“I Became We” is currently playing at Atlantic Theater Company’s Linda Gross Theater without a conventional cast of characters played by Equity actors. Instead, the cast is a choir of sixteen members made up of professional singers from opera, concert, film, symphony orchestra, and theatre in addition to a conductor (Jack D. Coen, who is also responsible for music and lyrics) and a pianist (Blair McMillan). Mona Pirnot’s libretto turns an intimate first-person story into a collective meditation with the choir singing the words of the story’s narrator.

The libretto is a sequence of fifty-eight short, titled sections, and the staging has no acting or blocking. It naturally unfolds in three arcs. The first arc begins with “I Saw a Segment” and ends with “If You’d Have Asked Me.” The story begins after the female narrator watches a segment on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” called “What Do You Know About the Female Body?” The men interviewed on the street know nothing about the female reproductive system. Embarrassed that she did know the answer to one of the questions, she began searching the internet to find out how many eggs her thirty-four-year-old self was left with. The relatively low number surprises her, as does the fact that fertility significantly drops at age thirty-five. The search does not concern her since both she and her husband have always been sure that they “don’t want kids.” The theme in this first arc is how a settled identity can be unsettled by time, experience, and desires the narrator did not know she had. However, as the story continues, her certainty begins to wane.

The second arc begins with the section “One Month Later” and ends with “The House Is Ours.” After spending time with her mother and discovering she wants to start a new life—a “third act”—in Bolzano where she “might meet a man,” the narrator realizes that something is missing in her own life and decides to approach her husband about owning a house. Nothing is permanent. Things can change. The theme in this second arc is the ability to confront life’s transience that creates a longing to make a permanent home and actively choose one’s future. But will owning a house end the narrator’s new journey across unknown territory?

The libretto’s final arc begins with the section “Getting Settled” and ends with “I Became We” and reveals the important meaning of the title of the piece. When the house gets quiet, the narrator begins to realize that purchasing the house with her husband can no longer distract her from the question underneath the move: whether she wants children—the question that has haunted her since holding the barbecue hostess’s baby. Seeking her mother’s counsel about parenthood does not resolve her uncertainty about becoming a mother. A child, Paige Nesle, appears in the “I Don’t Know” section voicing the uncertainty about children: “I cannot stop thinking about children / And how I said I never wanted them / And how now I’m not so sure.” In the final scene, the narrator tells her husband that she became a “we” when they met. He replies that his mind could change as well. Their shared concern becomes not simply whether to have a child, but how two changing people can face mortality and uncertainty together. The theme in the third arc is that love does not remove uncertainty. Instead, it makes life’s irreversible choices mutual, while also asking how a shared life can endure change.

Under Sarah Benson’s careful staging, the narrative moves to its conclusion seamlessly. The audience has no concept of time as it focuses on the enduring themes voiced by the choir, its conductor, Jack D. Coen, and its accompanist, Blair McMillan. The sets by Mimi Lien, the costumes by Louisa Thompson and Gylanni Carrington, the lighting by Tuce Yasak, the crystal-clear sound by Palmer Hefferen, and projections by Nicholas Hussong serve to make “I Became We” a special event. Kudos to Atlantic Theater Company for taking the risk to bring such a new theatrical concept to the off-Broadway stage.

Although the story seems to center on the question of whether to choose parenthood, the enduring question posed is more universal and equally difficult to “answer.” How should we make meaningful, irreversible choices when time is limited and certainty is impossible? When the narrator begins to grapple with the movement from individual autonomy to the moment when she and her husband wonder whether two changing people can choose a common future, the question “How close can we get to forever?” becomes relevant. That is the moment when “I Became We” happens.