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The Rice Thresher
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Robert Reichle Thresher Editorial Staff Christopher Durang's Baby With the Bathwater is a bizarre play by anyone's standards. An absurd dark comedy about child-rearing gone awry, Baby With the Bathwater's over-the-top situations and offbeat humor could provide a dangerous trap for the average cast and crew. Despite these challenges, Will Rice College's production of the play manages to succeed with few flaws. The play begins with Helen (Will Rice senior Amanda Blankenship) and John (Will Rice senior Matt Frost) gooing and gaaing over their new baby. The new parents are emotionally deformed, wholly irresponsible and completely out of touch with such basic, simple realities as their baby's gender. (You'd think it'd be easy enough to just peek under the diaper.) Soon after bringing the baby home from the hospital, the overbearing know-it-all Nanny (Will Rice senior Kendall Moseley) shows up and adds her own out-of-touch point of view to the mix. Between the yelling at the baby, singing inappropriate nursery rhymes and feeding the baby Nyquil and vodka, Dr. Spock would be pissed. Before long another stranger, Cynthia (Will Rice freshman Guinevere Casey-Ford), joins the household and imposes her own twisted wishes on the baby. By the end of the first act, the adults are being so irresponsible that the household resembles a game of The Sims left on overnight - four people sleep in one bed, they don't change the baby's diaper and they yell at it to shut up. As the second act begins, the baby has grown into a (surprise!) highly dysfunctional little girl. The child is never seen onstage, but interactions between two women in the park (Casey-Ford and Moseley) and between the child's teacher and principal (again, Casey-Ford and Moseley) reveal how scarred he/she is from his/her preposterous upbringing. As the child matures into a adult who yearns to be normal (played by Will Rice sophomore Matt Haynie), he hashes out his psychological torture with an offstage psychologist (Wiess College senior Susanne Pringle, also the play's co-director and producer) and his eternally messed-up parents. Despite all the mistreatment the child goes through (his parents called him a baked potato, for crying out loud!), the play ends with a hint of twisted hope. Baby With the Bathwater would be a depressingly dark play if not for its bizarre, random humor. Frost leads the cast with his superb comic timing, making every scene he's in hilarious. He also does a good job of making John totally clueless yet still interesting. Blankenship's Helen also has her moments, although the script calls for a little too much indignant yelling on her part. In the calmer scenes, however, she and Frost play well off each other. Moseley's Nanny is a truly frightening character, and at times the character's psychosis goes a little too far over the top. However, as the school's principal, Moseley executes some hilarious one-liners and visual gags. Ironically, the scene between the principal and teacher, while funny, is one of the script's weaker points because it feels so out of place. Casey-Ford's Cynthia is the right combination of spacey and scary, and Haynie portrays the young man as appropriately confused, conflicted, but still somehow normal in a way. Unfortunately, Moseley and Casey-Ford play so many characters that at times they start to blend together. Directors Pringle and Steve Carstensen, a Will Rice senior, do a good job of using the awkward space of the Will Rice Private Dining Room. The blocking makes efficient use of the minimal set, which consists solely of a sofa-bed, and is inconspicuous enough to not interfere with the absurd nature of the play. The lighting, designed by Carstensen, is nothing remarkable, but the script doesn't really call for any elaborate situations. The lighting and music are used quite effectively to highlight an important transformation for one of the characters. Durang's script is good overall, but it also leads to this production's biggest problems. Too much of the play is spent with the characters screaming like banshees at each other, and my ears were actually ringing on more than one occasion. With all the yelling, the pacing gets a little weird at points because the characters are simply fighting back and forth with no resolution. And it definitely takes a certain sense of humor to appreciate the play's darker moments, so some theatergoers might not get all the jokes. In all, Baby With the Bathwater is a rock-solid production. The dark humor works nearly every time thanks to Frost's great deadpan and the cast's chemistry as a whole. The script isn't for everyone, but the cast and crew of the Will Rice Theater production overcome its flaws on nearly every level, making for a hilarious show.
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