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For its first production, the Beirut Wedding World Theatre Project chose a setup that's promisingly weird. In Reborning, Kelly (Tiffany Groben) designs lifelike baby dolls for parents whose children died in infancy. But when Kelly reveals her backstory early in the play (directed by company co-artistic director and co-founder Bobby Bermea), things get weird in a less compelling way.
As a baby, Kelly was thrown into a dumpster. Her fingerprints were Dranoed off and she was stabbed multiple times. It's a backstory that's so over the top, it almost feels like it's intentionally too much. What's strange about Reborning, though, is the tone feels incredibly serious even when you'd suspect a sense of irreverent irony.
Reborning deals mostly with Kelly's strained relationships with her boyfriend Daizy (a gifted dildo designer played by Murri Lazaroff-Babin) and Emily (Jana Lee Hamblin), one of Kelly's clients. The characters' backstories seem to definitively explain their interactions instead of giving them depth: Kelly's adoptive parents were plastic surgeons, which seems like some rather heavy-handed foreshadowing of her future career creating fake babies. The play is filled with references to Freud, which seems like it could be a meta joke about the backstories that doesn't totally land.
That's mainly because it's hard to tell exactly where the play is coming from. At times, it feels like it's indiscriminately cramming in edgy subjects: dead babies, dildos, drug abuse, creepy baby dolls, jarring music during scene changes. But the edginess often feels like attempts to be progressive that have fallen short. Take Kelly, for instance. It's admirable that the play gives a spotlight to a woman who's been through some serious shit. Getting left in a dumpster as a baby spawned a life that's not easy: crippling OCD, alcohol abuse, and a past heroin addiction. But the fact most of her character traits can be explained by her backstory make it seem like her troubled past is her only defining feature, and stunts her ability to be seen as a complex character.
It would be fine if the play wasn't interested in challenging conventions, but it does seem like Reborning has conceptual questions it wants to raise. One of the play's early scenes involves a Freudian discussion between Kelly and Daizy about Kelly's strange occupation. But the thematic deliberation takes a back seat to Daizy clowning around the stage with an oversized dildo and miming getting head from one of the synthetic babies. However, as the play progresses, Kelly's mental health and her relationships with the other two characters become more and more strained, which makes it hard to believe the play sees itself as any less than very serious.
Even so, the play implies plenty of hope for the new theater company's future. It's promising that Reborning seems like it really wants to push boundaries. It's just confusing which boundaries it's going for.
SEE IT: Reborning plays at Action/Adventure Theatre, 1050 SE Clinton St., beirutwedding.org. 7:30 pm Thursday-Sunday, through Nov. 20. $15-$20.
Willamette Week