Baby Anger
“Bringing up baby” takes on new meaning for a successful young couple who start living their lives through their baby boy when he is cast in an award-winning commercial as a girl! Their lives are turned upside down and the spoils of success bring unexpected results in this surprising, twisted comedy. Told in twenty-seven scenes, beginning in the present and spanning ten years, BABY ANGER presents a timely discourse on the trend of casting our children in the all-too-bright limelight.
Author’s Note
In 1989 I spent the summer in Burlington, Vermont. One day, while driving around town, I came upon an old cemetery. It had a section reserved for babies, and all of them had died before the turn of the century. Often the children had no first names. The tombstones read simply Baby Johnson or Baby Smith. I remember being struck by the vastness of this particular section of the cemetery. Then I came upon a stone which read: Baby Anger.
I gasped. Seeing those two word together shocked me. So after I wrote a scene which had two women in it – one breast-feeding, the other was eight months pregnant – and they had an unusual conversation about labor and what sort of pain to expect.
Over the last several years, with the encouragement of Playwrights Horizons, I kept writing; eventually a play emerged. In October of 1994, two months after the birth of my first child, a workshop production of Baby Anger was mounted in their New Theater Wing. Two and a half years and several drafts later Baby Anger premiered on their Main Stage.
This play has been greatly influenced by the writing of the noted Swiss psychoanalyst Alice Miller (Drama of the Gifted Child). She wrote a compelling book, Banished Knowledge, in which she examines the Death of a Salesman and Long Day’s Journey into Night. While she admires these plays, she argues that the endings in both disappoint. She believes that both plays let the parents off the hook. She explains: “In all works in which authors blame parents directly, however the parents have the last word, and the child is silenced.”
I wanted to write a play that would not silence the child. And if the play was ruthless with inappropriate parental behavior, so be it. We happen to live in a time of Macaulay Culkin and his parents, tennis star Mary Pierce and her abusive father, Michael Jackson and his family and we live in a time where, in the words of the late Harry Kondoleon, “Smart, alert children are the new gods, and their products are the only thing hoisting up the flaccid economy.”
On a personal level, as a father of two children, I can think of few themes more important than how we raise our children, and what the consequences are when we don’t raise them well.