Play About the Baby: Trade Edition

by Edward Albee

More information to be announced soon on this forthcoming title from Penguin USA

Genres: Plays, Drama, Theatre, Fiction, Grad School, American

90 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Noted American playwright Edward Franklin Albee explored the darker aspects of human relationships in plays like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) and Three Tall Women (1991), which won his third Pulitzer Prize.

People know Edward Franklin Albee III for works, including The Zoo Story , The Sandbox and The American Dream .
He well crafted his works, considered often unsympathetic examinations of the modern condition. His early works reflected a mastery and Americanization of the theater of the absurd, which found its peak in European playwrights, such as Jean Genet, Samuel Barclay Beckett, and Eugène Ionesco. Younger Pulitzer Prize-winner Paula Vogel credits daring mix of theatricalism and biting dialogue of Albee with helping to reinvent the postwar theater in the early 1960s. Dedication of Albee to continuing to evolve his voice — as evidenced in later productions such as The Goat or Who Is Sylvia? (2000) — also routinely marks him as distinct of his era.

Albee described his work as "an examination of the American Scene, an attack on the substitution of artificial for real values in our society, a condemnation of complacency, cruelty, and emasculation and vacuity, a stand against the fiction that everything in this slipping land of ours is peachy-keen."

Reviews

[Sketchbook · Rating 3 out of 5]

Albee does another Baby Situation again when an older couple want a baby belonging to young kids. In the Off-Bwy production, the youngsters had a nude scene. It was a hit. Surprised ? When in doubt, as Albee often is, he mixes Theatre of the Absurd w realism, and adds a baby burp of Dadaism. Depending on the casting, it can be an entertaining sniff and to hell with what it means, as with most of Albee. Leave mum at home reading Grace Livingston Hill.

[Lauren · Rating 3 out of 5]

And I’m back to being indifferent to Edward Albee.

Having found the other two 2001 Pulitzer finalists quite strong, The Play About the Baby is the weird cousin by comparison. For me, The Play About the Baby represents the worst of mid-century theatre – too obtuse, experimental and absurd. It feels like it’s weird for the sake of being weird. This is the sort of play that always makes me think of The Emperor’s New Clothes in that I wonder if people actually enjoyed it or merely said they did because they didn’t want to seem provincial. Not recommended.

[Sam · Rating 2 out of 5]

fantasy = baby turns into a rhino and decides to wait for godot

[Jt · Rating 2 out of 5]

Perhaps I need to read it again. Perhaps I need to be much older with more life experience. Perhaps I need to be on drugs.

Whatever it is that I need to change in order to understand or appreciate this play, I am not willing to do. Simply put: There is a reason that, when you think of Edward Albee, you think of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and not The Play About the Baby.

[Allison · Rating 2 out of 5]

In general, I think absurdist plays are difficult to read and are more enjoyable when seen (assuming you can find a good production). The Play About the Baby is supposedly a companion piece to one of Albee's earlier, very famous works. I'd tell you which, but that might spoil the fun.

[Carolyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a modern passion play: stark, cool, removed - that gets under the skin, penetrates to the bone, generally makes one uncomfortable as only human interactions can.

[Meredith · Rating 2 out of 5]

A bit of an odd duck, definitely a challenge to describe. Wish it was a bit more linear; a lesser Whose Afraid of Virginia Wolfe?

[Christine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Intense ride, especially as I'll be performing in this!

[Martin Denton · Rating 2 out of 5]

Innocence doesn't just die in The Play About the Baby. It's squashed, annihilated, beaten to a bloody pulp; conquered unconditionally and unmercifully by the practiced calm of Experience. This play by Edward Albee is steely and heartless and cruel--so much so that for all its stageworthiness, I felt entirely repelled by it. This is undeniably a potent play, but I cannot and will not pretend to like it.

I'd be more tolerant of The Play About the Baby, I think, if I detected any real passion behind it. Bitter old men write diatribes all the time: Arthur Miller's last works certainly fall squarely into this category. But watching or reading Mr. Peters' Connections or The Ride Down Mt. Morgan I was always aware of the still-questing soul behind the work: Miller wrote those plays because he was compelled--even at the end of a long and productive career--to keep exploring the Big Questions that troubled him.

Whereas, in The Play About the Baby, I sense no longing, no urgency; nothing, indeed, but contempt. I worry that Albee wrote this play not because he had to, but simply because he could.

Now, having said all that, it would be wrong for me not to say next that The Play About the Baby is masterful theater. Albee's trademarks are all here: a preternatural fascination with words; an enigmatic, twisted plot line; a thread of dark, bitter humor that is often profane and just as often profound. There's also a palpable desire to shock--in Act One, by having an attractive young couple scamper about in the nude for a few minutes; and, more bracingly, by having the same couple (clothed) brutalized by a pair of deadly serious pranksters in Act Two.

