“Babel” Offers Disturbing View of Future

With some keen writing about impending motherhood, its fancies and fears, and a bizarre mix of stork fable with futurism, playwright Jacqueline Goldfinger has constructed an over-the-horizon Babel of society at the Broadway Theatre Center’s Studio stage.

Babel, staged by The Constructivists theater group, is set in an unspecified future time, when efforts to reduce mass murder and crimes have led to genetic laws — eagerly embraced by planning devotees — that determine which fetus is near perfect and socially acceptable and which will be disposed of or shunned to a nether land.

Two newly expecting couples – a lesbian family and a heterosexual one — occupy this world. Two of the four people are assured by genetics they are near perfect, two of them not. Problem is, we discover, they are not in the same couple.

Despite occasional blue table and chairs, Sarah Harris‘ set under Ellie Rabinowitz’s lighting — with occasional clouds and stork shadows wheeling by –- pretends to be as simple as a blue birthing sheet stretched ceiling to floor. The breathing exercises, the self-help phrases, the moments of panic at medical exams, and the sounds of soothing waves will wash deeply over the mothers in the audience. The men, more’s the pity, may have to have some moments explained to them.

The play’s main pull, aided by a revealing program note by Constructivists’ director Jaimelyn Gray, offers dialogue debate on every government intrusion into family birthing decisions, on the perils as well as the joys that technology holds, and who has a right to play God.

Perhaps writer Goldfinger, long considered a fringe theater writer (like Edward Albee once was), was afraid that her realistic dialogue insights into the couples’ characters would weaken her avant-garde images unless she jazzed it up and broke into the surreal. Whatever her stylistic choices, she left director Gray uncertain when observations worked better directed to the audience or among the couples.

The sense of repetition within the dialogue stems partly from the limited attack methods of the cast, Nicole McCarty, as the lesbian carrying the child, displays the most worries about the results of this now mandated genetic testing, carrying the play’s main attack on this new world like a battering ram, relying on her musically-trained voice to support a frontal verbal attack, heavy on flailing and facial movement. Which is a shame, because there is acting ability within her if she would go internal.

As her tall and hyperactively controlling partner, Maya Danks offers a modulated contrast that pays off at the end – assuredly  capable, yet casually cruel.

For the other couple Ashley Oviedo is seeking a character approach combining her anxiety about an ideal motherhood and her personal ambition. It’s a bit over the top but a nice try. As her husband, and the playwright’s attempt at an avatar as deus ex machina, Logan Milway has problems similar to McCarty’s – too much of a frontal attack on the language and mannerisms.

The Constructivists have been knocking at the door of media coverage since 2018, limited not by their director’s theatrical vision, but by consistency of production. Consistency remains a problem, but both the topic and the overall technical execution justify a larger audience for the 90-minute show, running Thursdays through Sundays until April 2.