Oh, Baby!

Perishable's engaging labor pains

by Bill Rodriguez

THE YEAR OF THE BABY. By Quincy Long. Directed by Vanessa Gilbert. With Robin Gabrielli, Casey Seymour Kim, Robyn Geogan Noble, Neil G. Santoro, Wendy Overly, and Tom Hurdle. At Perishable Theatre through November 26.

In the long run, America isn't as much about NASDAQ cycles or even election poll fluctuations as about birth and renewal, about character formation and starting all over again. Unlike elsewhere, frontiers kept unfolding here for a couple of centuries. Unlike in Yugoslavia, in our South one generation was enough to mellow murderous racial hatred into plain old prejudice. Quincy Long's The Year of the Baby uses literal birth as a rollicking metaphor for our collective personality, and Perishable Theatre does a terrific job bringing it all to us.

This comical drama is just a choreographer away from being a musical. There are 14 songs, from standards and sleepers by Stephen Foster, to country lyrics by the playwright set to music by Maury Loeb. Songwriters, not speechwriters, best articulate where we're at, Long is telling us as we hear the classic "Hard Times Come Again No More" or when a main character, unable to say a few words at a graveside, strums and sings a simple song about the dead man. With Eric Fontana playing banjo and mandolin on a small bandstand, and with all the actors in fine trained voice, the music sustains the story like a heartbeat.

And what a wacky story it is. It's an instructive folk tale the Brothers Grimm might have come up with if they'd grown up in Appalachia weaned by a still. The set design by Jeremy Woodward is raw wood, with a screened-in area stage-right for occasional characters to stand behind and look grim. Things start off with Donna (Casey Seymour Kim) shredding newspapers into a cardboard box, as if around a puppy or gerbil. But as oblivious hubby Kenny (Robin Gabrielli) strums his out-of-tune guitar, she's being too furtive for it to be a pet. It is a baby that she "borrowed" from neighbors, and Donna is too simple-minded and kind-hearted to think she's done anything wrong -- until police come banging on the door and find the baby in an empty apartment.

Broke and on the run, they end up at an equally broken-down rural motel. The raggedy old proprietors might have been rejected from Deliverance as too menacing. Luther (Tom Hurdle) is suspicious to the point of bursting in on the couple with an axe; he accuses them of being robbers on the lam because it looked like Kenny hid his car from view when he parked it out of the sun. Wife Martha (Wendy Overly) is another Gothic piece of work. She intimidates them with her seething presence, ending with a glower at the audience that could curl shirt collars. (Overly is especially gripping in a dirge-like song whose title says it all: "Can't Stand It.")

Martha is something else. Playwright Long eventually gives her a dimension that could warrant her own play and that at the least needs further development. Apparently deprivation has curdled her soul into a finely honed madness in which the devil will someday whirl her away as his main squeeze and they will gobble the good life like gumdrops. Luther proves harmless, except for non sequiturs that induce eye-rolling in Kenny.

When Donna inevitably becomes pregnant, she spills her woes to a local storekeeper (Robyn Geogan Noble) and asks where she can get books on birthing a baby. In a typical droll off-balance exchange, Donna is told she can find them in a library. She asks, "Where is that?" "Isn't any," she is told. However, the woman's husband (Neil G. Santoro) has had plenty of experience delivering young'uns, mostly with livestock but many times with women in this remote place. If the play has a message, it is a subtle one delivered here. The man is a bartender, and when Kenny blubbers out his dire worries about bringing a baby into this world, the sympathy we've been set up to expect doesn't come. After a hard life, his heart is unmoved by this pitiful stranger. However, when Donna asks him simply and directly for help, he comes through, in the barn-building tradition that separates judgments from duties. The man is a mechanic when he's not pouring drinks, and are we glad. His way of looking at the process of delivering a baby is hilariously straightforward. He looks "under her hood" to "check her clutch," and refers to cutting the umbilical chord as "chopping the fuel line."

Each player here is just fine, but Kim holds the whole production together with a wonderful balance of tensions: fear and spunky -- or foolhardy -- strength. When Donna relates why she didn't rat on a childhood friend who pushed her into traffic -- because she liked her -- Kim flashes through a welter of retained emotions that include embarrassment, fond remembrance, and the courage to compromise for affection. As the clueless but eventually responsible Kenny, Gabrielli takes us on a nuanced trip, as Kenny's guitar-playing skill develops simultaneously, from careless and discordant to rock-solid reliant.

From the professional musicality to the assured acting to the buoyant direction of Vanessa Gilbert, The Year of the Baby gives us several satisfactions.