses, and incomplete thoughts, in order to unearth the truth behind trivial words and daily life.

In past plays, Gilman has looked at murder and rape (The Glory of Living), racism (Spinning Into Butter), and a stalker (Boy Gets Girl). These disturbing manifestations of harm each examine an unhealthy society. In Crowd, however, Gilman shifts the focus to concentrate on self-determination in the ordinary backyard, in the middle-class American everyman. The play is not concerned with villains or heroes. Crowd's characters are not offensive. Indeed, each can be identified with. They are all ultimately decent people who just want to be happy. In this respect, Gilman does not judge, nor does she pressure her audience to. Character unravels incrementally, representing the ways in which motives are composite and subtly woven into the unique experience of each individual.

It would be misleading, however, to suggest that Crowd is altogether gentle and ambiguous. There is an air of urgency. Gilman suggests that one must necessarily take responsibility for one's own life. Moreover, she shows the ways in which people's narcissism often prevents them from acknowledging that personal choices have broader implications. Given today's sociopolitical and environmental crises, what does it mean to bring a child into the world? Crowd stresses the importance of moving out of complacency and confronts these concerns head on.

The play deals with an antiquated dialectic of agency versus fate – a tension at the core of countless great dramatic works. In this respect, Gilman returns to a classical dramatic model, evidenced by the play's unification of time and space. What is distinct, however, is her approach, which leads us deeper into human consciousness. It is precisely the absence of the inevitability characteristic of Greek drama that drives the characters' dilemma. While the pressures they face - marriage, community, parenthood, car payments - may at first appear trivial, they are simply the shape Gilman has drawn to represent the profound human burden of choice.