Review: Marisa Tomei Plays a Victim Who Doesn't Realize She's a Victim in Babe

Most works of art that tackle issues of discrimination and abuses of power in the workplace tend to focus on perpetrators or victims who seek justice. Babe, the new play by Jessica Goldberg making its off-Broadway premiere with the New Group, takes a potentially different approach by considering an unwitting victim who doesn’t grasp the depth of her victimization until later in life. It’s too bad such a promising angle is given such ham-fisted treatment here.

Abby (Marisa Tomei) has been the righthand woman to Gus (Arliss Howard), a legendary talent scout at a record label, since the late 1980s, though their relationship goes back decades. In the play’s opening scene, Gus is interviewing Katherine (Gracie McGraw), a potential new hire in the label’s artists and repertoire division. The ideological divide between them is blindingly clear: Gus talks about “girls” in openly sexist terms, while Katherine prides herself in having served on a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion committee at Berkeley, among other accomplishments. Despite such fault lines, Gus hires her anyway.

Cut to four months later, when, during a meeting in which Gus shoots down yet another of Katherine’s suggestions for an artist to work with, he goes on a wildly offensive tirade, triggered by what he sees as an unearned sense of entitlement on her part. Katherine, however, is not the kind to take such a tongue-lashing lying down.

Through it all, Abby remains either on the sidelines, in a hospital bed as she fights breast cancer (which only Gus knows about) or flashing back to her experiences with one of the label’s biggest stars, Kat Wonder (also McGraw), who she discovered and championed. She made inroads in a male-dominated industry by playing by their rules, even if it meant sleeping with someone to get a foot in the door. It is only through witnessing Katherine’s reactions to Gus’s behavior that Abby begins to realize the ways she’s been discriminated against.

Gus sees his antiquated workplace manner simply as brutal honesty, which has served him well up to now. But of course, Katherine’s desire to foster a safer work environment is laudable. Such gestures toward nuance in Babe might have come off more convincingly had the characters been conceived as something more than one-dimensional pawns in Goldberg’s hot-button chess board. Katherine, in particular, is made into such a caricature of a woke Gen Z-er that it’s difficult to find fault with Gus’s foulmouthed demolition of her.

Unlike those two characters, Abby is meant to have an actual arc. To that end, Goldberg peppers in tantalizing details meant to deepen the character. Most notably, there are suggestions that Abby is not only as queer and closeted (costume designer Jeff Mahshie has clothed her in a T-shirt, blazer, and wide pants to give off an androgynous vibe), but that she was also sexually involved with Kat Wonder and still harbors guilt about furthering the drug abuse that led to her untimely death. None of the details are developed with any satisfying depth, however, with the effect that her dawning awareness seems merely pro forma instead of emotionally devastating.

Uncharacteristically, Tomei seems rather adrift as a performer, indulging in all sorts of gestural stage business (note the gratuitous restlessness of her hands in the opening scene) to compensate for the character’s thinness. McGraw does her best to make Katherine seem halfway human; she also gives impressive riot grrrl belt in a closing rock number she performs as Kat Wonder. Of the trio of performers, though, it’s Arliss Howard who gives the most coherent performance: genuinely terrifying at his macho height, but also convincingly tender and passionate around Abby in ways that suggest why she fell so easily into his orbit.

None of the three are helped by Scott Elliott’s awkward direction. Beyond the odd transitions between scenes and time periods, he makes the distracting, inexplicable choice of having actors who are not involved in a scene remain sitting onstage, backs turned to the audience, until they reenter in the next. Scenic designer Derek McLane also appears to have focused more on economy than imagination, with Cha See’s lighting design and Jessica Paz’s sound design occasionally picking up the slack to suggest different settings and time periods. The strangest touch of all in McLane’s set is the neon “BABE” sign on the far-right top corner of the stage, which inevitably gets lit up at the very end. Flagrantly unrealistic it may be, but it’s an all-too-appropriate touch for a show in which character drama gets sacrificed at the altar of heavy-handed provocation.