Advertisement

‘Baby’ a Tangle of Commerce, Parenting

Share

Despite its frequently hilarious depiction of all-American culture clash--pitting a childless yuppie couple against an overly fertile white trash family--Jane Anderson’s “The Baby Dance” is a serious meditation on the moral tangle that results when the values of commerce are misapplied to the role of parenting.

In fact, procreation starts to look a lot like Supermarket Sweep when Rachel (Cynthia Forbes) and Richard (J. David Krassner), successful players in the movie industry, contract with impoverished Wanda (Jill Remez) and Al (Gavin Glennon) to adopt the baby they can’t afford to raise. Inevitably, class differences in the couples’ attitudes toward everything from nutrition to racism to economics cause amusing but increasingly ugly rifts.

In his flawless staging for Theatre 40, director Bud Leslie never lets the humor eclipse the darker tone, and he coaxes complex and thoroughly believable performances from his talented cast. Even the lawyer/baby broker (Artur Cybulski) has a sympathetic streak beneath his smarmy manipulation.

Advertisement

Anderson’s sharp dialogue never falters, but some rethinking needs to go into the brief finale, which discloses a plot outcome but adds nothing to a dramatic arc that ended emotionally with the previous scene.

Otherwise, Anderson admirably sustains an effective though unsettling refusal to let us off the hook with easy half-truths. Al and Wanda may be deplorable specimens, but their narrow-minded perceptions are often better grounded in real-life experience than Rachel’s insulated wishful thinking. Likewise, Richard’s high-minded concern for doing the right thing becomes suspect when he starts quizzing his lawyer about other possible babies on the adoption block.

In this ethical no man’s land, no one’s hands are clean.

* “The Baby Dance,” Theatre 40, 241 Moreno Drive, Beverly Hills. Sundays-Tuesdays, 8 p.m. Ends Sept. 27. $10. (213) 466-1767. Running time: 1 hour, 55 minutes.

‘Goodrich & Price’ a Warm Reminiscence

The honed performance skills of a show-biz veteran and the compelling impact of a well-told personal narrative prove a combination hard to resist in “Goodrich & Price and the Child,” Lu Leonard’s smart and funny one-woman homage to a childhood spent on the road with her actor parents.

Amy Goodrich and Hal Price were never household names, but they had the talent to make “life itself big time, with love at the top of the bill.” Their life as traveling vaudeville performers doing up to four shows a day left little opportunity for conventional parenting, yet Little Lu had no regrets about spending most of her first eight years in dressing rooms. She loved the excitement and all the colorful characters--magicians, Hungarian acrobats and a certain Captain Horatio who kept tossing the fish meant for his trained pelican into the footlights.

Buoyed by the honesty and simplicity in David Galligan’s staging at Chandler Studio and accompanied by pianist Greg Schreiner, Leonard re-creates these eccentrics with appealing enthusiasm, and her affection for that “innocent world that no longer exists” is ultimately contagious.

Advertisement

* “Goodrich & Price and the Child,” Chandler Studio, 12443 Chandler Blvd., North Hollywood. Fridays, Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 3 p.m. Ends Sept. 25. $10. (818) 508-6714. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.

Advertisement