Echo Chamber

Baby Want a Kiss is a sort of ventriloquiz, a chance to guess whose playwriting voice is being thrown onstage. Dramatist James Costigan can mimic the voices of Edward Albee, lonesco and the Theater of the Absurd, Pirandello and even James Thurber, but except for a few sallies of wit and whimsy, he cannot speak for himself.

What Baby really wants is to give success a satirical kiss of death. Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward play the pampered, corrupted children of commercialized glamour, tinkling symbols of beauty, wealth, sex and fame. A matched pair of Hollywood divinities, they spend most of their time polishing their halos. Unconsciously, they are cynics who know the price of everything and the value of nothing. They pay a visit to a kind of hermit of integrity, a bachelor, writer and onetime friend unseen for 15 years. A bearded pixy, nicely played by Costigan, the writer likes to surround himself with pygmy baptismal fonts, and serve drinks from 16th century eyecups.

For the purposes of the play, the drink is presumably truth serum, but it is too often weak and cloudy. The trio act out charades of appearance and reality, dreams and desires. The stars, who actually loathe each other, make passes at the writer, and Woodward and Newman show a sly comic flair for kidding the erotic and the perverse. But, taken seriously, the dream sequences are too obscure for an analyst, but an editor might have helped.

Baby is better at cracking wise than being wise. When Woodward announces that she has preserved her beauty as a sacred obligation to her public, Newman reveals that she has had a dozen face-lifts and is so full of wax that she doesn't dare get close to a fireplace. Newman's funniest conceit, in every sense, is an idea to package frozen "Celebrity Seed" so that every woman in America can have a baby by her favorite actor, singer, TV panelist, "or in certain isolated instances, dress designer." That's what Baby needs --a playwright father.

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