Christopher Shea, TimeOut Chicago 4/13/10 " Early in Albee’s self-referential 1998 play, the character named Man enters wearing sunglasses, asking the audience to guide him around the stage. After eliciting responses, he removes the glasses and rhetorically queries, “Have you ever done this? Pretended to be blind?” Like much of Baby, the moment’s a seemingly lighthearted “fuck you” to an audience eager to comprehend and engage with the work.

Fortunately, Albee has the skill and perhaps good-heartedness to couch these metaphorical middle fingers in a funny and often searing bigger picture. Baby revolves around new parents whose bliss abruptly ends when an older couple opens their naive eyes to life’s horrors. Albee shows affection for the young couple in precise, endearing glimpses of their dirty talk and sex life. The second act is a scorchingly articulate collection of taunting takedowns of the young pair by the seductive Woman and MC-like Man.

Yates and Pacas turn in dynamic portrayals of Man and Woman, but Act II demands restraint and dynamism in equal measure. Reeder too often lets the older duo become quick-clipped, slightly loony schoolyard bullies. A gag in which Woman invents sign language to match Man’s spoken words looks more like a foolish game than a cold-hearted, atonal evisceration of the youths. With Baby’s devastatingly eloquent degradations of the young couple dumbed down, its “fuck yous” read all the louder"

Chris Jones, Chicago Tribune 4/13/10 - "When it comes to raining on youthful optimism, pricking the balloon of innocent joy, or spoiling any party attended by young love, Edward Albee is your man.

His very fine 1998 drama “The Play About the Baby” is, in essence, an evening designed to point out to those yet-unaffected (or under-affected) by life's remarkable capacity to knock you to the canvas that the punches have been pulled only temporarily. The complexity, regrets and pain are all coming, as surely as the extra pounds that will attach themselves persistently to your frame.

Albee, of course, is also a comedian of the most cynical variety. And if there is one pleasure the old get from their terrible foreknowledge of what will befall the young, it's the chance for schadenfreude. Thus “The Play About the Baby,” the latest production of Chicago's BackStage Theatre Company staged in the basement of the Chopin Theatre, is constructed as a self-aware little vaudeville, replete with banter, jocularity and slightly sinister epigrams. You don't know who's real or not any more than you know what's real or not. Truth is a tricky business.

So are Albee's plays, and the cast of director Matthew Reeder's laudably lean production struggles to find the right tone. The problems with this production mostly surround that perennially thorny question of how authentically to play a world that seems to shift with every different line. That's understandable. But this is a play that must have menace — buried menace, but menace nonetheless — and this overly mannered show lacks that crucial quality. Any play that contains the line “We've come to take the baby” has to send shivers down the spine.

The baby (maybe real, maybe not) in question belongs to a young couple (played by Kate Cares and Patrick de Nicola) who seem to exist in a cocoon consisting only of their mutual physical desire and their love for the infant they've produced (maybe). Into their sweet bubble step a suave older duo (Michael Pacas and Karen Yates), whose apparent charming benevolence does not hide their snark. Or their ability to mess with young love.

Cares, a strong and honest young actress, finds the most truth in a production that reflects Reeder's growing talent for creating concise yet resonant physical worlds (this is a fine space in which to do this play, and Reeder deftly exploits the intimacy). But you never feel the crack as one world clashes into another, nor are the worlds of innocence and reality sufficiently defined and contrasted. It's all too mushy, and Albee is always best when the edges are like".

From the Director - Two chairs stand in a private room inhabited by a gleefully naive couple whose youthful desire for each other is hardly interrupted by the coming of their first child.

Soon, however, their playfully sexual exploits are bizarrely interrupted by a mysterious and nameless older couple who may (or may not) have sinister motives.

Penned by one of America’s preeminent playwrights, The Play About the Baby is an absurdist black comedy, reminiscent of burlesque in it’s high spirits and banter, that grapples with such issues as reality and the games we play to define it, the ambiguity of existence, and the agonizing bonds between parents and children.