This baby talk is very serious

Where DO babies come from?

That question keeps getting trickier. Adoption, surrogacy and medical advances have created unexpected options for hundreds of thousands of women and men who might otherwise have little chance of starting a family.

"As reproductive technologies keep changing, the ability to choose when to have kids, to not be locked into a certain age range, gets down to what choice really means," says Michael John Garces, artistic director of the Cornerstone Theater Company. At the same time, he notes, desire can be trumped by financial demands and personal and ethical pressures.

Garces' downtown ensemble is a champion of socially active -- and interactive -- theater, which is why it commissioned a play about the complexities of what he calls "reproductive choice." Julie Marie Myatt's "Someday," which opens June 6, weaves together nearly a dozen tales of aspiring parenthood, most notably a couple's attempts to conceive through in vitro fertilization and egg donation, and a disabled woman's battle to adopt a newborn she discovered in an alley. The piece is the second of five plays in the Justice Cycle, a multiyear exploration of ways in which laws influence Angelenos.

Many of the show's themes and characters grew out of an outreach program Cornerstone developed to provide material for projects like its earlier Faith-Based Cycle, which examined spirituality and religion in L.A.

People from different communities join "story circles," sharing experiences that an author crafts into a script. Garces wrote the Justice Cycle's opener, the 2007 "Los Illegals" that was inspired by conversations with day laborers, domestic workers and immigration activists, among others. Myatt was enlisted for "Someday" because, says Garces, "Julie has the ability to capture the scope and story of the big picture and still hone in the details. That's important because the drama is inherently in those life stories and the decisions people have to make."

Myatt, who lives in Los Feliz, has been on a hot streak. Last year, her works premiered at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. She is no stranger to weighty subjects or extensive reportage, having written about homelessness, Iraqi war vets and the Cambodian sex trade -- the last in an ambitious venture that took four years to complete. Even so, she has never done anything like this.