Play inspired by Harriet McBryde Johnson disability essay receives positive reviews

The NY Times review. (Here's the back story about the Harriet McBryde Johnson essay.)

Parenthood never looked weirder or more terrifying than it does in “Smudge,” a new play by Rachel Axler at the Julia Miles Theater. Here are some of the things that Colby, a new mother, calls the thing she gave birth to: it, creature, hot dog, freak, smudge, a bunch of entrails in casing.

Her husband, Nick (Greg Keller), prefers to use a name, Cassandra, and to wax poetic about her one eye. But Colby (Cassie Beck) isn’t convinced the thing is even a girl. How, she wonders, can “something with a penis” be a girl? Nick: “That’s her leg.”

You expect comedy from Ms. Axler, a former writer for “The Daily Show” who now works on “Parks and Recreation” (when good, the funniest show on television). And “Smudge,” a Women’s Project production, obliges, though it’s more properly a horror story.

Colby and Nick bring the thing — let’s call it Cassandra — home, where it (she) lives in an old-fashioned baby carriage, looped with tubes and hooked up to a beeping mechanical contraption. (Kudos to the set designer, Narelle Sissons, for creating such a vivid image, at once domesticated, creepy and funny. David Cronenberg would be proud.)

Nick tries to interact with Cassandra. But it’s Colby, ambivalent and sometimes hostile, who gets her to react. Cassandra, it seems, responds — with honks, blips and flashing lights — to provocation more than love.

Ms. Beck plays the freaked-out Colby just right. She is smart, reasonable and wry, and confronted with a nightmare for which she is responsible. Mr. Keller is good too, even if Nick seems more contrived, as does his job. He works for the Census Bureau with his brother (a very amusing Brian Sgambati) and ponders Being, and the family and fertility.

“Smudge,” stylishly directed by Pam MacKinnon and given a spare, almost clinical look by Ms. Sissons, can feel dramatically underpowered at times. Still, it’s nearly always interesting. Ms. Axler has a comic’s gift for language that is precise and imaginative, but never showy.

What gives the play its charge is how Ms. Axler taps into a primal fear — giving birth to a monster — and then calmly considers it from all angles. She has a lightness of touch, especially in the scenes with Colby, that makes the dark undertow all the more affecting.