THEATRE: UNIVERSITY PRESENTS AN OFF-BEAT COMEDY; THEATRE REVIEW

If you've had children for any length of time, this is what you know about parenting: you might do it well at times, but you can never do it right.

The distinction there is fine but quite tangible. Parenting and perfection are not congruent states, yet the children caught in this exercise of inadequacy most often abide and endure this condition. This dawns on suffering parents slowly, but Christopher Durang takes less than two hours to make the point (albeit obliquely) in his play "Baby with the Bathwater."

The University Theatre at Southeast Missouri State opens this very off-beat comedy at Rose Theatre tonight. It also plays Saturday before resuming Wednesday and continuing through Oct. 12. Curtain time is 8 p.m.

Promotions for this play refer to it as a "comedy-satire about the follies of modern parenting." Here's a warning: don't go to Rose Theatre looking for any `thirtysomething' angst. The subject is child rearing but "Baby with the Bathwater" is what might have resulted if David Lynch had directed the movie "Parenthood" instead of Ron Howard.

The story line is simple enough to recap. One sentence should suffice: the play follows the first 30 screwed-up years in the life of Daisy Dingleberry. Not since the Corleone boys has any child been so affected by unconventional upbringing.

The parents are Helen and John, a well-meaning but inept pair who fail the first and simplest chore of child rearing: gender identification. Things get worse for the baby, who is called "it" (hardly a loving pronoun) during the whole first act. On one hectic day, the toddler is given Nyquil, tossed about, doused in a puddle, terrorized by a dog, kidnapped, driven over by a bus and harangued for having the wrong attitude about smiling.

Helen clothes Daisy in dresses for 15 years before the boy insists on a gender reevaluation. From this point, his life is filled with psychiatric analysis, sexual promiscuity, 13 years of college (just to reach his sophomore year) and a baffling string of name changes.

Donald J. Schulte, a former Southeast theatre professor returning as a guest director, stages Durang's work at a frenetic pace. His decision on this probably wasn't hard to reach: the direction for a farce like this has to be, "Play everything over the top and hold on to your hats."

Schulte's players embrace this challenge and the hyperactive fun they have is infectious. Abbie Crites travels easily Helen's mercuric route between exhilaration and depression. In the end, she nonchalantly combines the two conditions. That comes at a point after she wears a shirt with a smiling face that is streaked with blood and then wonders why her child is maladjusted.

Alden Field plays John as a man who has good intentions but can't quite come up with the right chemical composition to get the job done. Sharon Wickerham is delightful as a rather warped nanny who knows little about child care and admits to being "like bacteria," thriving wherever she is.

The confused offspring, seen from his 17th year on, is played effectively by George Kralemann. Though he doesn't show up until late in the play, Kralemann spends a lot of time on stage by himself and remains unintimidated.

Leila Christie, Kiersten J. Moratzka and Debora Call round out the cast and do nice jobs. Particularly noteworthy is the work of Moratzka as the sexually distracted principal, Mrs. Willoughby.

All of these efforts bear mention because they overcome a substantial bit of adversity; the play itself. Durang's work, even for a farce, is wrought with excess. For all this, he makes only negligible points about the human condition.

Schulte is to be commended for softening a couple of gratuitous obscenities in Durang's script. It would have taken more nerve to excise the aforementioned scene in which Moratzka plays the principal. Again, the actress shines in this brief scene, gets off a few good lines, but it's extraneous to the rest of the play. Even in absurdist comedy, narrative discipline pays off.

A director's note in the program suggests that Durang "manages always to keep one foot in reality." In some scenes, that appraisal is generous by about one foot. This is a far-out play and the University Theatre, whose mission is to educate and entertain, should be given credit for stretching itself beyond the standard fare.

My guess is that if you see "Baby with the Bathwater," and someone asks you if you liked it, you'll hesitate before answering. My guess also is that you'll spend a lot of time at this play laughing. Like child rearing, comedy is something you can do well without doing it right.