Somewhere in the top five key rules of playwriting is this one: the more mystified you leave your audience, the bigger the payoff had better be. In The Baltimore Waltz, Paula Vogel took the risk. Much of that play, with its wild, slapsticky take on spy-movie cliches, seemed to operate in its own heady ozone layer, yet the finale offered a revelation so potent that everything before it was instantly justified. No such luck with Vogel’s latest, though.
I thought Edward Albee had done the imaginary child gambit for good, but em>And Baby Makes Seven has three: Henri, the precocious French youth; Cecil, the English pedant; and Orphan, the wild boy raised by dogs. Who would dream up such characters? A childless lesbian couple (Mary Mara and Cherry Jones) trying to spice up their lives.
Play-acting these tykes takes up the better part of the pair’s homelife -- which would be no problem except that Anna (Jones) is now pregnant for real, thanks to gay friend and roommate Peter (Peter Frechette), who’s agreed to father a child for the threesome. Now there’s no more time for make-believe kids, but the fantasy is so deeply ingrained (at least in Ruth, played by Mara) that the boys have to be systematically “killed off.”
Because Vogel is an entertainingly theatrical writer, a surprising number of good scenes get squeezed out of this very bad idea. Jones, so breathtakingly vigorous in Waltz, has much less to do here, but her crabby, morning-sickness monologue -- significantly, one of the few scenes that audiences can directly relate to -- is a winner, as is Henri’s rather touching “disappearance.”
That said, the silly stuff overwhelms us, especially when we begin to wonder if Ruth is an A#1 psychotic -- Vogel never addresses the issue. Vogel’s theme turns out to be that ordinary life is so dull and constricted, people need diversionary fantasy to be happy. Sorry, Ms. Vogel, maybe these annoying loonies do, but you haven’t explained why that applies to anyone outside their small apartment.
