Theater Review - What to expect from Expecting Isabel

Synchronicity Performance Group didn’t stage Lisa Loomer’s infertility comedy Expecting Isabel as a deliberate rebuke to the new movie Baby Mama. Like an unplanned pregnancy, the timing just worked out that way.

Baby Mama, opening Friday (and reviewed here), depicts Tina Fey’s single mother turning to Amy Poehler’s uncouth surrogate to have a baby. Where Baby Mama’s observations about surrogacy and the business of nontraditional birthing feel completely inauthentic, Loomer unquestionably grounds Expecting Isabel in real experiences.

Married New Yorkers Miranda and Nick (Stacy Melich and Dan Triandiflou) want to get pregnant. They undergo the horror stories and heartbreak of infertility treatment in the first act, and the adoption bureaucracy in Act Two.

With painfully self-conscious Miranda narrating the action, Expecting Isabel emphasizes the humor in the undignified, expensive and endlessly frustrating situation. Some of Loomer’s lines sound like warmed-over Neil Simon: “I went to the sperm bank – I didn’t make a withdrawal.”

At times the cast hits the comedy awfully hard, pushing already broad roles into caricatures such as Miranda’s drunk, martini-clutching mother (Tiffany Morgan); the occasional wacky U.S. taxi driver; and a musical number of happy mothers pushing strollers. Frequently, the funniest moments are the most underplayed. When Miranda drops her husband’s sperm sample in the street, Suehyla El-Attar’s bystander hands it back to her with a hilariously deadpan expression.

Expecting Isabel is strongest when Miranda’s and Nick’s marriage is the focus. Their relationship begins in a state of reasonable happiness and grows increasingly frayed with the pressures of debt, hormones and each partner trying not to blame the other for their childlessness. Melich and Triandiflou make good comic foils. Her chatty neuroses play off his earthy attitude as a sculptor from a proudly Italian, blue-collar background. The actors’ attention to the marital tensions, particularly in the downbeat but hopeful second act, gives the play its substance.

Nick’s happy-go-lucky outlook and Miranda’s obsessive nature are each put to the test, as a married couple that once complemented each other discovers their love more difficult to sustain under pressure. Loomer’s canny approach to relationships elevates the play’s sillier scenes above the sitcom level and hints at the trials you can expect when you’re not expecting.