January 1st, 1970

Early in Albee’s self-referential 1998 play, the character named Man enters wearing sunglasses, asking the audience to guide him around the stage. After eliciting responses, he removes the glasses and rhetorically queries, “Have you ever done this? Pretended to be blind?” Like much of Baby, the moment’s a seemingly lighthearted “fuck you” to an audience eager to comprehend and engage with the work.

Fortunately, Albee has the skill and perhaps good-heartedness to couch these metaphorical middle fingers in a funny and often searing bigger picture. Baby revolves around new parents whose bliss abruptly ends when an older couple opens their naive eyes to life’s horrors. Albee shows affection for the young couple in precise, endearing glimpses of their dirty talk and sex life. The second act is a scorchingly articulate collection of taunting takedowns of the young pair by the seductive Woman and MC-like Man.

Yates and Pacas turn in dynamic portrayals of Man and Woman, but Act II demands restraint and dynamism in equal measure. Reeder too often lets the older duo become quick-clipped, slightly loony schoolyard bullies. A gag in which Woman invents sign language to match Man’s spoken words looks more like a foolish game than a cold-hearted, atonal evisceration of the youths. With Baby’s devastatingly eloquent degradations of the young couple dumbed down, its “fuck yous” read all the louder.

- Christopher Shea, Time Out Chicago

January 1st, 1970

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf proved Edward Albee could be awfully mean-spirited. But even by the standards of that bleak 1962 Walpurgisnacht, this 2001 work feels cold-hearted. As in the earlier play, Albee uses two couples–one young and full of hope, the other older, sour, and illusion-puncturing–to explore the myriad sick games couples play. This time, however, he employs a mind-boggling series of Pirandellian tricks (the older folks are quite aware of being characters in a play) to manipulate the audience and mock us for daring to care about the young couple. The result is a script that, even in this focused, lively BackStage Theatre production–and despite the amusements supplied by Albee’s inspired mind games and bad-boy love of puncturing middle-class sentimentality–just doesn’t have any heart. –Jack Helbig

- Jack Helbig, Chicago Reader

January 1st, 1970

When it comes to raining on youthful optimism, pricking the balloon of innocent joy, or spoiling any party attended by young love, Edward Albee is your man.

His very fine 1998 drama “The Play About the Baby” is, in essence, an evening designed to point out to those yet-unaffected (or under-affected) by life’s remarkable capacity to knock you to the canvas that the punches have been pulled only temporarily. The complexity, regrets and pain are all coming, as surely as the extra pounds that will attach themselves persistently to your frame.

Albee, of course, is also a comedian of the most cynical variety. And if there is one pleasure the old get from their terrible foreknowledge of what will befall the young, it’s the chance for schadenfreude. Thus “The Play About the Baby,” the latest production of Chicago’s BackStage Theatre Company staged in the basement of the Chopin Theatre, is constructed as a self-aware little vaudeville, replete with banter, jocularity and slightly sinister epigrams. You don’t know who’s real or not any more than you know what’s real or not. Truth is a tricky business.

So are Albee’s plays, and the cast of director Matthew Reeder’s laudably lean production struggles to find the right tone. The problems with this production mostly surround that perennially thorny question of how authentically to play a world that seems to shift with every different line. That’s understandable. But this is a play that must have menace — buried menace, but menace nonetheless — and this overly mannered show lacks that crucial quality. Any play that contains the line “We’ve come to take the baby” has to send shivers down the spine.

The baby (maybe real, maybe not) in question belongs to a young couple (played by Kate Cares and Patrick de Nicola) who seem to exist in a cocoon consisting only of their mutual physical desire and their love for the infant they’ve produced (maybe). Into their sweet bubble step a suave older duo (Michael Pacas and Karen Yates), whose apparent charming benevolence does not hide their snark. Or their ability to mess with young love.

Cares, a strong and honest young actress, finds the most truth in a production that reflects Reeder’s growing talent for creating concise yet resonant physical worlds (this is a fine space in which to do this play, and Reeder deftly exploits the intimacy). But you never feel the crack as one world clashes into another, nor are the worlds of innocence and reality sufficiently defined and contrasted. It’s all too mushy, and Albee is always best when the edges are like razors.

- Chris Jones, Chicago Tribune

January 1st, 1970

Longevity seems to be a difficult goal for many great American playwrights. Not that their works can’t endure for years to come, which is why they’re great. However, many of them struggle with churning out great plays over the entire span of their career. Quite a few start off white hot, but lose their streak as the years wear on. Arthur Millerwon his first Tony in his thirties for All My Sons, but ended his career with the mediocreFinishing the Picture after years of other mediocre plays. Tennessee Williams also witnessed the success of The Glass Menagerie in his thirties, but didn’t see much success in the last thirty years of his life.

Edward Albee, however, apparently has escaped this curse. He started his career with the brilliant Zoo Story in 1958 and won the Tony Award in 2003 for his brilliant The Goat, or Who is Silvia? He still has his duds (I’m looking at you, Sandbox) but he has definitely aged well and is still kicking out revisions and new works. The Play About the Baby is one of his later plays (1998). It captures the refreshing absurdism that put Albee on the map, even though it was written after most other absurdists were dead. Not often produced, it’s a treat that BackStage Theatre is mounting the rarely seen play, even though it has its bumps.

The play is indeed about a baby, but also about reality, perception, loss of innocence—pretty mature stuff. It starts with a Boy and Girl (Patrick De Nicola and Kate Cares, respectively), living their blissful lives in a blinding white Eden-like setting. They are blessed with a baby, youth, and unquenchable sex drives. Their world is invaded by the bizarrely vaudevillian Man and Woman (Michael Paces and Karen Yates ). The baby mysteriously disappears, and Boy and Girl do whatever they can to find it (or possibly, believe in it again?). Innocence is stripped away. A double-headed snake, the Man and Woman force-feed the younger couple the fruit of knowledge.

Matthew Reeder’s production is surreal, hilarious, disturbing, intimate, and heartbreaking. He doesn’t try to cram a concept onto Albee, but presents the script as written. Some have suggested theories like Man and Woman are Boy and Girl grown up, but you won’t find any hint of that here. As whacky as it is, Reeder’s interpretation of the play is straightforward. This was the smart choice, but unfortunately Albee can get a little confusing, with his blurring of theatricality, absurdism, and reality. The second act, for example, is pretty much the first act chopped up and repeated. Everything gets a little muddled towards the end; it can be hard to keep up.

The cast deeply respects Albee. De Nicola is vicious yet infantile; Cares matches his vulnerability with soft-spoken empathy and a (occasionally disturbing) motherly quality. Paces and Yates are charismatic, funny, and sort of terrifying. Their extended direct addresses can slip into Open Mic Night stand-up territory, but overall they keep the ship afloat and the audience entertained.

This is only the second production of The Play About the Baby in the city since the Chicago premier in 2003. That isn’t too surprising—Albee doesn’t stake out a clear narrative, there’s full-frontal nudity…even the fact that no character has an actual name is kind of scary. Reeder and BackStage bravely stage this tough script, though, and the cast never backs down from Albee’s challenges. Next season sees a flurry of Albee (both newer and older, but all of it is genius), and BackStage’s The Play About the Baby is a deliciously absurd first course.

- Barry Eitel, Chicago Theatre Blog