Theater Reviews : ‘Baby With Bathwater’ Bites With Bitter Humor

IRVINE —  Community rooms at public parks are designed to bring people together. Christopher Durang comedies insist there’s no real hope in bringing people together. So seeing a Christopher Durang comedy in a community room is a pretty curious experience.

The room at Turtle Rock Community Park is the ill-fitting home of the Irvine Community Theatre, where it is staging Durang’s “Baby With the Bathwater” with all the muscle director Todd Kulczyk’s company can exercise. There isn’t a moment in this play that isn’t cruelly bitter, and also hardly a moment without a laugh that sometimes catches in the throat like a chicken bone. The Irvine folks make you chuckle and choke, just as Durang intends.

Right off, there’s the visual dissonance of rotund Helen (Sofia Moraes) married to tall John (Karl Person), both of them so oblivious to their new baby that they think he’s a she named Daisy. Maybe the Nanny (La Donna de Barrios) will do a better nurturing job, but Daisy keeps running, perhaps suicidally, toward moving buses or hiding in piles of laundry. This baby is really made of stuffing. But for once in a comedy, the prop is more than just a joke: It’s how Helen and John view their child.

The pain of Durang’s conceit only sets in when Daisy grows up--into a very confused young man (Timothy Titus) who spends much of his time in dresses and at the shrink’s office. To add to the post-modern confusion, John has become a lush and a Christian Scientist at the same time, and Helen is still struggling with the real “baby” in her life, her novel-not-so-in-progress.

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Durang suggests that the Young Man may grow into the adult his parents never became, but that’s doubtful. In Durang’s world, evil usually wins, the innocent are abused and the good are irrelevant or invisible, and in this community room, that message is therefore all the tougher.

Kulczyk turns the extreme disadvantage of the room’s absurdly shallow stage into a strength. The comedy, without the traditional shadings and characterizations, is all flat and in primary colors, which matches nicely with this flat space.

He nudges good deadpan performances out of just about everyone, from Person’s blank confusion to Moraes’ fretful myopia to biting cameos by Beth Titus and Jan Briggs. Barrios could be much more frightening as the nanny from hell, but she’s physically imposing enough to scare any baby. Timothy Titus carries the tragic weight well, though he needs to squeeze more acid humor out of his lines.

* “Baby With the Bathwater,” Turtle Rock Community Park, 1 Sunnyhill Drive, Irvine. Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m. Ends Saturday. $6-$8. (714) 867-5496.

Sofia Moraes: Helen

Karl Person: John

La Donna de Barrios: Nanny

Lesley MacGilfrey: Cynthia/Susan

Beth Titus: Kate/Miss Pringle

Jan Briggs: Angela/Principal

Timothy Titus: Young Man

An Irvine Community Theatre production of Christopher Durang’s comedy. Directed by Todd Kulczyk. Stage manager: Jody Marler.