Bag Babies

David E. Kemp is head of the Drama Department at Queen’s University.

Stratton is one of Canada’s most-produced and most-praised
playwrights. Probably best known for his hilarious comedy Nurse Jane
Goes to Hawaii, he is the author of more than a dozen plays, ranging
from outrageous farce through black comedy to gentle, affirmative
melodrama.

The play’s subtitle, “A Comedy of (Bad) Manners,” belies both the
style and intention of the piece. Bag Babies does in fact draw heavily
on the Restoration comedy of manners for its effect. This late
seventeenth-century English theatre form was typically concerned with
the pursuit of wealth, often depicting unsuccessful attempts by upwardly
mobile members of the fledgling middle class to ape the manners and
sensibility of the aristocracy. The characters were “types,” stock
figures, without deeply developed personalities. The appeal, for a
Restoration audience, lay in the cleverness of the language and the
action.

Bag Babies is essentially a brilliantly funny satire about urban hunger
and homelessness, where the wealthy adopt street people to improve their
public image. In a style that is both “black” and at times bleak,
Stratton lampoons those whose major concern is tax deduction and whose
motto seems to be “greed without guilt.” He invites us to take a
second look at our own beliefs about social justice—for, make no
mistake about it, this is an intensely political play, focusing as it
does on the class struggle.

Stratton’s brilliant ploy of having the rich speak in rhymed couplets
and the poor in prose will work only if the verse is of high quality.
Here the quality is the finest—Dryden and Pope would surely have
approved.

This play is committed theatre at its best. It dares to challenge the
assumptions of its audience and in doing so links itself to an honorable
tradition of plays that seek to change, as well as reflect, social
mores.