Two addicts, one on her way out of rehab after 90 days sober, the other on his way in with a frighteningly drug-free 90-day challenge ahead of him, meet to electrifying effect in Baby Foot, Tim Venable’s gut-punchingly powerful, unexpectedly laugh-getting follow-up to last year’s stunning The Beautiful People at Rogue Machine Theatre.

It hasn’t been easy for 20something musician Alexis (Hope Lauren) to kick junk since her fifteen-year-old self smoked almost an entire eighth of weed with her bff, but if ex-junkie janitor Fred (Paul DeBoy) is any judge of character, Alexis has built enough of a foundation over the past three months to avoid relapsing. She just needs to keep working the steps.

Enter Blackie (Daniel Dorr), 27, who’s been high half his life and wouldn’t even be here today without, as Alexis figures out, “a nudge from the judge.”

Still, if anyone has good reason to get and stay sober, it’s the onetime starving actor turned Chili’s manager, whose soon-to-be-ex-wife is suing for full custody of their child. (Boy or girl, they don’t know, since they “don’t want to assign gender based on genitalia.”)

Unlike Blackie, who needs to stick around L.A. or lose any chance of shared custody, Alexis is heading off to New York to start over in a place where she’s “never been fucked up before,” and if her achingly beautiful rendition of Bob Forrest’s “Memphis” (“If I can just make it down to Memphis all my troubles would go away. If I can get down to Memphis maybe I’ll be okay.”) is any indication of musical talent, the future ahead of her might just be bright.

Or then again, maybe not.

As he did in The Beautiful People, playwright Venable keeps audiences guessing throughout Baby Foot’s engrossing eighty minutes, the first half of which inspires the kind of laughs you’d expect from oft-teamed onscreen couples like Hepburn and Tracy or Hanks and Ryan, movie duos with the same kind of romantic-sexual chemistry Dorr and Lauren generate in what may well be the year’s most intimately staged production.

Then something happens (well, a couple of things to be precise) to transform Baby Foot form dark romcom into a bona fide edge-of-your-seater, and an extraordinarily moving one at that, particularly because Dorr and Lauren have created a pair of vital, authentic, flawed human beings more than worthy of a second chance at life.

The Matrix Theatre’s uber-intimate Henry Murray Stage has virtually every one of its thirty or so seats within touching distance of Dorr and Lauren at one point or another, giving the space’s sophomore production a you-are-there-in-the-rec-room-with-Alexis-and-Blackie feel from start to finish.

With playwright Venable doing dynamic double duty as director, Dorr and Lauren burn up the stage with a pair of fearless, riveting, gut-punching, burningly real, in-the-moment star turns.

Not only that, but they deserve bonus pay for doing it all with an audience in their faces throughout the show, and DeBoy lends invaluable support as the most supportive of custodians, not only of the facility, but perhaps of life itself.

Production designers Joe McClean and Dane Bowman have audiences believing that the Henry Murray Stage is in fact a shabby but welcoming rehab rec room (complete with foosball table (known in France as le babyfoot), with Leanna Keyes providing an expert sound design along the way.

Baby Foot is produced by John Perrin Flynn and Guillermo Cienfuegos. Brett Aune and Clay Hollander are producers and Justin Okin and Rebecca Larsen are associate producers. Rachel Ann Manheimer is stage manager. Chris Moscatiello is sound consultant.

I named Tim Venable’s The Beautiful People one of last year’s 10 Best World Premiere plays, and Baby Foot more than lives up to its reputation. Like its acclaimed predecessor, this one too packs one heck of a wallop.

Matrix Theatre, 7657 Melrose Avenue, Los Angeles.
www.roguemachinetheatre.org

–Steven Stanley
October 23, 2023
Photos: Jeff Lorch

Tags: Los Angeles Theater Review, Matrix Theatre, Rogue Machine Theatre, Tim Venable