Playwright Jane Anderson factors in race to her 1991 hit The Baby Dance’s already heady mix of adoption and class to give 2018 audiences a play distinct enough from its source material to merit World Premiere status, Rubicon Theatre Company’s compelling, talk-provoking The Baby Dance: Mixed.

Richard and Regina (Brian Robert Burns and Tracey A. Leigh) may be living the good life in Hollywood, but the 30something couple lack what Louisiana trailer park dwellers Al and Wanda (Gabriel Lawrence and Krystle Simmons) have in abundance–offspring to make their house a home.

And so Regina places an ad in hopes of finding a pregnant woman willing to give up her child in exchange for “help with expenses,” and with Al and Wanda too cash-strapped to take on the financial responsibilities of a fifth child, the titular “baby dance” begins.

Anderson’s early-‘90s original had the affluent couple seeking “a healthy, educated white baby” from the kind of poor white trash that have given Sordid Lives scribe Del Shores a career.

 The Baby Dance: Mixed gains added texture and resonance by making Regina, Al, and Wanda black.

Wanda’s casual racism toward “the coloreds” now finds itself directed towards “the illegals” who “don’t learn English.” A meal of collard greens and fried chicken stirs up memories of a perhaps not-so-privileged childhood in vegetarian Regina. An Act Two confrontation has Jewish Richard reminding an anti-Semitic Al in less than friendly terms that it was his people who went South to help “your people” during the Civil Rights Movement.

Changes like these make The Baby Dance: Remixed an even richer theatrical experience than the original, an up-to-date rewrite blessed with less easily stereotyped characters whose rich-meets-poor collision remains as power-packed as ever, whether in Regina’s reluctance to drink Wanda’s tap water and her dismay when she realizes she’s being offered peaches from a can, or in Wanda’s insistence that she’s doing just fine without prenatal vitamins and that imbibing coffee during pregnancy didn’t hurt any of her other kids, so why should she start drinking decaf now?

 What remains the same in both Baby Dances is how glued to the edge of your seat you will be, whether wondering if Wanda will rethink giving up baby number five, or perhaps more alarmingly, if Al will refuse to sign away his unborn child, particularly when his escalating financial demands (a new Corvette among them) may not be met.

In other words, if Baby Dance 1991 was guaranteed to get audiences talking, its World Premiere rewrite is likely to provoke even more heated discussion.

 Baby Dance 1.0 director Jenny Sullivan returns to give Version 2.0 the kind of tender loving care it deserves, and the performances she has elicited prove second to none.

Southland treasure Leigh and musical theater sensation Simmons turn Act One into a riveting two-hander as the perhaps not always so well-heeled Regina spars with a woman who might herself be wearing designer shoes but for a teenage pregnancy, and just wait till Act Two gives each actress her Ovation-worthy moment to dazzle and devastate.

 New York-based Lawrence so thoroughly inhabits Al’s muscular, menacing skin that his moments of vulnerability prove unexpectedly poignant, and Burns shines too as a man whose self-confident air may be a shield against self-perceived inadequacy made more painfully palpable by his wife’s desperate need for a child.

Carl Palmer completes the cast terrifically as Ron, a man never not in lawyer mode.

Scenic designer Tom Buderwitz’s pitch-perfect Louisiana trailer home morphs magically into an equally meticulously appointed (by properties designer T. Theresa Scarano) hospital room.

Derrick McDaniel’s vibrant lighting, Alex Jaeger’s character-defining costumes, and Randall Robert Tico’s sound design mix of music and effects are equally top-drawer.

Jonathan Stover is production consultant. Jessie Vacchiano is production stage manager. Joseph Fuqua, Donna Simone Johnson, and Wrekless Watson are understudies.

Guaranteed to keep you riveted throughout and talking long after, The Baby Dance: Mixes more than merits a drive up north. It’s one of Rubicon Theatre Company’s best.

Rubicon Theatre, 1006 E. Main Street, Ventura.
www.rubicontheatre.org

–Steven Stanley
May 5, 2018
Photos: Jeanne Tanner

Tags: Jane Anderson, Rubicon Theatre, Ventura County Theater Review