For years Eclipse Theater has steadfastly enriched and enlivened Chicago’s theater landscape each new artistic season by focusing on the plays of a single playwright. By providing audiences with a more complete understanding of a writer’s body of work, they can draw a deeper appreciation for his/her contributions to the culture and posterity. Last year’s often exceptional mounting of plays by William Inge proved a high mark in that mission.
The usual live greeting to the new season this year with its brief explanation for choosing the current year’s playwright, Christopher Durang, was missing. Instead a recorded voice opened the play declaring the name of this season’s chosen playwright while ticking off the standard etiquette reminders to mute mobiles and unwrap your candy now.
Durang, whose plays often inhabit the worlds of comedy, satire and the absurd, is a contemporary artist who enjoys both high acclaim and popularity. Written in 1983, early in his career, Baby and the Bathwater rests firmly in the realm of the absurd. Despite its many comedic accents, both the subject matter and the play’s absurdist foundation made this production darker than expected. At its height during the 50’s and 60’s, and lacking in either realism or “logical development”, modern audience may find the fantastical format disconcerting; but also fascinating.
In the performance, the plunge into realm of implausibility happens quickly as new parents John (Tyler Anthony Smith) and Helen (Elise Marie Davis) gaze starry eyed into the carriage of their new born. When the baby starts to whimper, both panic and make it clear neither of them have the faintest idea how to be the caregiver of an infant. They don’t know how to either comfort or sooth it and are so demure that they can’t bring themselves to even change it and thereby determine its sex. Not knowing the sex and faced with the task of naming the baby, they take a guess and name it, Daisy. It is the wrong guess.
Throughout, the dialogue between the husband and wife divulges much. The alcohol and drug dependency, the absence of financial stability, the penchant for entertaining the delusional and their complete lack of awareness of the appropriate.
An underlying dictum of the absurdist philosophy is that all of mankind lives in a world “devoid of purpose”. Helen and John’s exaggerated removal from the norm fits snugly into this principle and does not improve as the story progresses.
When a Mary Poppins styled nanny shows up to right the ship, she turns out to be just as detached from the pragmatic as the baby’s parents. sexually seducing John and instilling Helen’s with unrealistic fantasies. Cavalier to the point of endangerment in her care for the infant, she’s an eloquent monster played with disarming effect by Jamie Bragg.
Kirby Gibson whose multiple supporting roles help glue the continuity of the play does more than an admirable job of helping the performance maintain an even flow without altering the show’s core intent. Two of her characters, Miss Pringle and Susan, allow her to play the roles straight; heightening the fantastical conceit of both the play and the other actors. Her scene as Miss Pringle sharing her concern with the Principal (Jamie Bragg) about the now teenage Daisy’s emotional state proved a performance highlight. As Principal, Bragg exudes twisted delight in her take on omnipotent power; relishing in her inability to understand the concern being presented to her. She also uses the episode as an excuse to abuse her authority by breezily firing the messenger for inappropriately disturbing her. Here, the melding of satire to the inane worked.
All of the performances were strong. It was the context that also made many of them jarring. The incessant co-dependent inanity between Helen and John strained endurance. You can only imagine what it would do to a child. Daisy, a boy so accustomed to wearing dresses that he suffers a form of separation anxiety about them in his late teens, takes 5 years to complete his freshman year of college, even more to finish his second year and becomes as promiscuous as a high demand sex worker who clocks in thousands of hours on a therapist’s couch in between. Jose Cervantes as Daisy, and a host of male names he gives himself, is easily the most sympathetic character of all.
Eventually after meeting and marrying someone who embodies enough of the normal to gain a toehold on a conventional life, he too becomes a parent who shows signs of slipping into the same maleficent caregiving his own parents exhibited. There are signs he will prevail and escape such an abyss.
Baby and the Bathwater, for all of its many flights into the inconceivable finally touches down in the land of hope. An odd and fitting endpoint to a story so fraught with the impossible.
Baby and the Bathwater
April 11 – May 19, 2019
Eclipse Theatre Company
2936 N. Southport
The Athenaeum Theatre
Chicago, IL 60657
312-625-0422
www.eclipsetheatre.com