A bundle of fertility issues

Amid all the baby mania in "Someday," the second installment of Cornerstone Theater Company's multi-play Justice Cycle -- this one focused on the complicated new world of reproductive politics -- the last lines of Anne Sexton's "The Double Image" kept echoing in my mind. Filled with a mother's remorse after another suicide attempt, the poem builds to Sexton's sorrowful confession to her daughter: "And this was my worst guilt; you could not cure / nor soothe it. I made you to find me."

Such psychological foraging isn't the style of "Someday," a theatrical survey of characters in feverish search of offspring, written by Julie Marie Myatt and directed by Cornerstone artistic director Michael John Garces. The piece, which was informed by community dialogue, is far more intent on covering a broad spectrum of concerns. Everyone gets a fair shake in the company's compassionate sharing circle, but as a result, the examination is discursive, overstuffed and only occasionally inhabited in the sustained way we expect from drama.

This fertility stew contains a bit of everything: the rights of the disabled to adopt, the exorbitant cost of surrogate birth options, the irreducible weirdness of the sperm and egg donor system, the challenges faced by nontraditional families and, to a lesser degree than might be expected, the hot-button dilemma of unwanted pregnancies.

Diffuse as the play may be, there's something instructive in having all these issues bundled together. What's clear from this well-intentioned if at times textbook-like overview is that we live in an age in which individuals believe they should be able to control their fates. The notion that biology is destiny seems like a throwback to a more passive yesterday, no matter that you might go bankrupt, financially and emotionally, trying to bio-medically steer your own course.

Equally obvious is that the kind of inner emptiness Sexton painfully diagnosed in herself can still be a motivating factor for parenthood. Couples want to stabilize uncertain relationships, the chronically single would like to fill their lonely lives and prospective moms and dads who have been discriminated against are groping for restitution.

Of course, "just wanting a kid" can mean almost anything -- a desire to love and nurture, to pass along genetic material, to correct one's childhood, to affirm a partnership and, perhaps most important of all, to endow ephemeral life with a sense of purpose and continuity. Any discussion of the topic can't help taking an existential turn.