Mar 24, 2008

Local theater goes ga-ga

Juvenile role-playing propels dark comedy

By John Angell Grant / Theater Reviewer

Lesbian playwright Paula Vogel was first propelled into the limelight with "How I Learned to Drive," a surprisingly sympathetic portrayal of a male pedophile leching after his underage niece. Besides dozens of productions across the country, Vogel also won a Pulitzer Prize for the play in 1998.

Palo Alto's Dragon Theatre currently shows one of Vogel's earlier works "And Baby Makes Seven," which also contains a pedophilia motif.

In the presentation of Theatre Q's "And Baby Makes Seven" two married lesbians take in a gay male roommate to be the live-in biological father to their child. The two women have a very active fantasy life together, performing in elaborate and sustained scenarios as two small 6-year-old boys named Henri and Cecil.

The play opens with a particularly foul-mouthed fantasy conversation between the two boys under a bedsheet with a flashlight. As the drama progresses, eventually the two women decide to murder their two imaginary boys.

All the action takes place on designer Ron Gasparinetti's stylish New York City apartment set. The story makes for a weird mix, producing conflicting feelings in a viewer.

On the one hand, it seems to be about the joys of infantile regression role-playing, and some of that is entertaining. At the same time the imaginary boys' fantasy pedophilia conversations are disturbing. This is a play in which poor boundaries are part of the fun.

In director Rebecca Longwood's Palo Alto production there are good performances from all three cast members, Annamarie MacLeod, Katie Anderson and Matthew Lowe.

MacLeod is a special standout, imbuing her lesbian character's performance as the French-accented Henri with entertaining secretive facial expressions, eye movements, glances and partially coherent muttering squeaks.

In one scene she sings a song and conducts conversational fragments alone, talking in a French accent - owing a nod to Inspector Clouseau of the "Pink Panther" films - to her peanut butter and jelly sandwich. This fantasy child, it later turns out, goes to a psychiatrist.

"And Baby Makes Seven" recalls Edward Albee's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf," which has its own imaginary child, although in story terms Vogel's play doesn't take the compulsion for a baby-talk fantasy life very far.

The two women seem to feel that they need to eliminate their fantasy children once their real child comes into the world, but why they feel the need to do that isn't clear and therefore doesn't seem psychologically authentic.

It's also hard to see why the guy is in this play: he's a sperm donor for the pregnancy, but in household family life he only functions as a minor third wheel.

On one level "And Baby Makes Seven" seems to be saying that we are all addicted to fantasy, yet it doesn't offer much insight into the issue. The device of adults regressing to small children simply plays and replays.

Near the show's end, one of the small fantasy boys claims to be father to the new baby, taking us back to the recurring pedophilia motif in Vogel's writing. One wonders what's going on with that.

Rating: Three stars

E-mail John Angell Grant at jagplays@yahoo.com.