Claire Faces Rigorous Criticism

It might seem churlish of me to question the integrity of the performance of any baby, let alone dear Claire, but this is a question of Art, and we serve no one's interests by molly-coddling rank amateurs and stroking their egos with hopes of an endearing coo, gurgle, or ephemeral ooochy-smooochy smile.

To be fair, the original casting choice itself was unrealistically optimistic, perpetrated as it was with a parent's natural overestimation of their child's acting accomplishments, and here we have the common and false assumption that because this is a non-speaking role (in this case a small monkey, orangutan or perhaps lemur, some quibbles may be taken with the non-specificity in the costume department) it is unimportant for a convincing portrayal of the subject for the actor to be familiar with talking, or to have any previous experience with acting. Quite the contrary: the mastery of acting is often done without words; one eyebrow lift from Ralph Richardson is a worth a hundred overwrought Mel Gibsons in Hamlet II- the Post-Reckoning, and the comic expressiveness of a Chaplin or a Lloyd is still without compare. Claire, in spite of her vast reservoir of charisma, is no Meryl Streep, or even Roddy McDowell.

While I am no slave to hyper-realism as the only standard of stagecraft (witness V. Marsch's brilliantly surreal performance in Godfather II - a role executed entirely without his physical presence or indeed inclusion in any tangible way), it boils down to this: I am not in any way convinced that Claire is actually a small monkey. She relies wholly on her straightforward aping of a common archetype of simian simulacrum: to wit, munching absently-mindedly on a prop banana, and that seems to be the extent of her conscious performance. She makes no effort to study the movements and behavior of monkeys, or even to actively pretend to be a monkey, relying purely on our shared genetic heritage for any accidental evokation of a little monkey. The role is all surface. I, frankly, have seen better, less-self aware monkey performances by walk-ons at a stunningly misconceived Tacoma Dinner-Theater production of The Cherry Orchard.

While young actors are sometimes gifted with a effortless, ingenuous empathy for their roles, it is muddy whether Claire is even aware that her role could be perceived in any way, let alone as an over-stagy approximation of monkeyness. Sure, it's cute, we all concede this, even adorably so, but cute among babies in costumes is as ordinary as subsumed homosexuality in the GOP. The essential question is obvious to a 1st grade theater critic: what does the performance even say?

To be fair, this is partly the fault of the production - one can be forgiven for asking: what is the production? Even a baby actor needs a context.