Tuesday, April 7, 2009

The Hand That Cradles the Rock, Gaslight Baker Theatre, March 27 - April 11







Billy Alexander is beleaguered and bemused throughout this cheery piece of Canadian froth, now playing at the Gaslight Baker Theatre in Lockhart.

As the stay-at-home writer Ross Cameron, he's a Mr. Mom surrounded by women: his wife the successful industrial designer, the friendly home care nurse Miss Bricker from the Canadian public health service, and his flighty mother-in-law Beattie, still a dish after all these years. Oh, and his infant daughter, offstage. We never see her but she does generate comic demands on her dad, who is slowly going diaper-pail pablum stir-crazy in their house out in the remote Canadian woods.

The plot is a little bit color-by-the-numbers. Writer Warren Graves piles on top of the gender role reversal a series of funny bits about the frustration of Cameron's libido, and then introduces that wide-eyed pretty nurse just as Cameron's wife Alexandra is back from three weeks of travel and crashing on an important design project (above) . Mom-in-law Beattie and her droll companion George swing by regularly for comic relief and a tipple.

Inevitably, when Alexandra travels for a presentation, bad weather and good luck bring that cute Miss Bricker into Cameron's house. An aspiring author of romance fiction, she has lent Cameron the draft of her first novel, written in hot pink prose.

Will they or won't they? And what will be the consequences?

Read More on AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .


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