‘That’s My Baby!’ Is Wrenching Account of Adoption

If you don’t know Beverly Sanders by name, you will almost certainly know her face. Besides appearing in hundreds of television commercials over the years, Sanders also played Easy Susie, the perpetually pregnant character on “Rhoda.”

When it came to getting pregnant in real life, things weren’t so easy for Sanders. In her one-woman “Yes Sir, That’s My Baby!” at the Third Stage, Sanders recounts her experiences with infertility and adoption. It’s a small, specific, intensely personal story, told with humor and wrenching candor.

Fifteen-odd years have passed since Sanders went through her ordeal, but what she has to say is still of the moment and topical. Like an old campaigner reporting from the trenches, Sanders tells of her perilous passage through a minefield of routine humiliation and wrenching disappointment as she tenaciously pursues a baby to call her own. Eventually, Sanders triumphs: Her adopted daughter is now 14 years old, and the apple of her eye.

Essentially a series of strung-together anecdotes, “Baby!” seldom smacks of the episodic, thanks largely to director Asaad Kelada’s unobtrusive staging and Sanders’ smooth stage presence. Some of the anecdotes are frankly hilarious. Some are shocking: A doctor, who is about to inseminate Sanders, makes a coarse crack to her husband. A few are tragic: Months after adopting a baby girl, Sanders and her husband are forced to give the child back to her obviously unfit parents. It’s every adoptive parent’s horror story that, all these years later, chokes Sanders up in the telling--and chokes us up in the hearing.

BE THERE

“Yes Sir, That’s My Baby!,” Third Stage, 2811 W. Magnolia Blvd., Burbank. Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m. Ends June 13. $15. (818) 789-8499. Running time: 1 hour, 15 minutes.