Words: Alex Grunberg

3 Stars

The Infant is a play of murder and motivations as the characters battle through accusations and psychic abilities to determine the cause of an infant’s death. 

The story plays with time, and this contrast of settings is explored best through a sound design that pairs specificity with subtlety, imbuing the interrogation scenes with anxiety and using music choices as brilliant reference points. While immersion into the world is more lost in other more sparse design choices, the actors also brought the time-specific setting to life through careful and committed character work that embodied the stifling Southern atmosphere.

Moments of high emotion are filled with passion and depth. Sorrow and rage are explored with high energy and expressive physicality. While that energetic spark did not quite light up in the quieter conversational moments, explosive revelations kept the audience on edge and fueled the mystery through high tension and a testing back-and-forth. The story was most engrossing in these connections between the characters, where they met and frayed and fell apart. 

Though the writing sometimes lost its subtlety when making direct thematic points and assumptions, the beauty in this story occurs when it revels in the murky in-between, the questions that unsettle conventional notions of morality. In the play’s grey space of “what would you do,” there is a very satisfying kind of discomfort.

The Infant
Theatre 1 at theSpace @ Surgeons’ Hall
10:35
August 18-23