Julia Weber
Staff Writer
Chautauqua Theater Company brings its final New Play Workshop of the 2025 season to the stage at 6 p.m. tonight in Bratton Theater for its first of three staged readings.
Best for Baby, written by Sharyn Rothstein, chronicles a mother working for Johnson & Johnson — a company which produced talc baby powder — as she finds her footing caring for her newborn daughter.
The play recounts the real-life story of the corporation Johnson & Johnson — embodied as an individual character — and the lawsuits brought against them for their widely-used baby powder, which contained asbestos. The mother, faced with her dual identities as a Johnson & Johnson employee and a parent using their product, must grapple with whether she can trust her company and her child’s safety.
CTC Guest Actors George Abud and Crystal Dickinson see Best for Baby as an opportunity to grapple with horrible events through absurdist humor, questioning how individuals become complicit in what they know to be harmful and asking audience members to understand how small decisions snowball into bigger consequences.
To Dickinson, who is now in her third season with CTC, the very purpose of great art is that it asks audiences to confront the issues they face in real life.
“It’s supposed to reflect what is happening in our world, and this play does that in droves, she said. “And, you get to laugh, so it’s a win-win.
Like Dickinson, Abud, who is in his first season with CTC, said the use of absurdity in the play demonstrates how troubling these real-life events were.
“The function of the absurdity is to make the realities deeply troubling,” he said. “It’s not a fully absurdist piece, but the use of absurdity in making Johnson & Johnson a person or a physical creature and a speaking character, it’s really fun and terrifying and disconcerting.”
In Abud’s perspective, embodying the company as an individual in the play sheds light on the role of the individual.
“Because the character of the institution was embodied in the play, it actually drew the criticism completely away from the institution and put it squarely on the human beings that are populating the institution,” he said.
This creative decision, he said, allows those who experience Best for Baby to “really zero in on who is complicit in this capitalist, monstrous structure that we maintain and maintain and maintain in this country.”
As a NPW, Best for Baby is in its earliest stages. Commissioned by Producing Artistic Director for CTC Jade King Carroll, the play — which received a table read last summer — will be revised through the NPW process as the playwright receives input and feedback from parties like the director, dramaturg and actors.
A NPW is often the first opportunity playwrights have to witness their plays being read and acted aloud. Dickinson said she enjoys the earliest stages of new play development because of the role collaboration plays in producing a new artwork.
“This is a brand new play and that’s my favorite thing of all,” she said. “They’re my favorite because we are truly in collaboration. The people in the room are in a true, true collaboration with every page turn.”
For her, the process of asking questions and experimenting is exciting because it allows those working on the project to begin “distilling things down to what it is that we want the audience to know and what’s important.”
While Chautauquans need not prepare ahead of time with any research or reading, Dickinson said they still should bring the same mentality they bring to lectures and worship services to the NPW.
“Whatever you bring to those things, you bring to the theater and we will be just happy that they populate the seats,” she said. “They will be pleased; it is a great, great play. Even in its beginning inception, it’s really fun.”
She said she enjoys bringing theater to Chautauqua audiences because of their inclination toward curiosity and openness to important dialogues.
“I believe that they are really smart people, people that care about their communities and about their country,” she said. “Based on that, this play is a perfect play for anyone here to come to because it plays on all of those things.”
