Reborning
Runs through July 5 at Urbanite Theatre, 1487 Second St., Sarasota; 8 p.m. Wednesdays-Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays; $20, $5 with student ID; 1-941-321-1397; urbanitetheatre.com.
Sarasota’s nearly-new Urbanite Theatre continues to bring quirky, edgy new plays to its audience with Zayd Dohrn’s Reborning, a drama that resembles nothing I’ve seen in the last twenty years — or ever, for that matter. This strange tale of real and artificial babies asks us to study the psyche of Kelly, a damaged young recovering heroin addict who’s never far from a dose of alcohol or marijuana. Kelly’s job is making realistically detailed baby dolls for bereaved parents who want three-dimensional mementos of their deceased children. And speaking of lost children, Kelly herself was an abandoned baby, thrown into a dumpster to die by unknown persons, and mutilated and brutalized before she was tossed away.
Can one abused young woman provide solace to grieving mothers who need a persuasively-sculpted infant to hold onto? Can her relatively normal live-in lover Daizy (a male) turn her into a conventional wife with thriving babies of her own? (Daizy makes oversize dildos, which keeps the theme of human reproduction front and center.) Although Dohrn’s multi-level deployment of the baby theme is ingenious, I have to admit that I question the relevance of the play to any audience member who had a reasonably conventional birth, not to mention upbringing. But it’s refreshing nonetheless to see a playwright stake out new territory for conventional realism, and I applaud Urbanite for taking a risk on an eccentric drama. It’s nice to know that something besides a typical crowd-pleaser awaits us when we decamp on downtown Second Street.
When the play begins, Kelly is working away on a baby doll for a demanding professional named Emily. We soon learn that Emily won’t settle for anything but perfection in the model infant that she’s paying Kelly to craft; she even brings video of the lost child in the hopes that sculptress Kelly will glean the spirit of the infant. Satisfying an exacting client isn’t Kelly’s only problem, however: she’s also going through a rough patch with “ordinary” Daizy, with whom she hasn’t had sex in a month, and for whom a genuine baby of their own is a live prospect. Daizy is repulsed by Kelly’s vocation — he finds it “sick and exploitative” — and he doesn’t for a moment agree that Kelly’s “fucked-up DNA” shouldn’t be replicated in a biological child. But workaholic (and alcoholic?) Kelly isn’t listening: she’s become obsessed with perfecting Emily’s babe, and more and more neglectful of all other needs, like food and her lover. Soon enough that obsession will turn in a new direction, and Daizy will find himself fighting a delusion which is all the more tenacious in that there could be some truth to it. And both Daizy and Kelly will come face to face with the effect of the savagery Kelly endured as a helpless child of parents who despised her.
If it sounds like Reborning offers some good opportunities for high-pitched psycho-drama, you’re absolutely right — and the good news is, the Urbanite cast mostly handles it beautifully. As Kelly, Megan Rippey is volatile, unpredictable, though she does have some easy moments (that are a little hard to believe in) before she sets off on the next jag. Rippey’s Kelly is no mere victim, careening still from the abuse that was meted out to her as a newborn; she’s also an assertive, no-nonsense woman who pretty much dominates her vanilla lover but occasionally defers to him when he seems to have a point. As that lover, Brendan Ragan — also co-artistic director of Urbanite — is affable, reasonable, and pretty horny after long abstinence. He may exist most minutes in his partner’s shadow, but that doesn’t stop him from pushing for sex, arguing for sanity, or going out-of-doors in pursuit of household peace. Finally, Natalie Symons is fine as exigent Emily, the woman who has contracted for a precise replica of her dead child, and who isn’t going to settle for anything less. Brendon Fox’s direction is first rate, as is Rich Cannon’s superb set of Kelly’s workroom with its shelves of baby dolls and baby heads, its messy table and video screen for magnifying doll details. Riley Leonhardt’s costumes couldn’t be more convincing.
Reborning may be just too unusual to resonate widely, but it’s original, suspenseful, and in its strange way, uncompromising. I recommend it to anyone for whom theater-going is seeming stale — I very much doubt you’ve seen anything quite like it. In an age surfeited with dramatic realism — on TV, in movies, and, of course, on stage — it’s rare to find subject matter that comes across as new. But the world of Reborning isn’t a bit familiar — and that’s gratifying. There may be life behind the fourth wall yet.
This article appears in Jun 25 – Jul 1, 2015.