Onetwothreefourfive. That’s quintuplets, all finally put down to sleep. Home is finally quiet, though the parents—Judith (Emma Healey) and Gary (Justin Isett)—look like they’ve just survived wave after wave after wave of full-frontal military assault. Judith, standing in her robe and slippers, slightly sways. She realizes she can’t stop doing the “baby rock,” a repetitive-stress motion her muscle memory just keeps replicating in order to survive.

They’re alone, no assistance from a phalanx of nurses. It’s just them and their five children, at home, trying to figure out this whole parenting thing. And when in doubt about something, Judith and Gary quickly check their parenting guides and online resources. We do, you know, live in a culture that produces how-to/self-help guides for whatever life moment you may be facing. Weight loss. Better sex. How to land Mr. Right. How to seduce women. How to make money. How to save money. How to turn your saved money into more money. And, even though human beings have been reproducing for at least a hot minute, miles and miles of text about baby-making, baby-having, and parenting—all filled with statistics to inform prospective/new parents about the probabilities facing their offspring. And there’s nothing quite as debilitating as a little information.

So when Judith notices a red spot on one of her children’s cheeks and tells Gary that she thinks it’s herpes—and points him to the book that confirms this suspicion—they dive headlong into the paranoia of statistics overload. One out of every 10 children will have to deal with childhood obesity. Only one out of five (or something) is going to succeed academically. One may be good at sports. One may be . . . an artist? (Judith cringes.) But that’s not all, oh no. Soon the stats are creating more and more and more ludicrous scenarios for the parental unit to freak out about: One of their children is likely to become addicted to marijuana. One is likely to drop out of school and end up living at home. One is likely to be Chinese.

Welcome to 2011’s installment of Run of the Mill Theater’s ingeniously playful Variations project. Launched in 2005 as a way to prod local playwrights into exploring a theme in short one-acts, over the years the Variations programs—on Desire, on Fear, on Justice, etc.—have birthed a wide variety of narratives that loosely come together in one dependably engaging night of smorgasbord theater-going. Don’t like one play? Wait a moment, something else will start soon.

This year’s Variations on Chaos offers a rather freewheeling thematic hub. The playwrights—John J. Conley, Kevin Kostic (who wrote the above “One Out of Five”), Susan M. McCarty, J-F Bibeau, Laura Merrill, Clarinda Harriss, Matthew Smith, Joe Dennison, and Ben Hoover—approach the idea from a variety of angles. Some embrace chaos as organized disorder. Some riff on ideas of chaos theory and its interrelational narrative sparks. Some aim straight for the apeshit.

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