The Play About the Baby

Reviewed by Neal Weaver
The Road Theatre on Magnolia
Extended through December 10

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As I was driving to The Road Theatre to see this Edward Albee play, the radio news announced that Albee had died earlier in the day, at the age of 88. At the theatre, director Andre Barron informed the crowd in the lobby that Albee had passed away. There was a murmur of sadness, but neither the crowd nor the actors were willing to let Albee’s death throw a wet blanket on his play’s rich comedy.

Albee was always inclined to be cryptic, and famously refused to answer questions about the meaning of his works from either actors or audiences. It was up to them, he said, to divine his meaning. And he remained cryptic to the end.

His best and most renowned play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was concerned with two couples: an older pair, George and Martha, and a younger pair, Nick and Honey. In The Play About the Baby, there are also two couples but here they are reduced to abstractions: the older couple are Man (Sam Anderson) and Woman (Taylor Gilbert), while the younger ones are Boy (Philip Orazio) and Girl (Allison Blaize).

And that’s not the only similarity between the two plays, which seem to have a subterranean and perhaps symbiotic relation. In both, there is a contested child. In Virginia Woolf, the child is imaginary. In the current work, the baby seems to be real. The Girl gives birth to it in the early moments of the play. But the happiness of the young parents is short-lived: Man and Woman arrive on the scene and announce they have come to take the baby.  And once the baby is gone, they attempt to persuade Boy and Girl that there is no baby, that the baby never existed, despite their memories of its birth.

Who are these people? Logic is not much help here. We’re never told why Man and Woman want the baby, or what they intend to do with it. On the obvious level, Boy and Girl represent youth, hope and optimism, while the older couple suggest age and experience — and possibly cynicism. What does it all mean? As always, Albee leaves it up to us. But he gives us plenty of clues: Man asks boy, “If you have no wounds, how do you know you’re alive?” And he talks about the abyss that lurks in wait for us, beneath our everyday lives. “Not yet,” Boy cries, “let us keep our happiness a while longer.” But his plea falls on ears that are, if not deaf, at least unsympathetic.

Ultimately, the characters are theatrical constructs, designed to give the playwright the opportunity to air his views and say what he wants to say. Perhaps Man is Albee himself, challenging our illusions, and cruelly ripping away our false optimism. A playwright is, after all, a bit of a sadist: the power of his tale depends on his ability to inflict on his characters terrible things to contend with. And the more terrible and difficult they are, the greater the stature of his play becomes. And who is Woman? Your guess is as good as mine, but perhaps she’s another aspect of Albee — his more frivolous, fantasist side.

The thing that is astonishing is how funny the play is, despite its grim underpinnings. There’s a constant ripple of laughter throughout Act 1. The comedy is more sporadic if no less funny in Act 2. Albee keeps the tone light, or as British playwright Christopher Fry put it, he’s “coruscating on thin ice.”

Director Barron has cast the piece beautifully and deploys his actors with wit in Albee’s clever ideological vaudeville. Orazio’s Boy is feckless, randy, and greedy, competing with the baby for Mommy’s nipple. As Girl, Blaize is at first happy to revel in Boy’s attention, but her grief at the loss of her baby is real, and throughout much of Act 2, she hovers on the brink of tears. As Woman, Gilbert is giddy and garrulous, happily recounting her possibly fictitious amorous memories. But it is Anderson who finds multiple layers of meaning in Man — now humorous, now passionate, indignant, and angry — and who gives the production its richest substance.

The only disappointment is Sarah B. Brown’s set design. In the Broadway production, the setting featured huge out-sized toys in what critic Ben Brantley called “a nursery of the mind.”   Brown’s design seems to represent no place in particular, and does little to prepare us for the play’s intriguing oddity.

The Road Theatre on Magnolia, 10747 Magnolia Boulevard, North Hollywood. Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m., Sun., 2 p.m., Extended through Dec. 10. (818) 761-8838 or www.roadtheatre.org. Running time: Two hours with one ten minute intermission.