Interludes

VIEWPOINTS – American womanhood through the lens of absurdity: Peggy Stafford’s EVERYTHING IS HERE and Rice & Roland’s WHAT IF THEY ATE THE BABY?

• By drediman
• December 16, 2025
• No Comments

Currently Off-Broadway, you’ll find a pair of new plays that use theatrical absurdity as the lens through which American womanhood is refracted. In the resulting disorienting environments, everyday realities are heightened, emphasizing aspects of women’s lives that are typically taken for granted or brushed underneath the proverbial rug. As always, read on for my further thoughts.

WHAT IF THEY ATE THE BABY?
SoHo Playhouse
Through December 31

Down at SoHo Playhouse, Xhloe Rice and Natasha Roland are reprising their latest creation What If They Ate the Baby? (RECOMMENDED), a rabbit hole of a show that scored the New York-based performance artists another hit at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival — and certainly the more aggressive and oppressive of the two works under discussion here. Using the anxieties surrounding McCarthy-era surveillance and the controversial Roe v. Wade decision as the springboard for their looping phantasmagorical fantasia, Rice and Roland investigate, essentially, the intense frustrations of the suburban housewife. Judging from the costumes and satirically heightened mannerisms on display, the absurdist play seems to be distinctly set in the 1950s. However, theatergoers looking for a tangible narrative to grasp on to should be warned that suggestive, ever-evolving subtext rules in the mystery-laden universe the duo have conjured. Well versed in the clowning tradition and the rigors of physical theater, both work with instinctual synchronicity with each other as they — as a pair of desperately-seeking housewives — dive headlong into an impressively precise display of theme and variation, obsessive behavior, and stylized interactions governed externally by nothing more than an aesthetic shell and internally by unarticulated rage and untapped queerness. Suffice to say, an inevitably increasing sense of dread and entrapment pervades the merely 60-minute piece — thanks in large part to some unnerving sound design work (e.g., creepy footsteps above, incessant knocking on the door) — which all but suffocate the two doll-like women by the conclusion of this simultaneously exhausting and invigorating theatrical exercise.

EVERYTHING IS HERE
59E59 Theaters
Through December 20

Far less visceral but no less freewheeling in its flights of fancy is Peggy Stafford’s new play Everything Is Here (RECOMMENDED), which is being co-produced Off-Broadway this fall by The Tank and New Georges at the prolific 59E59 Theaters on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. In terms of timeline and themes, there’s a through line that can be extrapolated from What If They Ate the Baby? to Everything Is Here — the women residing in the nursing home of Stafford’s meditation on getting older may very well be the same age as the children of Dottie and Shirley, the two 1950s housewives in Rice and Roland’s play. The women here face terrors of a different but related sort — namely, loneliness, irrelevance, physical aging, and loss as an American woman of a certain age in the 21st century. Throughout director Meghan Finn’s gently absurdist production — which does an uncanny job of theatrically depicting the flaccid placidity of latter years as half-lucid days slip out of one’s grasp — movement and choreography play a central role in the play, as if these women constantly need to be reminded of the physical presence of the bodies within which they reside. With their limited mobility, their nursing home has basically become their entire world, complete with a friendly healthcare worker who regularly comes around to provide them medical assistance, as well as an aspiring middle-aged actor who has them engaging in theater exercises and even performing scenes from Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire. Suffice to say, Everything Is Here operates by the rules of its own internal logic, turning these activities into fantastical, heroic acts. At the center of the play are the trio of performances by Petronia Paley, Jan Leslie Harding, and Mia Katigbak, three distinguished veteran stage actresses who, in their respective roles, exhibit profound depth and a quiet but steely resolve to maintain a sense of themselves.