The New One Is an Ambivalent Case for Fatherhood, and Mike Birbiglia's Best Work Yet
“I hate it when people tell me what anything is about,” Mike Birbiglia said recently in reference to the opening of his new show, The New One, at the Cherry Lane Theatre in downtown New York (through August 26). “Last year I loved Lady Bird, Get Out, and The Big Sick, and my greatest gift to my friends was to tell them to see those movies and don’t read anything about them.” All due respect, Mr. Birbiglia, but you make a critic’s job a little tricky.
I did go into The New One not knowing anything about the show—but it doesn’t take long to cotton on to the double meaning of the title. The “new” thing is not just the stand-up’s latest; it’s a somewhat unwelcome interloper who has established her tyrannical rule within the comic’s formerly peaceful nuclear unit. Birbiglia’s wife, Jen, was the kind of woman who could restore him from life on the road—trips from which he returned, as the comic puts it, “just bones and garbage and Diet Coke and Cinnabon wrappers held together by those plastic ringlets that bind sodas and strangle ducks.” There’s a long-running bit in the latest show about the humble charms of a couch, and Jen serves this kind of warm, enveloping role as well. Did Birbiglia want a kid? Would you sacrifice that kind of unadulterated, personalized comfort? But have a kid they did.
A lot of Birbiglia’s prior comedy—a lot of comedy!—has a solipsistic bent, and I mean that as a compliment. Birbiglia has a down-to-earth, good-guy vibe—the most menschy (lapsed) Catholic you’ll ever encounter. Onstage, in his chinos and T-shirt, he’s not normcore, he’s just normal. If he showed up at your party, you wouldn’t have to ask him if he wanted beer or wine, you’d already know. In 2008, when Nathan Lane introduced Birbiglia, he said: “You know you’re getting the real turtle soup, not merely the mock.” It’s a cozy pleasure to be in his company.
And quite apart from his unpretentious appeal, the man has been through some noteworthy travails—as he reminds us in this show, he suffers from a life-threatening sleep disorder that once sent him walking through the window of a room in a La Quinta Inn. (If you haven’t heard his riff on the enforced pronunciation of that establishment, I highly recommend listening to it, stat.) And he distills those struggles into entertainment that is alternatingly raucous and poignant. At one point in the show I saw, Birbiglia offhandedly indicated that he was going to “bring it down” a notch or two, and it struck me that he’s a master of this kind of modulation.
Fatherhood gets a similar loud-soft, tragic-comic treatment in his latest. (Though there is one breathtaking moment of stagecraft in which the finely tuned seesaw is obliterated with great dramatic effect.) It seem silly to say that a comic has “found their subject”—who am I to judge?—but there is something about the process of becoming a dad that seems to have opened up a new and wonderful exploration for Birbiglia. If his past work had him neurotically pacing within his own consciousness, refracting his mother and father and urologist and priest through his own singularly entertaining lens, now he is considering the bigger question of what it might be like to pass parts of that consciousness on to another human being.
Of course, none of that kind of heaviness enters the show. The actual performance is a romp—a perfectly paced ride through the indignities of early parenthood, especially for a father who finds himself sidelined for the most physical parts of parenting. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do,” Birbiglia admits, as he watches his wife give birth. “I guess I’ll just write an email to everyone I’ve ever met. Which is really the chief responsibility of the dad. The mother births a double bowling ball out of her vagina and then the dad just knocks out an email.”
One of Birbiglia’s earlier specials was titled What I Should Have Said Was Nothing, and there’s a sense in this show as well that he’s saying things he’s not supposed to. In some of those pauses between the punchlines, he expresses the sadness and the bitterness in feeling “evicted from your own life sponsored by you,” even going so far as to state that he understands why some dads walk out on their families. But make no mistake, this is a life-affirming piece of work, for fathers, mothers, and all of us who have them.
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