In its Los Angeles premiere, Reborning explores the dark side of maternal love with considerable bravery and skill. The play by Zayd Dohrn is set in a grungy loft in Queens where Kelly (the uncanny Joanna Strapp) is a doll-maker for a special clientele comprising women who have either suffered miscarriages or find themselves unable to conceive. Kelly turns store-bought dolls into hyper-realistic facsimiles of the real thing–-in effect, giving birth to them.
Kelly’s significant other, Daizy (Ryan Doucette), works in vinyl himself, but on a more primal level–-sculpting erect penises for porn shops and sex addicts. It’s just a job to him, which makes it hard for him to understand why Kelly would get involved with one of her clients, Emily (Kristin Carey), who shows up unannounced and insinuates her way into their life.
Emily, still mourning her still-born child, keeps pressuring Kelly to make the doll she has ordered from her more life-like. Kelly, who is deeply troubled to begin with (having been abandoned and abused at birth), finds herself in a love/hate relationship with the older, wealthier woman. Ultimately, having convinced herself that Emily is the mother who abandoned her, Kelly freaks out in a wild, savage, heart-breaking way. It remains for Daizy and Emily to try and help guide her way back to reality, sanity. Reborning works well as a psychological study thanks to Dorhn’s tough-minded, insightful writing (which also has many blackly comic moments). But above all, the play benefits from the expert contributions of its three actors; not only do they work well together, but they give three-dimensional life to characters who could easily have come off as grotesques.
