When the audience arrives in the lobby outside of the Children’s Theatre Company Cargill Stage for a performance of “Babble Lab,” they’re offered a sock puppet. They are told they can put the sock puppet on their hand, or if they’d rather, their feet— provided they take their shoes off first.
They also don’t enter the theater right away. Instead, there’s a holding period before the show starts. When I attended the show on Sunday, the lobby was abuzz with little kids running, jumping, and dancing around as they waited for the show. Eventually, actor Autumn Ness arrived at the scene, wearing a colorful, cartoonish contraption. It had a long orange tube connecting a container strapped to her back with a funnel/megaphone object Ness held in her hand. She also wore oversized headphones, a foam ruff, and rainbow colored sneakers. Moving in between the small children who were rapt in attention, she used her invention to “listen” to the sounds around her— like the sounds of a baseball game, or the sound of a flushing toilet. Then, she ushered everyone into the theater.
Written and performed by Ness and directed by Sarah Agnew, “Babble Lab” is an inventive, imaginative little play that has a whole lot of clowning and magic, and maybe even some learning— though everyone seems to be having so much fun they might not notice that last part. It’s a show geared toward preschoolers, and you can definitely see similarities between the show and Sesame Street, the children’s television show also geared toward the early learner set. It’s a play that takes on major stepping stones of development for young people (sensory awareness, verbal sounds, and letters, for example) and makes all of it a delightful journey.
Ness started creating the piece about 10 years ago, when her two kids— both on the autism spectrum— were little. “Their journey to development, as so many kids and families journeys through development are— was— circuitous would be a nice word for it,” Ness told me in an interview. “Not rocky, but certainly with twists and turns.”
Ness told me that during that period, she remembers going to appointment after appointment, sometimes for several hours. At the time, she was struck by how serious the doctors could be in their white coats. “My little boy, he’d be five, and they, very seriously, blow up a balloon, and they let it go. And they watch his reaction. And they take a bunch of notes. And they’d do it again. It was this strange journey of development.”
In “Babble Lab,” Ness herself plays the scientist character, though one who does not speak for the first part of the play. Eventually, she learns to make sounds, and by the end begins to speak a great deal— though in a nonsense language rather than English.
“This scientist, which is what I play, is mixing together these different sounds or these different elements, and she’s trying to have this breakthrough,” Ness says. “The breakthrough she has is that she discovered language, she discovered letters that she can say, and then she discovered that she can sing them and she can laugh them and she can shout them.”
Sometimes, objects transport seamlessly between two dimensional and three dimensional worlds. That is, Ness will be engaging with one of her prop letters, which she makes disappear with her hands and all of a sudden it appears as animation in Jorge Cousineau’s bewitching projections. Ness herself also floats on screen in at least one moment. Annie Cady’s costumes and Michael Sommers’s imaginative set design are also playful and fun, and sound designer Katharine Horowitz has a lot of fun with the various sound effects.
Ness’s physical comedy ability makes the show sing, and she revealed to me there’s a bit of Dadaism snuck into the work. She remembers learning about the art movement while attending the University of Minnesota for theater, and being very attracted to the concept. When she first pitched Peter Brosius, artistic director at CTC, the idea of leaning into Dada came up. “Because preschoolers are naturally Dada,” she said. “They are naturally absurd. They don’t even think twice about it.”
Specifically, they found inspiration from a sound poem by Dadaist artist Kurt Schwitters called “Ursonate.” It’s 25 pages of nonsense words. “When you hear someone do the whole thing, you just get swept away at how bizarre and how delightful it is,” Ness said.
Ness kept kids with different development journeys in mind when working on the piece. “We just tried to make a sensory base for the show that is friendly for any preschooler to come into, but certainly a preschooler or kindergarten or whatever the age maybe with sensory issues,” she says. That includes considerations around volume and light levels, and also letting the audience know what’s about to happen from one moment to the next. The show also underlines a feeling of welcomeness for all kids.
“You have the messaging letting people know you can come as you are,” Ness says. “We understand that listening doesn’t mean, for most kids, sitting on your hands and cocking your head going ‘Oh yes, I understand.’ Listening can be cartwheels. Listening can have a sways and up and down. Listening can have talking back.”
There was quite a bit of that talking back at the show I saw. The performance has small benches for kids only in the front rows, and that section of seats had a lot of commentary throughout the show. “How did she do that?” One kid called out, after Ness performed a bit of theater trickery. “What are you doing?” Another kid cried, when Ness attempted to lick one of the letters.
But even with all that talking, the kids in the audience that I saw were utterly transfixed by the performance, as was I. This isn’t necessarily a play that has a definitive plot like a fairy tale. Rather, it’s really about the discovery of all the things that make being human so amazing— discovery, communication, and awe.
Babble Lab runs through April 14 at the Children’s Theatre Company ($17 kids, $26 adults). More information here.
Sheila Regan
Sheila Regan is a Twin Cities-based arts journalist. She writes MinnPost’s twice-weekly Artscape column. She can be reached at sregan@minnpost.com.
