Sketch Artists
The first clue that Maybe Baby, It’s You at American Heartland Theatre is more like an athletic event than a traditional show is in the two-person cast’s credits. Karen Hinton, who plays all the female roles, is an alumna of ComedySportz in Philadelphia, and Brian Patrick Miller, who plays all the male roles, has performed in Forbidden Broadway in Kansas City and across the map. Both actors are accustomed to being held hostage by the sketch format, getting at most three minutes to establish characters and then build and traverse a bridge to a final payoff. It’s the perfect preparation for Maybe Baby, a show that provoked this astute observation overheard in the lobby at intermission: “It’s the best thing I’ve seen here in a while.”
Charlie Shanian and Shari Simpson apparently cowrote the show for themselves, two struggling actors and veterans of Gotham City Improv, and it must be gratifying to see that the play’s success isn’t limited to their talents. Maybe Baby is an acerbic and clever evening of mini-plays — eleven to be exact, all starring Hinton and Miller, all of them putty in these chameleonic actors’ hands. If there’s a theme to the show, it’s the age-old quest for a soul mate, which anyone but a hermit could relate to.
Against Keith Brumley’s spare grid of a set, the show opens with a skit called “Wish List,” in which Hinton and Miller write the personal ads of their dreams and subsequently lower their standards. Miller’s wish for a “Sports Illustrated model” becomes, by the third go-around, “a Sears model.” It’s no knock against Sears, just a realistic shift of priorities; more people look like models in a department-store catalog than like Tyra Banks, and it’s only those rare quirks of fate that allow the average and the extraordinary to touch each other.
Paul Hough has directed a show that reminds one — depending on one’s age — of Your Show of Shows, Saturday Night Live or Mad TV. And as on SNL, for example, where a Molly Shannon can strike gold with a particular character and reprise it until the audience tires of her (or someone makes an awful movie about her), Maybe Baby has a character that gets a second and a third hearing: the dancing fool Miller introduces near the start of the show in “Rhythm of My Heart” and brings back in “My Heart Will Go On” and “Heart to Heart.” He’s a best man at a recurring wedding reception where all his friends know he will soon embarrass himself and everyone else because he spasmodically dances to the beat of his own perverse drummer. It’s a testament to the writers and the director, but especially Miller, that the character is funny each time he appears.
The other sketches (all of them separated by man- and woman-on-the-street voice-overs about the crumbling state of affairs in the heterosexual arena) mine middle school, retirement and a host of stops in between. “The Eliminator” prepares you for Schwarzenegger but introduces instead a ball-busting Girl Scout whose greatest defense mechanism is her sharp tongue. Hinton brings each of Miller’s characters (a homeboy and a jock, among others) to his knees until she comes toe-to-toe with a brainiac who sees through her facade. The scene goes out with the tag line of an Aesop fable, when Miller tells the girl that it takes more thought to build someone up than tear him down.
A blind date with Medea goes on a bit long (given that audience members may not know anything about the sorceress Medea, as was demonstrated by the undeservedly sparse laughter following Miller’s normally innocuous question, “So, do you like children?” during a recent performance) but otherwise each skit has its own well-timed shelf life. The best-written scene opens act two, where Miller and Hinton bleed the Double Indemnity style of metaphors and comebacks for all it’s worth. It wouldn’t be surprising to learn that every line in the piece contains a simile, some but not quite all on the level of “She had lips as pouty as a teenager on vacation.” (The only gaffe: After setting the skit in what appears to be the 1940s, why reference Gilligan’s Island and Diet Coke?)
In lesser actors’ hands, the show would be a huge albatross instead of the colorful menagerie it becomes. Miller is a triple threat: He’s handsome, funny and charming, and one senses that more than a few women in the house briefly contemplated getting him alone at a cocktail party. Hinton is as perky and smart as Katie Couric without being syrupy or smart-alecky. Both actors go at the material untethered by vanity, never hesitating to look foolish or desperate when the script calls for it.
The technical requirements for the show are pretty simple: a prop or two to set the scene, minimal but effective lighting and sound effects, and evocative yet quickly discardable wigs and costumes. William J. Christie, Shane Rowse, Roger Stoddard and Doug Brown are all up to the challenge, especially Rowse, who creates a steaming street grate with one spotlight and a healthy puff of stage smoke. It’s a show that is perfectly served by everyone involved and, as one of Miller’s characters says, “versy vicey.”
