Nicky Apple turns 4 today and he is wicked excited. He gets up very early and opens all his presents in a few frantic minutes while his parents, Bill and Sandy Apple, try without success to slow down their spoiled brat of a child.
The family is expecting guests later in the day. Jeffrey and Mia Freed are a childless couple, who travel the world studying children in primitive tribal cultures. Sandy, convinced that having a child is the most fulfilling thing a woman can do, is determined to persuade the Freeds to have one of their own.
The University of Maine’s School of the Performing Arts skillfully puts a current cultural debate about the role of motherhood in society front and center in Tina Howe’s play “Birth and After Birth” at the Cyrus Pavilion Theatre in Orono. Howe, who died last year at the age of 85, wrote the play in 1972 during the second feminist wave but continued revising it through 2006, when it was finally produced off Broadway.
Jayden Moore (Bill Apple), Inanna Piccininni (Sandy Apple), Patrick “Patty” Morris (Nicky Apple), Wyatt Gamage (Jeffrey Freed) and Jess Baran (Mia Freed) create a tight knit ensemble and wring a whole lot of laughs out of a show with many absurd but few tragic touches.
Howe saw herself as an absurdist playwright following in the footsteps of Samuel Beckett, author of “Waiting for Godot,” and Eugene Ionesco, best known for “Rhinoceros,” but chose to write from a female perspective.
Director Rosalie Purvis, an assistant professor of theater and English at the university, said in the director’s note in the program that she chose the play to honor Howe’s “significant contribution to contemporary American theatre and her pioneering effort to bring motherhood quite literally center stage, incorporating the ‘female gaze’ into the genre of absurdism.
“Currently, much of American political discourse has been reducing women’s perceived ‘functionality’ to only their gestational and child-rearing roles,” she said.
Purvis wrings some fine performances out of her student cast. Her attention to details, whether it’s the use of a camcorder, using a red wagon like a piece of furniture or having the couples wear wedding rings, is impressive.
Much of the absurdity and the humor in the show comes from having a grown man with a full beard portray 4-year-old Nicky. He runs around the stage in colorful pajamas, sucks his thumb, plays a version of Simon Says, demands grape juice and, for the most part, just behaves badly.
Morris, who gave a searing performance last year as a father grieving the death of a child in UMaine’s production of David Lindsay-Abaire’s play “Rabbit Hole,” is equally excellent here albeit in a far different role. Any parent who lives with or remembers living with an active 4-year-old will find the energy Morris brings to the role exhausting and exhilarating. It’s hard not to love his obnoxious Nicky because Morris is so good.
He also does some very good imitations of past presidents, including Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton in a sequence where the actor dons a series of masks and recites well-known quotes from the mostly dead politicians. Morris, a fourth-year student, sometimes is a bit too loud for the intimate Pavilion space but 4-year-olds often are loud unless they are up to something they shouldn’t be.
Second-year Moore and first-year Piccininni are totally believable as Nicky’s parents, Bill and Sandy. Moore swaggers about the stage but is never brutish as the insurance salesman, who’s having a crisis at work. Piccininni beautifully indulges Nicky while extolling the joys and challenges of motherhood. Together, they beautifully bring to life a loving couple sometimes overwhelmed by the demands of parenthood.
Gamage and Baran, second- and fourth-year students, respectively, don’t join the party until the second act. They are entirely convincing as an academic couple more interested in observing children rather than raising one. Both actors lean into the absurdity of the Freeds’ work in the telling of a story about an odd tribe of tree dwelling human beings with tails and how one of them gives birth. The duo give detailed and delightful performances.
The technical work for “Birth and After Birth” is outstanding and the designers use the round building, built in 1908 as the Stock Judging Pavilion for the School of Agriculture, to great advantage. Daniel Bilodeau’s set brings the audience into the Apple’s toy-strewn living room and JP Sedlock’s lighting and sound design illuminate the characters beautifully. The costumes by Janet Sussman are colorful, creative and perfectly define each character.
While many who lived through the nation’s second feminist movement in the 1960s and ’70s assumed the debate over whether women belonged in the workforce or the home had been answered with a resounding, “Both,” recent political discourse is resurrecting the issue. That makes Howe’s play, unfortunately, as relevant as when it was written. Purvis and her cast brilliantly capture all the comic absurdity of the question in “Birth and After Birth.”
“Birth and After Birth” will be performed at 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday and at 1 p.m. Sunday at the Cyrus Pavilion Theatre at the University of Maine in Orono. For information, visit umaine.edu/spa/tickets or call 581-1755.
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