That last sentence, by the way, traces the arc of this play: Adam and Eve come into the world full of hope and happiness, and then Something (God? Mankind? Reality?) arrives on the scene to dash both of those unobtainable ideals forever. Albee fills the play, as he does, with lots of fascinating ideas about the nature of life, theater, and reality; most of The Play About the Baby is ontological game playing, albeit of a highly particularized and dangerous sort.

Oh yes, there is a baby, precisely the same kind as the one in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which is to say a metaphorical one. Here it represents all the stuff that was lost when we got tossed out of paradise. Albee insists that this baby is real, and he's right: that's what The Play About the Baby is about.

[Nick Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don’t know that much of Edward Albee’s work, but I divide what I know into two sorts. There are the experimental works that draw on Beckett and European absurdism and the Theatre of Cruelty and probably much more and there are the works that at first seem grounded in American realism, but are then thrown off kilter by the occasional invasion of Albee’s experimental sensibility. As yet, I prefer the latter sort, the realist works where the realism doesn’t quite work. I think Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and A Delicate Balance are two of the finest – or maybe the finest – American plays of the second half of the Twentieth Century. As is probably obvious from its title, The Play About the Baby is one of the more experimental ones. There is a young couple with a baby. I’ve seen it suggested that they have an Edenic existence, but I find them naïve and shallow in their lovey-dovey self-infatuation…but maybe that is how Adam and Eve were. And there are an older couple who seem cynical and spiteful and wish to take the baby. But we never find out their motivations. They just are. This situation is repeated with variations for the length of the play. I imagine in a bad production it could be incredibly tedious. But what I like about Albee is the precision of his prose: it is always suggestive…even if I am not sure what it suggests. There is humour, but it is a disconcerting humour. Our sympathies might go to the young couple, but the old couple are vastly more entertaining and get the best lines. What does it all add up to? I’m far from sure. It feels as though Albee was playing a little game: introducing a situation and having some fun finding out what he can do with it…although it is slightly discomforting fun. I admit I’m not sure what to make of it, but will put it in a box labelled Interesting Experiments.

[Andrew Jiang · Rating 2 out of 5]

Imagine a fancy restaurant where the chef comes in and presents a dish with the absolutely finest techniques and the most expensive ingredients, but applies them all wrong: caviar foam, a foie gras gel, wood-smoked king crab, and diced truffle. And no matter how much you try the dish, it tastes just fine? It’s weird, but you can’t quite put your finger on it, and you think that if the chef had just prepared the ingredients normally it would have been so much better — after all, he was using the pinnacle of ingredients. But the chef tells you it’s post-modern, and you simply just don’t understand the subtext that exists, which makes you think, well no, I understand everything that went into this entree, it’s just not very good. Even if the chef is famous for his other dishes.

If you want to read more weird Albee that’s actually good, read The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?

[Ace · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m usually all for esoteric, experimental theatre. But I felt kinda lost on this one. My first foray into Albee’s writing so may I don’t get “it” yet. I enjoyed the playwriting style a bunch, particularly the toying with tempo and fourth-wall addressing.

But the subject matter and meta-discourse were pretty meh for me. Are we meant to understand much by the end? Is the rouse that we expect it all to dance in a land of metaphors and figures of speech when really we should accept both the baby and the not-baby to be real? Is the whole point of absurdist theatre to enable the reader/viewer to throw their own psyches into the work, rendering this a Rorschach exercise?

Ultimately I know two things for certain:

1. Albee had a serious thing going for the mammary gland
2. “What a wangled teb we weave” is a highly quotable line.

I’d revisit.

[Bob · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not sure why I think this is important, but as I was reading this play, I was assuming it had been written way before 1998. Somehow, I'm less impressed by it now that I know it's a younger piece than I originally believed. That aside, it's interesting, but as some reviews have suggested, I think there's equal chance of being perplexed or mesmerized. Despite the several biblical references, I absorbed this play as less of a humanity origin story stuff and more of a dreamy intersection of a young couple and their older selves, who may or may not have actually had a baby that may or may not have actually tragically lost. Ok, as I finish reviewing this, I'll call this more like 3.5 stars. It was interesting; just not top-top-shelf.

[Kevin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Almost a distillate of every Albee play and perhaps my favorite.

[Gren · Rating 4 out of 5]

What are we if we don't have baby?

[maddie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Huh

[Möwgli Skräp · Rating 5 out of 5]

nice tidy descent. would be fun to act in.

[Maya Spektorov · Rating 3 out of 5]

interpreting it as just two actors who r way too into their plays made me like it more than i did at first.

[Shelley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Crazy play haha. So chaotic, yet…masterful? I wasn’t into it and then suddenly I was. The man and woman are so terrible! The boy and girl so innocent. The pain the man and woman cause is so senseless and bizarre. I liked how they’d address the audience at points, the conversational nature of those sections. I’d be curious to see this performed, tho it was easy to visualize while reading it too. But I’m not sure I “understood” any sort of meaning. It just felt overwhelming and strange and compelling. Not
As good as Annie Baker though

[Jennie · Rating 5 out of 5]

A weird choice I know, but this is my favorite modern play.