"Mine," the very arresting and intensely personal new play by Laura Marks at the Gift Theatre, begins with a young woman having a baby at home and takes place entirely during the next few weeks of that newborn's life. If you look back at that title for a moment and ponder, you'll likely note the double-entendre. Those foggy first weeks of parenting are, of course, a time when one must come to terms with a new sense of dread toward the world, given the existence of an achingly vulnerable human being more important to you — and, it feels, only to you — than your own life. But sleep deprivation plays its tricks, and a new arrival causes havoc in a marriage. Babies usually blow things up.
The nitty-gritty, be it physical or psychological, of parenting an infant is very underexplored in the theater, not least for practical reasons, given the difficulty of casting the antagonist. So while there is much to admire in director Marti Lyons' carefully wrought Gift production, nothing is more admirable than the level of believability of this entire enterprise.
Gift is a very small theater; the viewer is no more than about a dozen feet away from the actors.
