Theatre in Review: Babe (The New Group at the Pershing Square Signature Center)

	Arliss Howard, Marisa Tomei

Babe wastes no time setting up its generational conflict: Gus, a recording industry legend of several decades standing, is interviewing the bubbly, twentysomething Katherine for a starter position at his company. A true representative of her peer group, Katherine's sales pitch is based on her bona fides as a good person: "I graduated from Berkeley in 2017 with a major in music history. I was super active on campus, vice president of [the] diversity and inclusion committee, [a] proud member of Gender Sexuality Alliance, I was on the board of Students for Change, and one of the founders of Sound Baths and Bread." The latter initiative involved providing members of the homeless community with "fresh-bake bread" and "pop-up sound baths" designed "to provide the healing power of sound." Never let it be said that playwright Jessica Goldberg lacks a wicked ear.

There's plenty of amusement at the sight of Arliss Howard's Gus staring, squint-eyed and baffled, at Gracie McGraw's Katherine as she applies charm like a patissier frosting a cake. (McGraw, a new face, is a real find, armed with a radiant smile and a steel core that makes her far more formidable than she initially appears.) Katherine even holds onto her sang-froid when Gus bluntly asks her, "Why the fuck are you here?" Plowing ahead, her manner unruffled, she notes, "I have quite the following on social media." Gus interrupts, asking, "But do you have a soul?"

This is a pertinent question, purposely left unanswered in the exceedingly entertaining opening scene. We get a hint of the truth when Katherine is caught trying to pass herself off as a resident of Woodstock when she only spent certain weekends there with her divorced father. (This admission also sets up the childhood family tragedy that, we will later learn, drives her adult choices.) As Gus reluctantly brings her on board, the conflict between an aging, unfiltered survivor of the sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll era and a determined, utterly self-confident Millennial is extremely promising.

But Goldberg never lets that conflict come into focus, settling instead for an odd and unsatisfying triangle that blurs her best efforts. Standing between these two natural antagonists is Abigail, Gus' longtime associate and (truth to tell) enabler. Abigail has problems of her own: She is undergoing cancer treatment and remains haunted by the memory of the late feminist punk rocker Kat Wonder, her greatest discovery and the love of her life years after her death from an overdose. The last thing she needs is to get entangled in the office intrigue that provides Babe with its main source of conflict.

Abigail is the play's problem character, a largely reactive, conflict-avoiding figure whose role at Gus' company is hard to define. Indeed, one of the play's greatest weaknesses is that its portrait of the music industry has no reality. All anybody does is listen to snatches of music; we never experience any interaction with artists or discussions of marketing and publicity. The vast changes wrought by streaming and the Internet are at best vaguely referenced and Gus' party-hearty years are barely described. (An act of abuse, in which he broke Abigail's hand, is so poorly described it's hard to know what to make of it.) Until the last scene, Babe communicates little or no zest for the business of music-making.

It's hard to tell which of Goldberg's antagonists is more unpleasant. Howard's Gus, dressed in age-inappropriate black sleeveless T-shirts and hoodies by the always-observant Jeff Mahshie, is a wizened satyr, growling out profane pronouncements largely for their shock value: "Music should make you want to do one of three fucking things: fucking dance. Fucking cry, Fucking fuck," he says, adding that a track presented by Katherine "makes we want to slit my fucking wrist." Trying to frame himself as a source of candor in a dishonest world, he adds, "If I want [to] tell you you have a nice ass -- I'll tell you, you have a nice fucking ass. I don't give a shit what's happening in the rest of the world. Women scaring grown men into caves. Since when are women scared of dicks? You don't want to see a dick, don't go into a hotel room with one." The idea of anyone getting away with this talk in the post-Weinstein era is hard to credit, and, frankly, Goldberg doesn't try.

If Gus' foul-mouthed old-man grievances are irritating, Katherine's glib moralizing and use of MeToo jargon aren't much better: She corners Abigail at home, trading confidences and attempting a seduction, a strange choice for someone who condemns Gus' on-the-job carrying on. Then again, she uses her supposed concern for ethical behavior as the basis for a brazen power play that makes Babe oddly reminiscent of David Mamet's Oleanna only not as well-constructed.

Because Abigail spends most of her time listening to her colleagues vent, her character never comes into sharp relief. Instead, she listens, demurs, and often slips out of the present, distracted by memories of Kat. Most notably, she comes across as too mild-mannered to have lasted so many years in Gus' bad-boy universe. She is so fuzzily conceived that Marisa Tomei seems unsure how to play her -- alternating passive attitudes with wild bursts of energy -- and, frankly, I feel for her confusion. Goldberg is making an interesting point about women in their fifties who, having survived the anything-goes show business mores of past eras, find themselves judged by young people with no appreciation of what anyone over the age of thirty had to navigate. But the playwright's chilly approach to her characters is off-putting; Babe has a sour undertone that Scott Elliott's direction can't erase.

Elliott almost always gets fine work from his designers and Babe is a good example. Derek McLane's scenic design, depicting Gus' office, neatly transforms into Abigail's apartment in seconds. Cha See's lighting is a model of what an inventive designer can achieve even in a more-or-less naturalistic work, distinguishing between past and present with a simple change in tone and cranking up concert lighting effects for the musical finale. She also provides subtle color accents using the LED tape built into the set's rectangular ceiling piece; all in all, it represents some of this young designer's best work. Jessica Paz's sound is especially effective in the electric finale.

And "electric" is the word: Babe suddenly, finally gets a jolt of energy thanks to a speech by Abigail furiously refusing to apologize for her past, followed by Kat in a scorching performance that torches the many words used to keep women in check. (McGraw, who also appears as Kat, has a vocal belt that should have casting directors for musicals booking auditions immediately if not sooner.) In a single moment -- well-orchestrated by Elliott -- the play's themes coalesce. The good news: It sends the audience out on a high. The bad news: The rest of Babe doesn't live up to it. It's a pity; what Goldberg is writing about needs more investigation. --David Barbour