Paula Vogel’s And Baby Makes Seven has all the ingredients for a successful play, and none of the results.
This ultimately tedious exercise has one wonderfully interesting idea – that a lesbian couple has invented a small group of imaginary sons – and then restates it relentlessly without any real development or variation. The three actors in the play – Alison Burns (pictured center), Jessica Rothert (right) and David Jenkins – are talented enough, and Karla Hartley as usual offers vibrant and intelligent staging. But this is a text without real insight, without larger meaning or even suspense, and no collection of artists can make it stageworthy for more than a half hour.
I’m a big fan of Vogel’s Pulitzer Prize-winning How I Learned to Drive, but you’d never know from watching Baby that its author is the same one who gave us precocious Li’l Bit and her deviously abusive Uncle Peck.
This article appears in Sep 30 – Oct 7, 2009.
