Julia Weber
Staff Writer
Chautauqua Theater Company continues its staged readings of the third and final New Play Workshop of the summer, with chances to see Best for Baby at 2 p.m. Saturday, and 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. Sunday, in Bratton Theater.
Best for Baby is a story of corporate personhood, and of the love a mother has for her child, in a chronicle ripped from the headlines — if the headlines were funny.
In real life, Johnson & Johnson has been the subject of more than 60,000 lawsuits that claim one of its oldest and most trusted products — baby powder — contained asbestos mixed into its talc.
In Best for Baby, after a period of maternity leave, a mother of a newborn returns to her job at Johnson & Johnson. Though working for the company and using the product on her very own child, she soon wonders if she can trust the product and the company she works for.
The play was commissioned by CTC Producing Artistic Director Jade King Carroll. Playwright Sharyn Rothstein came to the Institution for a week last year to spend time writing, and returned this year to develop it as one of the season’s NPWs. In the process of developing new work through the CTC commissioning effort, Rothstein said she feels “so supported.”
“I’ve got this amazing gift of a week up here with these incredibly smart, collaborative people to really dig in and make sure that this play is firing on all cylinders,” she said.
For Rothstein, Best for Baby provides an opportunity to lean into humor and absurdism to explore a serious issue. She said she sees her writing style as a response to how people can use humor to cope with tragic events.
“I don’t know anyone (whose) life is just happiness or just tragedy,” she said. “I think most of us live in that middle and get through hard times with laughter.”
Best for Baby director Oliver Butler said workshops like this one are beneficial to playwrights because they’re often the first time they get to hear the play’s rhythms and cadences. By working with directors, dramaturgs, actors and other writers, the playwright gathers different perspectives on what is effective and what needs to be revised in order to bring the play to the stage for its full production.
Through this revision process, Butler said, the playwright can realize “not just what they wrote, but what they want it to be.”
Likewise, as dramaturg for the NPW, Liz Frankel said a large part of her work is supporting the playwright, director and actors through providing research and similar creative direction to inform others’ work. She said the actors are “inherently curious,” which is crucial to their process as they delve into their roles and explore the world the playwright has created.
“In the room, I feel like my role is to be another thought partner to Sharyn and Oliver and be listening, thinking and thinking about the structure (of the play),” Frankel said.
Rothstein said she loves to write plays that simultaneously tackle issues from the furthest perspective — in this instance, what it means to be a corporation — and from the “most human place” of the interpersonal: mother-daughter relationships and what it means to care for others.
For Butler, the play isn’t only a takedown of a corporation, but a way of understanding the “real, human impact of that behavior” by theatricalizing the narrative through absurdism.
“What I’m watching in the play is the ways in which peoples’ values slide little by little when they’re given the choice to do either the right thing, or do the selfish thing, or do the easier thing,” Butler said. “What is the math that goes into people making morally reprehensible decisions?”
Frankel said she is excited for audiences to experience the NPW because it offers a glimpse into what the final product might look like further down the road.
“It’s easy to imagine that the play will grow and change and progress after these readings, too,” she said. “(The audience) will be seeing a snapshot of where the play stands when they come to see it, knowing that it is in process while still in a great place already.”
