Marisa Tomei, who got her Oscar for portraying a super-competent woman who solves the case for her somewhat-clownish lawyer-boyfriend in “My Cousin Vinny,” has a new role Off-Broadway in “Babe,” as Abigail, a super-competent record producer who has helped turn raw talent into rock stars for her somewhat creepy boss and mentor, Gus. For playwright Jessica Goldberg, Abigail’s competence is apparently not enough. Goldberg’s play paints an ambivalent portrait of Tomei’s character in a world reshaped by the #MeToo movement.
For some three decades Abby and Gus (Arliss Howard) have worked together as A&R reps, finding and nurturing some of the biggest names in the business, none bigger than Kat Wonder, whose music spoke to “centuries of female rage,” before she self-destructed. Abby was really the one who discovered Kat. She didn’t get credit on any of the albums, didn’t get filthy rich as Gus did, and she had to put up with the vulgarity of the record company culture in which she was the only woman.
Times have changed, and now Gus and Abby are interviewing a young woman named Katherine (Gracie McGraw) who wants to join the company, and do what Abby does. She now works at a small agency with artists who are “not commercial, but real ones, which is awesome.”
“Then what the fuck are you doing here?” Gus snaps.
“Gus,” Abby admonishes….
The artists where Katherine works now “would sell their testes… circumcise their clits,” Gus says, to work with him.
“Gus,” Abby admonishes again. And so it goes during the interview, and afterwards, Gus making one outrageously inappropriate comment after another and Abby trying to rein him in.
“Didn’t you just get out of sensitivity training?” Abby reminds him.
It clearly didn’t take.
On the other hand, in a reflection of the complexity that the playwright allows each of the three characters, Gus insists on accompanying Abby to the chemo treatment for her cancer. We learn he always admired her, never came on to her sexually, and fought for her from the get-go with the reluctant suits, who said “Are you sure you want a woman around? We won’t be able to be ourselves.”
As Gus recounts to Abby: “And I said: ‘she’s one of us Bob,’ I said: she’s one of us.”
“But I wasn’t,” Abby replies. “I wasn’t one of you. You guys were fucking animals.”
That conversation comes late in the play, which follows two timelines – flashbacks that primarily detail Abby’s relationship with Kat Wonder (also portrayed by McGraw), and the events that follow the decision to hire Katherine after all. I won’t elaborate on what happens, other than to say Katherine won’t put up with what Abby has put up with all along, and things blow up in Gus’s face – but also in Abby’s. Katherine sees Abby as complicit.
The playwright seems to feel that way as well. But the play doesn’t offer enough details to make the case convincingly, so it’s easy to see Abby as being victimized twice – the second time for having survived the first time. And she has been unfairly treated perhaps not just by her old male colleagues and then her new female subordinate, but also by the playwright.
Maybe I misunderstood the playwright’s intent; perhaps there is a very of-the-moment lesson embedded in “Babe” about the need to keep up the fight in the face of frustration, that things can (eventually) change for the better.
In any case, if the play’s point is unclear, the production has its pleasure, not least seeing Marisa Tomei on stage express an impressive range of emotions, from ecstasy to fury to resignation and regret to… rock n roll. She and Gracie McGraw dance to snippets of original rock music composed for the production by the group BETTY.
Babe
New Group at Signature through December 22
Running time: 85 minutes with no intermission
Tickets: $89-$109
Written by Jessica Goldberg
Directed by Scott Elliott
Scenic Design by Derek McLane, Costume Design by Jeff Mahshie, Lighting Design by Cha See, Sound Design by Jessica Paz.Original music by BETTY.
Cast: Arliss Howard, Gracie McGraw, Marisa Tomei
