STAGE REVIEW : ‘Baby Dance’ Stumbles After Strong Start

Wanda is pregnant. Wanda has other children. Wanda’s mother takes care of Wanda’s children. Wanda’s mother has a yard. Wanda lives in a Louisiana trailer park with Al. Al is her husband. Al drinks beer. Al hasn’t paid the phone bill.

Rachel is in film development. Rachel has no children. Rachel lives in Los Angeles with Richard in a big house with a big yard. Richard is her husband. Richard is sterile. Richard will pay for Rachel to acquire a child.

Wanda’s child. That is the hot topic of Jane Anderson’s “The Baby Dance” which opened Sunday in the Balcony Theatre of the Pasadena Playhouse. The issue is as explosive as it sounds and Anderson is not afraid to meet it head on. At least in Act One.

Wanda (Linda Purl) and Al (Richard Lineback) have their backs against the wall. They agree to “sell” their baby because they don’t have much choice. Wanda’s a good and loving mother who hates giving up a new daughter. But with so many other mouths to feed and no money, what’s a mother to do?

Al is no model husband or father, but in his own uneducated way, he cares. Mostly about Wanda. Roughhewn as they are, they are more in touch with the ground below than the overcultivated Rachel (Stephanie Zimbalist), who lives her life according to the latest fashionable fad.

Anderson capitalizes brilliantly on these differences. The emerging picture of Wanda and Al is breathtaking in its accuracy: “po’ white trash” in full flower.

Wanda is a good woman caught in a vise, displaying a natural wisdom on one level (she knows all about lovin’ an’ birthin’ babies) and ingrained ignorance on another (she’s decided birth control doesn’t work and accepts Al’s sexual aggressions as part of his “bein’ a man”). When Al is derogatory about his black neighbors, bleeding-heart Rachel reprimands him for his racial bias. So why are you buying yourself a white baby, asks Al. Why not go out and get yourself a black one for free ?

Anderson’s dialogue crackles and sizzles and pops. It’s funny as well as perceptive. She has a perfect ear for the backwoods talk and plenty of compassion for the grinding poverty that self-perpetuates. She also has clear insights into the economic inequities that create permanent underclasses, and a fine sense of the risible self-inflation in the smug upper middle classes. By the end of an amusing and gripping Act One, with its incandescent closing image of the adoptive mother her ear glued to the belly of the pregnant real one who has dissolved in tears, expectations for Act Two are at fever pitch.

But the play’s resolution doesn’t live up to them. Act Two injects a development (not to be revealed here) that is at once a way of forcing the situation and a diversionary tactic. We meet Richard (Joel Polis) and we meet Ron (a funny sketch by John Bennett Perry), Richard and Rachel’s little toy lawyer--wind him up and he produces a list of desirable parents bearing undesired children--but we don’t come to grips with issues.

The disappointment is great. The first half of Anderson’s play is much too good and too brave. And the production, directed by Jenny Sullivan, is a stunner, in its derail and economy and in the extraordinary performances turned in by Purl (also listed as a producer) and Lineback.

Purl’s Wanda is an unflinching portrait of a forbearing, bright, woman, emotionally inarticulate, but trying to cope honorably with unmanageable problems.

Lineback gives us a frightened, ineffectual, beer-drinking man whose bottled up energy and lack of self-worth explode in bursts of quasi-violence. That he can also show us Al’s tenderness gives the relationship with Wanda dimension and credibility. There is more underlying substance in this union than we can find between Rachel and Richard, whose outward success does not, we discover, reflect much inner compatibility.

Deborah Raymond and Dorian Vernacchio have again delivered a terrific pair of sets. But the play’s still the thing. Anderson has a real tiger by the tail. When she finishes sketching in the rest of the body and the head, watch out.

At 39 S. El Molino Ave. in Pasadena, Tuesdays through Saturdays, 8:30 p.m.; matinees Saturdays and Sundays, 2:30. Ends March 11. Tickets: $25; (818) 356-PLAY).