'Play About the Baby' induces labor pains
JAMES D. WATTS JR. World Entertainment Writer, 03/08/2003
(Left to right) Jeremy Jones is Boy, Craig Walter is Man and Valerie Stefan is Girl in the Edward Albee play “The Play About the Baby.” JOE IVERSON / Tulsa World
Who's your baby?
What's your treasure of treasures? What's the light of your life, the purpose of . . . well, everything?
Is it love, youth, another person? Is it some sense of knowing what's what, what's right, what's wrong, even what's real?
Whatever it is, Edward Albee would like you to know, it isn't real. The only thing you can trust in this world is the pain that's coming your way, the heartbreak, the wounds both physical and emotional.
That's the jagged little philosophical pill Albee serves up in "The Play About the Baby," which Theater Club is presenting through Saturday at the Nightingale Theater.
Or maybe it isn't. This being a play by Albee -- who has made a career out of mining the gray zones between reality and fantasy -- it could very well be that the acid cynicism of "The Play About the Baby" is, well, just play. People have come to expect this kind of misanthropic manipulation from Albee, so he's going to provide it. In spades.
That might explain a lot of the heavy-handed theatricality of this work: the through-the-fourth-wall comments by the actors on the action ("Did two people just run nakedly across the stage, giggling?" one character says after just such a thing happens); the replaying of the end of Act One to begin Act Two; the way the characters themselves are known only as Man, Woman, Boy and Girl.
"The Play About the Baby" is very simple. We have a Boy (Jeremy Jones) and we have a Girl (Valerie Stefan). It would appear that in the opening minutes of the play that the duo has produced a baby (more about this a minute). It would certainly seem a logical conclusion, since the couple seem to spend a great deal of their time and energy in amorous pursuits.
At least, they do until the Man (Craig Walter) and the Woman (Barbara Murn) show up -- first singly, then as a kind of semi-united front, to question just about everything we have seen and might have assumed about Boy and Girl's relationship and, most importantly, the baby they've supposedly produced.
The Man and the Woman, they say, have come to take the baby away. They also seem to know a great deal about the things the Boy and Girl have gone through: the way the two met, when Girl collapsed and Boy passed himself off as her brother to be with her in the hospital; the situation that led to Boy getting his arm broken by a group of bullies; even the pain and terror and blood that accompanied the birth of the baby.
But the stories the Man and Woman tell about who they are and what they know begin to mingle and blur, cross borders of time and space.
Maybe Man and Woman are what Boy and Girl will become someday, the way the title characters in Albee's "Three Tall Women" represented three ages of the same person existing simultaneously.
Or perhaps Man and Woman are some sort of malevolent spirits, bent on breaking through the cocoon of naivete and innocence that Boy and Girl try to create with the age-old plan of "and baby makes three."
Or maybe Albee is just playing existential games with everyone -- that nothing in life is real except pain. "Wounds, children, wounds," Man says. "If you have no wounds, how can you know you're alive? How can you know who you are?"
As heavy as all this sounds, "The Play About the Baby" is larded with a great deal of snarky humor. One could almost classify it as a "comedy of menace," as Harold Pinter used to describe some his early plays.
Most of the humor comes from the Man, and Walter does a superb job in the role. He handles the character's extended monologues with easy grace and style, whether recalling an embarrassing moment at a party or speculating on ideas about reality and perception (that whole bit about how it seems to take longer to reach a destination than it does to return from it).
Walter's naturalness, even as the action grows more surreal, helps ground the play, providing a solid center around which the other, more obviously theatrical characters orbit.
Barbara Murn's Woman announces herself as "theatrical," and she works hard to live up to that billing. Woman wields a variety of schticks -- broad and intentionally poor impersonations of Mae West and Groucho Marx, exaggerated body movements -- so that the quiet moments are supposed to have the impact of a shiv thrust into the heart. At times, Murn was a little too exuberant, cartoonishly so, but for the most part she makes an effective co-conspirator in Man's mischief.
As Boy, Jones is saddled with some of the most embarrassingly unnatural dialogue ever penned -- an uneasy, uncomfortable melange of grown up ideas in child-like rhythms that is almost impossible to make sound convincing. When Boy is allowed to talk and act his age, Jones rises to the occasion -- the story about the broken arm, for example, or the separate pleas to be spared from being "injured beyond salvation."
While the baby is the focus of everyone's conversation, the heart and mind of the Girl is the real battleground. She's truly a blank slate -- she's the only character who has no memories, who pays no attention to the audience, who should have the most direct and personal connection to the baby. Stefan plays Girl with a sweet naivete, never becoming cloying or vapid.
As hard as the actors work, they cannot quite overcome the principal problem with this production -- a problem created by director Corey Douglas' decision to alter slightly the opening scene.
Albee has the play begin with an obviously pregnant girl announcing "I'm going to have the baby now," then walking off-stage to do just that, returning a moment later noticeably unpregnant to say, "There." Douglas' staging has this scene begin in darkness, on stage, the lights slowly coming up to show Girl miming childbirth.
By making this change, Douglas undermines the point of the play. It matters that the baby be real from the start, regardless of what happens as the play unfolds. If there's no baby, there is no threat. Yes, a real baby makes the machinations of the Man and Woman morally and emotionally disturbing -- but that's what Albee is after in this play.
"The Play About the Baby" is very much an evening of adult entertainment -- the language and situations make it inappropriate for young audiences. It continues at 8 p.m. Saturday at the Nightingale Theater, 1416 E. Fourth St.; call 857-9154 for ticket information.
James D. Watts Jr., World entertainment writer, can be reached at 581-8478 or via e-mail at james.watts@tulsaworld.com.