Kelly shares with lover Daizy an apartment she’s half converted into a doll house. Atop her work-table are parts of bodies, heads, faces, hair of dolls, painting paraphenalia, a projector, lamp, ashtray, bottles of beer. Baskets underneath hold baby-like limbs and torsos. Against the brick back wall, shelves hold molded heads--some with hair, some on baby doll bodies in various stages of dress. Kelly is a reborner.
”Reborning” means making a manufactured doll realistically resemble a human baby. Megan Rippey’s artist Kelly makes good money re-creating for each of her customers, usually grieving parents, a substitute for a dead child. Wonderfully on-edge Rippey’s Kelly survived tortured, deadly abandonment as a baby. Suffering obsessive-compulsive disorder, Kelly gets help surviving drugs and booze from Daizy, a happy-go-lucky fellow graduate artist who creates dildos in a spot (unseen) off their bedroom. Daizy (funny, centered Brendan Ragan) finds Kelly sadder and driven after lawyer Emily isn’t quite satisfied with the doll she’s commissioned. Unusually, Emily (rather young Natalie Symons but rightly intense and picky) feels Kelly has to go beyond the usual use of photos to resurrect Eva, Emily’s dead child.
Pursuing Kelly’s “lifelike guarantee” of her work, Emily keeps returning with descriptions and videos, along with attempts to get closer to Kelly and exert more control. “That lady needs more than a doll,” Daizy tries to get Kelly to see. He wants their sex life to resume as he knows she’s getting ever more emotionally involved with the Eva doll. When Emily returns to reveal “she still looks like a doll to me,” not as the child she remembers, Kelly retorts, “I can’t sculpt memories.”
Memories do flow, though--mainly Kelly’s own. After a return to sex with Daizy, Kelly takes up the Eva doll as her own. She’ll soon clash with Emily. Is their relationship just about the doll? What comes of her relationship with Daizy? What will he do about Emily? Will the former bond between him and Kelly break or strengthen?
All three actors wonderfully convey their characters realistically despite the potentially gothic situation. Director Brendon Fox lets them be themselves with all the complexities but yet humanity that author Zayd Dohrn gave them.
The technical crew, especially set designer Rick Cannon, contribute their own artistry to their responsibilities. Brahms’s “Lullaby” couldn’t be more appropriate to the story’s start and finish. Summer Dawn Wallace has brought to bear on the drama a wealth of research on the process of reborning and the doll making and parts sourcing involved. Everyone’s concentration on making the dark subject matter come to a comic ending means it is possible for human beings, even with conflicts like Kelly’s and Emily’s, to let the past inform but not stymie the future.
