The Birth of a Healthy ‘Baby Dance’ : Stage: The idea for an original play about baby buying was born during a brainstorming session between five women.

“There must have been something in the muffins,” said playwright Jane Anderson. “Five of us--an all-girl production team--met in (Pasadena Playhouse artistic director) Susan Dietz’ house to discuss ideas for an original play. We ate muffins and I listened to the passions of the other women. Then I went home and wrote. That’s how ‘Baby Dance’ was born.”

The provocative baby adoption drama, extended through May 13 at the Playhouse’s Balcony Theatre, deals with baby buying and the pound of flesh the transaction emotionally carves from four characters--a fertile but dirt-poor Louisiana couple and an infertile but upscale film industry couple.

The popular production, the first ever commissioned by the Playhouse since its rebirth in ‘86, is now in negotiation to move from the Playhouse to either London or the Kennedy Center “as a package,” said Dietz.

While the playwright and the two actresses in the play, Linda Purl and Stephanie Zimbalist, insist that the work is non-judgmental, the ethical issues involved are so volatile that many playgoers have spilled into the Playhouse courtyard and gift shop fuming over decisions made by characters in the play. How often do you find dramas that divide and disturb patrons? Not very often.

“I overheard two middle-aged women snarl at each other outside the theater in a heated disagreement over the ultimate fate of the newborn baby,” said Anderson. “In my play, I’m not championing private adoption where money is exchanged and I’m not criticizing it. State adoption agencies are so restrictive that some people have no choice. My objective was to present this problem that people are forced into.”

The 35-year-old former stand-up comedian, an East Coast college dropout who acted several years before turning writer full time, paused and said, “I see this baby as a floating soul.”

The gestation of the play itself actually began with the actresses. Purl and Zimbalist didn’t sit around waiting for a call from a producer. They went to Dietz with the desire to stage Strindberg’s two-character, one-act drama, “The Stronger,” another power-relationship drama.

Dietz brought in Anderson and director Jenny Sullivan, and when all of them met for muffins last May, the idea was to come up with an original one-act to pair with “The Stronger.”

Goodby Strindberg, hello “Baby Dance.” Zimbalist had a concept involving a homeless woman and a trendy Manhattanite locked in a room together. Purl said she was interested in babies and a woman who wanted a child but couldn’t have one.

Anderson sat quietly through most of this, but contributed that upper-middle class couples on the adoption circuit value intelligence more than anything else and that she had known a couple who purchased two babies and had incredible hassles with lawyers.

After 3 1/2 hours of discussion, Anderson went home, marshalled together all the pieces, and created “The Baby Dance,” setting much of the play’s action in the poor couple’s home in a shabby trailer court in Monroe, La.

In fact, Purl, who plays the pregnant Southern wife, and director Sullivan traveled to Monroe with camcorder in hand and researched a couple living in a trailer similar to the dirt-poor people in the play. “That’s where I got my accent,” Purl said.

Back home, Anderson was knocking out 10 pages a week and reading them every Monday night before members of the L.A. Writers Bloc, a group of local free-lance writers whom Anderson credits with keeping her writing honest.

(Anderson has a new play, “Food and Shelter,” about a homeless family’s illicit overnight odyssey in Disneyland, opening tonight in San Francisco in the ACT’s Play-In-Progress series. And she walked away from the Humana Festival of New American Plays in Louisville early this month with supportive reviews for “The Pink Studio,” an inventive fantasy piece about painter Henri Matisse.)

In “Baby Dance,” her dialogue crackles and frequently stings: When Zimbalist’s affluent, liberal wife criticizes the impoverished Southern white father (Richard Lineback) for racial remarks about his black neighbors, he slices her up like a melon: So why are you buying yourself a white baby, he asks. Why not go out and get yourself a black one for free?

“My agent’s sister-in-law went through the same thing as my character does,” said Zimbalist.

“We hope not to give baby buying a bad rap,” said Purl. “It’s an emotional play and we want the audience to question what they would do.” Purl, who is credited as one of the producers, joined with Zimbalist in putting up money from their TV earnings to help mount the show.

“We know that if it weren’t for our work in television we could never have done this,” said Zimbalist. “And we want it to go on to more theatrical life,” she added.

Dietz has a British producer, Mark Sinden, shepherding the play in London, for a run with the same stars, Dietz said, either at the Hampstead Playhouse or the Royal Court. Meanwhile, she doesn’t intend to lose that muffin recipe.