Gimme that baby!

It's definite - I am going to direct The Play about the Baby early next year. I cannot wait.

The main idea is expressed quite straightforwardly by the character called "Man": "If you have no wounds how can you know if you're alive? If you have no scar how do you know who you are? Have been? Can ever be?"

That’s what we’re talking about here. How tragedy defines humanity. People are not real until they’ve suffered. Until their innocence has been lost, they are just children, no matter what their physical age may be. Albee chooses to use the single worst personal tragedy one can experience – the loss of one’s child – to push his point home. At the end of the play, the Boy and Girl attempt to deal with the loss by saying that the baby never existed, but that does not work. According to Albee, the Boy and Girl "realize they cannot take the pain and loss of having a baby, so it ceases to be real." The author's thesis is that reality is determined by our need. However, no matter how hard they attempt to shape reality to their need, the fact is they can still hear it crying – they know the baby was real and the loss cannot be ignored.

Awakening is the important action of this play. The Boy and the Girl both wake up by the end. They have been profoundly changed by the experience. The catalyst for that change is the Man and the Woman. Those two are almost vaudevillian and I’ll probably direct the actors that direction. As an absurdist play, it’s not meant to be real. The action is absurd; the characters, the emotions, the awakening, the growth are all very real.