Arts Agenda - Parental advisory

Red Chair Theater, the home venue for the improv group Comedy Response Unit, offers its first theatrical production with Baby With the Bathwater, and the show proves the adage that you’ve got to start somewhere.
Christopher Durang’s characteristically dark comedy of family dysfunction begins with Helen (Jennifer Caldwell) and John (Bran Peacock), a pair of spectacularly unfit parents, at turns cooing and screaming at their baffling newborn. Their mutual panic at their new responsibility is interrupted by the arrival of a lusty nanny (Traci Redmond), who proves to be even less sane than they are.
Bathwater offers an object lesson in how not to raise a kid, with parental instructions like “Be careful of your face; don’t fall down on it!” Raised as a little girl, “Daisy” is in fact a boy who grows to severely maladjusted adulthood, with Daniel Berman showing him going through 10 years of therapy.
Directed by Laurence Ruth, the cast contains only improv performers from Comedy Response Unit, which brings as many drawbacks as advantages. The players are all bursting with energy and eagerness for laughs (including a surprising attachment to Benny Hill-style ribaldry, hoisting bosoms and sticking out bottoms). But it’s the kind of show that starts loud and broad from the very beginning, giving the players little room to grow or build characters. In such roles as an unflappable Southern matron, Meghan Kimzey occasionally shows the benefits of a “less is more” approach.
Red Chair Theater’s Baby With the Bathwater comes across like an improvised sketch extended over two hours, finding most of the jokes but missing some of the deeper commentary in Durang’s dark farce. Still, it seems a more appropriate launching pad for the company’s theatrical ventures than, say, Hedda Gabler.
Baby With the Bathwater plays through March 18 at the Red Chair Theater, 662 11th St., with performances at 8 p.m. Thurs.-Sat. $15-$17. Call 404-872-4242.