![]() ![]() But you can bet Daisy does.Bed rails are designed for two primary reasons, to prevent falls and to help you climb in and out of the bed. It’s not completely clear that “Baby with the Bathwater” earns its own mildly hopeful conclusion. Tyler Jones enters the picture as Daisy, his air of exasperation and resignation adds welcome poignancy to the work. Kailey O’Donnell also does solid work as the teacher and as a frizzy-haired, frazzle-brained visitor named Cynthia. She’s even nuttier as a sultry-voiced school principal who’s more interested in cooing demands to her (male) assistant than attending to a teacher’s concerns about Daisy’s disturbing summer-vacation essay. Wride’s performance is pitched perfectly to Nanny’s blithe way of brushing off such horrors as the baby’s brief kidnapping. Mackey’s character is more the docile, put-upon type, although the actor does erupt in an impressive aria of apoplexy in the second act.Īnd if “Baby” accomplished nothing else, it still would deserve praise for the gift of Shana Wride in the role of the very scary Nanny and other characters. (She insists acidly that John cannot call the baby “Sweet Pea” or anything else related to food.) Sitton, making a welcome return to the local stage (after having a baby of her own, as it happens), is especially adept at Helen’s breakneck changes of mood and her near-psychotic whims and fixations. Oswald also gets the best out of his cast, starting with Amanda Sitton and Brian Mackey as the parents, Helen and John. (Although “Baby” spans some 30 years of time, visually and sonically it never really leaves the ‘80s.) The parents’ behavior, though, is so over the top that it’s difficult to feel much emotional connection to their child’s plight or sympathy for their shortcomings - at least until we finally meet the kid in question (a boy named Daisy) late in the play.ĭirector Andrew Oswald does all he can to keep the comedy from floating off into the irretrievably surreal he also teams with such savvy artists as set designer Kristen Flores, costumer Kate Bishop and sound designer Melanie Chen to create a suitably loopy environment for the piece. The playwright (who won a Tony Award in 2013 for the more human and multilayered “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike”) can do contemporary farce with the best of them, and the absurdities endured by the poor child in “Baby” earn plenty of good (and guilty) laughs. ![]() That’s actually not close to the worst example of parental dereliction in Christopher Durang’s 1983 play, a fact that might tell you a little about the generally whacked-out comic spirit of the piece.ĭiversionary Theatre’s revival of this seldom-produced work injects plenty of antic energy into the saga of an unstable couple who prove terrifyingly ill-prepared to bring a child into the world.įor all the comic chops of the show’s five actors, though, Durang’s satirical voice can come off as shrill and a little hollow here. ![]() Every parent needs a mood-booster once in a while, and for the dad in “Baby with the Bathwater” that means a stiff shot of vodka - from a flask stashed away in a baby’s toy. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |