Went for the second time to see Edward Albee’s Play About the Baby performed by the Shotgun Players. Put it country simple, this play fucking kicks ass. Both a joy to watch and a deeply cathartic experience. Like, say, the Rite of Spring or Moroder’s soundtrack to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, it earns your sympathy by a sense of place: absurd, sarcastic, maudlin, and bewilderingly verbose by turns, you are never allowed to disconnect from the action and the story, even though there is little of either. Compare it to choreography: the rationale of individual gestures exists in isolation, referent to nothing but itself, and yet by some backhand means belongs in place.
The play is, of course, about the baby: the same baby in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolfe. Again there are two couples, young and old: the young addicted to the smell of the future, the old weighed down by a sense of historical inevitability. You can interpret them in the same way as in the earlier play, allegorically. Philosophy and History, Science and Nature. But it’s better not to. The characters are drawn too abstractly, are unexposed, in spite of what Man claims about the exposition; or rather, exposed as having no past, an unverifiable past.
The baby, then, is less related to civilization, to our civilization, than it is to a more basic human impulse: the desire to return to Eden. What is a baby? What does every parent want their child to be? Perfect, of course. Unfallen. But the tragedy of our existence is not so much that we cannot return to Eden as, rather, that we cannot even remember what it was like to be unfallen. All that is left to us is the taint, as it were, of perfection. The knowledge of things as they should be: as they never can be. Even in our moments of most complete innocence we are conscious of the possibility of failure, that “it could all just stop.”
last modified: 2004-11-09 18:44:24 -0500