BIRTHRITE
Taube’s play, which he also directs, deals with difficult subjects–child pornography, incest, and family loyalty. The family at the center of Birthrite makes the warped crew of Pinter’s The Homecoming look like something out of Leave It to Beaver. Judge (Don Blair), a child-porn producer, has been feebly clinging to his role as family patriarch after brutally mutilating his wife and burying her alive after she had sex with their repressed son Frank (Johnathan F. McClain). In addition to Frank, Judge has surrounded himself with a grim surrogate family. He treats the mentally disturbed Saven (David Keats) and ex-con Rafe (Ronnie Reporto) as his sons and keeps one of his former porn stars, Lita (Deborah King), around to act as incestuous mom to the boys. (She hasn’t turned Judge on since she reached the age of 12.)
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Birthrite is liberally sprinkled with Biblical imagery, profanity, and trite speechifying. Taube scores points for creativity if not for poetry with one character’s exclamation that “You don’t know fuck about dick” and another’s description of a man who smiled at him as if “I got come on my tie.” The actors labor valiantly to carry off lines like “There’s no such thing as love or hate or any of that shit” and “Some scars never leave you,” but their efforts are in vain.
