It’s good, but we’ve had ‘What They Have’ before

PHOTO by HENRY DIROCCO

If you loved HBO’s Six Feet Under, you’ll wish that What They Have was about a dysfunctional family that runs a quirky suburban funeral parlor. This new play by Kate Robin (one of the writers of the late cable-TV series) has everything that made that show so wonderful—intelligence, humor, perfect dialogue and tragi-squirmy moments when you recognize yourself in the most profoundly disappointing ways. But instead of mining revelations while blazing a trail toward somewhere we’ve never been—or better, somewhere we’ve maybe never even imagined going—Robin makes us watch while What They Have re-mows the backyard. Or more to the point, re-paints the baby’s room.

The overarching theme of What They Have may be the unquenchable dissatisfaction that eventually drains the pleasure from our American lives, but the heart of the play beats to the ticking of the biological clock. It’s about modern couples who are having trouble having babies.

Been there—scientifically, therapeutically, dramatically, on talk shows and in self-help books—and darn that. Because although What They Have is an excellent play, its topic has been so well-traveled for so long—the first test-tube baby, Louise Joy Brown, was born 30 years ago—that it’s pretty much impossible not to stray into cliché.

What They Have revolves around two artsy couples whose long friendship has become strained by the growing economic gap between them. Connie and Jonas are rich because they have sold their talents to very high bidders (she’s a powerful Hollywood producer, and he writes for a popular TV show). Matt and Suzanne are struggling because they have not (her abstract paintings take up wall space in bank branch offices, and he writes songs when he’s not giving guitar lessons). But both couples want babies with increasing desperation, and when one of them succeeds, the little bundle of joy becomes the biggest dividing force of all.

Sounds familiar, and it tends to play that way, too, undercutting Robin’s incredible ability to write precisely-timed punchlines and subtly crafted social commentary.

Meanwhile, nowhere in all the jawboning does anybody explore the darkest side of this story—the twisted fact that children have become the ultimate vanity accessory in our modern world. Unlike earlier eras, humans don’t need to reproduce to keep our species from extinction. We don’t need the workforce—hunters, farmers, seamstresses and the like—that families once acquired through childbirth. Now we often have children to satisfy some moral or aesthetic value we have ascribed to the concept of family. And in an era where human overpopulation is pretty much the No. 1 threat to life as we know it on planet Earth, all we’re really doing is hastening our own demise by making more resource-consuming polluters.

But nobody in What They Have ever says this. Instead, we feel as though we’ve already met its characters and picked out our own points of view. That never happened on Six Feet Under, because there had never been a TV show that explored family dynamics amid the palpable presence of the Grim Reaper, complete with dead flesh, dried blood and all permutations of grief/relief/celebration.

Perhaps it is unfair to Robin to consider What They Have in comparison to the scripts she did on Six Feet Under; on the other hand, her work on the TV show is one of the biggest marketing tactics for the play—it’s mentioned in the very first paragraph of the South Coast Repertory’s press release. People are coming because they were fans.

They won’t be disappointed by what they see and hear, but more by what they don’t.

WHAT THEY HAVE SEGERSTROM STAGE | SOUTH COAST REPERTORY | 655 TOWN CENTER DR | COSTA MESA 92626 | 714.708.5555 | SCR.ORG | WED&TUES 7:30PM | THURS-FRI 8PM | SAT 2:30&8PM | SUN 2:30&7:30PM | THROUGH MAY 4 | $28-62

Tags: art, six feet under, south coast rep, Theater, what they have