The couple at the center of “Babylon Gardens,” the new play by Timothy Mason at the Circle Repertory Theater, are in a lot of pain. Jean (Mary-Louise Parker), who likes to paint, is suffering from artist’s block, and Bill (Timothy Hutton), a hospital nurse who specializes in administering anesthesia, spends most of his time in the cancer ward. Jean hasn’t felt safe since the death of their horribly deformed newborn infant, and for the longest time hasn’t been able to paint anything that isn’t full of fetuses. She’s only just now beginning to be able to venture out of their East Village apartment and go down to the river to sketch, while Bill is regularly so affected by the suffering he witnesses that he finds it necessary to anesthetize himself with recreational drugs.
But they’re good, good people. Bill is like no hospital nurse you’ve ever seen: attentive, emphatic, involved, and endlessly willing to take time out from his busy schedule to sit around trading confidences and reminiscences with the hospital inmates—like Molly (Bobo Lewis), whose metastasizing carcinoma the medical establishment is slowly failing to cure. Bill is wonderfully patient with the fact that (ever since the baby) Jean’s gone all funny about sex, and Jean is patient with Bill’s need to get wasted and insult the dinner guests. Those dinner guests are another sore spot: they’re a nasty, low-minded crew—yuppies, not to put too fine a point on it, like Andrew (Steven Bassett), who tells jokes that make fun of the homeless, and Larry (Bruce McCarty) who works in real estate. Bill doesn’t make fun of the homeless. In fact, he spends most of his downtime thinking about Opal (Cynthia Martells), the black woman who lives in a cardboard box on the corner. But alas, there would seem to be no end to the pain: while Bill is looking for ways to make Opal’s life just a little bit brighter, his wife’s mental condition is gradually deteriorating—until, driven to despair by the heartless fecundity of their friends’ wives (Cordelia Richards and Lea Floden), she is clutching wildly at her husband and intoning lines like “He’s very wise: he named his first child America because it was already dead!”
Why a man with all Bill’s sensitivity wouldn’t notice his wife going slowly round the twist and call a psychiatrist, and what a girl who dresses like Jean is doing married to a man who has friends like Andrew and Larry, and what an East Village hipster is doing working as a male nurse—these are questions that Mr. Mason leaves unanswered. But then “Babylon Gardens”—which at times so closely resembles a “thirtysomething” script that it’s almost impossible to believe you’re in a theater—is less interested in details than in the big picture. Mr. Mason works from the outside in, moving characters around to suit predetermined designs and devices—just as his director, Joe Mantello, moves the actors around to suit predetermined notions of who should and should not be sympathetic.
The performances are almost unbearably stagy. The one exception is Ms. Martells, who, as the homeless woman, has to bridge the gap between reality and the playwright’s shopworn notion of lunatic-as-visionary—a task she carries out with grace, intelligence, and modesty, if not always with success. As for Mr. Hutton and Ms. Parker, they do a lot of fairly relentless acting—he being sensitive, she being quirkily prosaic. These two might think about expanding their repertoire—particularly Ms. Parker, whose only noticeable gift so far has been for looking like a babe while managing to sound like a funny old man. (It’s one reason her performance in “Prelude to a Kiss,” whose plot merely re-stated her acting style, was such a bore.) As adorable as her acting persona is at first, it proves insubstantial as the long, flowy, see-through dresses that look so good on her with leggings.
Mimi Kramer
The New Yorker, October 21, 1991