REVIEWS ...
Monday, February 18, 2002
Provocative 'Play About the Baby' blends humor, joy and sorrow
By Christine Dolen
cdolen@herald.com
Do not be deceived by the simplicity of its straightforward title, nor by the evocative pinks and blues of a set dominated by the cherubic visage of an idealized blond, blue-eyed baby.
The Play About the Baby is, after all, by Edward Albee. And Albee's art is not of the simple, feel-good variety.
Now getting its Florida premiere at GableStage -- which will, as Producing Artistic Director Joseph Adler announced on opening night, be spending an additional season in its current Biltmore Hotel space before moving in September 2003 to a still-in-negotiation larger new theater -- The Play About the Baby is deliberately unsettling, intellectually provocative, flamboyantly theatrical as it discomfittingly mixes humor, joy and sorrow.
An allegory about the loss of innocence, it pits an older couple -- here called simply Man (John Felix) and Woman (Cynthia Caquelin) -- against a younger one, though it is stylistically quite different from the combat in Albee's earlier play about two couples and an unseen baby, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.
Girl (Claire Tyler) and Boy (Nick Bixby) become first-time parents in the play's opening moments. Girl very noisily gives birth just offstage, returning seconds later completely slim and nursing her infant (ah, artifice!), reveling in her happiness with her man-child husband.
Right there onstage, Boy takes his own turn at her breast. And later, both of them totally nude, he chases her in a childish game fueled by lust.
All too soon, Man and then Woman arrive to psychologically brutalize them, though in a highly entertaining way. Unlike Boy and Girl, Man and Woman speak directly to the audience, engaging us, soliciting responses and a kind of complicity in the worldly-wise idea that they are just, after all, going to show these kids how life inevitably wounds everyone.
Albee underscores the artificial nature of this "vaudeville" by having Man and Woman re-start the scene that takes place just before intermission, comment to the audience on each other's stories and actions, even discuss the audience's very predictable activities (smoking, drinking, using the bathroom, compulsively using a cell phone) at intermission.
The production gets a clean but pointedly theatrical look from set-and-lighting designer Jeff Quinn (the baby's head sculpture is by Miriam Gwiazda) and costume designer Daniela Schwimmer. Together, Quinn and Schwimmer take the traditional pale pink-and-blue baby palette into stronger, more unsettling hues -- Woman's attire and Man's tie, for instance, are a vibrant Pepto-Bismol pink.
Adler and the four actors serve the script with assurance, Tyler and Bixby finding their characters' naiveté even while cavorting in their birthday suits, Felix playing the all-knowing host (though without the smilingly diabolical edge Brian Murray brought to the role), Caquelin radiantly turning in the best performance of her career.
The Play About the Baby isn't easy to watch. But Albee has never been about taking the easy way, and audiences willing to travel with him are in for an uncommonly rich experience.
Christine Dolen is The Herald's theater critic.
Tuesday, February 19, 2002
Albee's Baby is designed to rattle audience
By Jack Zink, Theater Critic
Old folks sure know how to spoil a good time. It's not enough that they're sourpusses themselves -- they've got to go and ruin dreamland for everybody.
Consider the young couple Boy (Nick Bixby) and Girl (Claire Tyler), frolicking naked across the GableStage performance space, celebrating the arrival of their first child while resuming their sexual relationship.
They don't notice the Woman (Cynthia Caquelin) downstage center, talking to all those people in the audience staring agape at Boy and Girl in the buff. But the Woman notices them; with the help of a Man (John Felix), she's about to make their lives miserable.
This is The Play About The Baby, by Edward Albee, having its regional premiere in Coral Gables. It's an allegory about the loss of innocence that is as thematically spooky as any Albee has ever written. But it's not angry, not like Albee's voracious Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the long-ago theatrical precedent that this work vaguely echoes.
The Baby play is impish, satiric and rascally as only grown-ups who have been through life's grinder know how to be. The Man and the Woman, who might as well wink with the audience to acknowledge our shared disillusionment, proceed to strip Boy and Girl of life's certainties.
The baby, for instance, disappears. Has the child been abducted? If so, why? If not, did it ever exist? Albee uses the never-seen child to toy with assumptions that the Man and Woman relentlessly challenge.
As GableStage director Joe Adler presents it, The Play About The Baby is a provocative drama both sexually and intellectually. At first, Bixby and Tyler are Adam- and Eve-like in their carnal bliss, talking frankly about their desires (his, mostly) when not actually fulfilling them. Although their relationship is innocently portrayed, conservative audiences should be aware that their intimacy goes somewhat beyond mere suggestion: Boy has a breast fetish, and Girl accommodates it.
Director Adler's hand, though as unseen as the baby, is as evident as a puppetmaster. All attention is focused on the players via Jeff Quinn's sets and lighting. The stage floor is bare except for two chairs (pink for Girl, white for Boy) in front of a royal blue wall with one large, closed window.
Clouds are painted on part of the wall, like a half-finished project in a nursery room. Framing the front is a large, pink proscenium arch with a doll-like baby's head looking down from the center (a sculpture by Miriam Gwiazda).
Albee has described The Play About the Baby as vaudeville, a characteristic easily recognizable in the older couple's routines. At times, their taunts and harassments of the young dim-bulbs resemble a burlesque comedy sketch; at others, the grown-ups perform a sort of olio with well-rehearsed verbal soft-shoe, the kind of linguistic dance at which Albee is without peer.
All of this is performed with high style and artifice by Felix and Caquelin, while Bixby and Tyler's youthful cluelessness is transformed to utter perplexity. So might yours.
In the end, Felix and Caquelin succeed at giving the young couple the medicine they'll supposedly need to face life's further challenges. And Albee has given audiences yet another dose of his theatrical castor oil. So swallow, because the label says it's good for you.
Jack Zink can be reached at jzink@sun-sentinel.com or 954-356-4706.
