When Daisy’s mother Helen Dingleberry (Lisa Muller-Jones) talks about cooking and eating their young child Daisy, she’s only speaking figuratively. Only deities and animals eat their young, for God’s sake! On the other hand, after a childhood defined by being fed Nyquil, living speechless under the laundry, and being encouraged to dive into the paths of oncoming buses, it’s safe to say that Daisy has been consumed by family life.
Parenthood is no happy hour in Baby with the Bathwater (directed by Joan Sand for Mad Horse), that’s for sure. First of all, which baby nouns of endearment are appropriate? (Baked potatoes are definitely out with Helen, but kumquats are OK.) Secondly, could someone please poke that narcoleptic kid with a stick and get it on its feet? Coping mechanisms are in order: Helen plays catatonic on the floor, while for Daisy’s father John (Craig Bowden), the cocktail of choice consists of slurping Smirnoff and Nyquil from their bottles.
Thank God Nanny (Christine Louise Marshall) comes along with her big furry bag of tricks. Coiffed, brassy, and rabid, she makes the baby faint, encourages Helen to write novels, and forces quickies on John on the sly. Then who should show up but Cynthia (Nancy Brown), a young urchin who was doing OK with the motherhood thing before a regrettable accident involving her hungry German shepherd, and would like to give it another go with the Dingleberrys’ child? As Hillary used to say, it does take a village. And as for Daisy — well, among many other things, because of the new parents’ squeamishness about the private space of genitalia, Daisy is a tough antecedent for gender-based pronouns until the second act.
Neurotic, yes, and the stage is set for it with brutal whimsicality, the bright nursery imagery gone terribly ominous: From the ceiling, stuffed frogs hang upside-down and bears are suspended by fishhooks through their heads; absurdly oversized alphabet blocks tower over the set. It’s Mother Goose by way of David Lynch.
As you might imagine, Christopher Durang’s script — dark-comic, absurdist, jarring — calls for some serious excess in the way of characterization, and Sand’s direction elicits appropriately hyperbolic performances. Marshall, first as Nanny and later as Daisy’s principal, is jaw-droppingly outrageous, a vacillating Antichrist of coos, barks, and ugly libido; and in Brown’s Cynthia, an edgy high-pitched tone and too much white-of-the-eyes combine in a nervy innocence. As Helen, Muller-Jones is positively terrifying in her emotional swerves and crackups. Her wide mouth is capable of expressing, by turns, lavish malevolence and volatile helplessness, while Bowden, as John, alternately bumbles and rages with slightly more sympathetic pathos. And everyone is illuminated with the dazzles of insanity — too-bright eyes, glossy proclamations, gestures and deranged about-faces glaring enough to make you blink.
