Standing in a spotlight, speaking to an unseen psychiatrist, he is wide-eyed, twitchy, and soft-spoken, a product of days spent lying depressed in a laundry basket or running suicidally toward buses.Īccording to the crazed schoolmarm Mrs. As for their son Daisy (Jeremy King), he's exactly what you'd expect of such parents, when he eventually appears toward the tail end of the show. Fitzwater, as a literal handful of psychoses, continues to distort their well-intentioned efforts. They are gross exaggerations, but pleasantly so, and Gina Restani, playing a variety of straight women (well, by comparison at least), puts their comedy in modulation, and Ms. Culp always looking for affection (despite her own affectation) in new and unusual ways. In this, Ground UP Productions has nailed the casting, with Mr. It is unrelentingly funny, but repetitiously so, which requires that the actors remain fresh and absurdly perky. Under Kevin Connell's crisp direction, even the pre-show is rich with the wicked underbelly of family values: a retro edutainment tape plays congratulating a family on successfully teaching their child about menstruation.īaby with the Bathwater is a difficult sort of comedy, the kind that you'd get if George Carlin had been George Carlin instead of Mr. There are sharp edges everywhere, from his wife Helen's (Karen Culp) passive-aggressive comas that say so much about our so-called "loving" relationships to their Nanny's (Anna Fitzwater) perverse, baby-shaking Mary Poppins shtick. ![]() ![]() Baby With the Bathwater, first penned by Christopher Durang in 1984, is a glorious satire on bringing up baby, without any childproofing, let alone adult proofing. John (Victor Verhaeghe), a despairingly incompetent and increasingly drunk father, has a song he likes to sing: "Hush little baby, don't you cry/or Mama's gonna give you a big black eye." Those aren't the words to the song, and he despairingly knows as much, but in a world of foamy floor mats, hazardous alphabet cubes, and an LSD-inspired wallpaper of bright pink polka dots, they might as well be. Victor Verhaeghe, Anna Fitzwater, and Karen Culp look at the baby.
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