By CARRIE NEAL
A Seat on the Aisle
When I was in high school, some of my girlfriends had to care for egg babies as part of a unit in health class. For the duration of at least one week, the egg had to go everywhere they went – unless they opted to leave it behind, in which case they had to pay a babysitter. Naturally, the egg couldn’t be hard-boiled, as the difficulty of caring for an egg that might break at any moment was what simulated the challenges of caring for a newborn.
No one questioned the efficacy of this exercise that I can recall, or wondered why only female students needed to practice parenting with an egg. But college campuses in the middle of the 20th century took things a bit further. Home economics programs had “practice houses” where young women would live in community and learn how to run a household together.
They also learned about motherhood by caring for “practice babies” – infants from local orphanages who came to stay with them for short periods of time. I’d never heard of this methodology before and was stunned to learn how widespread it once was. At the height of its popularity, between 40 and 50 universities across America utilized “practice babies.”
This rich source material is the inspiration for Borrowed Babies by Jennifer Blackmer, a fictionalization that imagines what life might have been like in one of these “practice houses,” for the professor, students, and baby who lived there. The timeline jumps back and forth between the 1980s, when the professor is retiring and moving out, and the 1950s, when she mentored a group of four female students and supervised their baby-rearing.
Director Bridget Haight has assembled a uniformly excellent cast.
Lauren Briggeman as Wendy (left) greets Jen Johansen as Professor Judy London. (Photo by Rob Slaven / IndyGhostLight.com)
Jen Johansen is an ideal choice to portray Professor Judy London, and Lauren Briggeman is both poignant and fiery as unexpected visitor Wendy. Carmia Imani, Rachel Ivie, Hannah Luciani, Sarah Powell, and Dorian Underwood all offer delightfully specific and quirky characterizations as the five students. And Julie Dixon ably portrays a small but crucial role when she appears very late in the play. Unfortunately, there were a few noticeable line flubs, perhaps understandable with opening night jitters but nevertheless surprising in a production of this caliber.
This feels like an important play, both to do and to see. Playwright Blackmer shines a light on the issues that have plagued mothers since time immemorial: can I excel at both parenting and a career? Will one invariably suffer in service of another? As Judy London says, is it “physically impossible to have it all?” These questions may have been thrown into sharper relief by the more limited choices of women in the ‘50s, but how much have things really changed since then?
Borrowed Babies clocks in at a lean 90 minutes with no intermission. Honestly, I wanted to see more of these indelible characters and learn more about their stories. This American Lives Theatre production will be running at the Phoenix Theatre Cultural Centre through Feb. 22, and tickets can be purchased at the door or online at phoenixtheatre.org.
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