In ‘Buggy Baby,’ Shadows Creep In

In the tub, the baby is screaming and thrashing around, on her way to a full meltdown. Overwhelmed, her young mother has turned her back — not for long, but for long enough. The infant slips beneath the water.

There is no actual water, though, and no actual child, either. The title character in Josh Azouz’s vivid comic nightmare “Buggy Baby” is played by an adult. Why, then, the terror that jolts through us as we watch her start to drown? More perplexingly, why is that sense of urgent immediacy so rare in this play?

For lovers of gritty, messy, mordant theater that cocks an eyebrow at the world and dissects its cruelties, the ingredients of a potent experience would seem to be assembled here. When “Buggy Baby” made its premiere in London, in 2018, critics were left baffled but impressed by the hallucinatory tale.

Yet Rory McGregor’s production at Astoria Performing Arts Center in Queens — produced in association with Dutch Kills Warehouse and Lawryn LaCroix —gives the persistent impression of being a bit too enamored of its own trippiness and less interested in telling this strange, unsettling story with the necessary clarity.

In a crummy room in London, Nur (Rana Roy) and Jaden (Hadi Tabbal) are refugees from an unnamed country that no longer exists, scraping by on so little money that when a job cleaning toilets comes up, Nur urges Jaden to really try for it. They are not a couple, at least not at first, but they have become for each other a kind of family.

The widowed Jaden — who promised Nur’s father, his old friend, that he would look after her — earns a pittance as a gardener, and misses his dead wife. Nur is a college student whose daughter, Baby Aya (Erin Neufer), sleeps in her stroller; they can’t afford a crib. When Aya was born, her soft skull was misshapen, so she wears a helmet to make it round. And yes, it does take a minute to acclimate to the sight of Aya embodied by a grown woman in a stroller, dressed in a rubber-duck onesie, her purple helmet strapped on. (Costumes are by Avery Reed.)

But once you get used to it, Aya is a fascinating baby: wry, no-nonsense, gimlet-eyed, with all the iffy muscle control and stubborn whims of a tiny new human. She is closer to Jaden, who cares for her while her mother is at school, than to Nur, who is afraid to pick her up. “Little gazelle,” Jaden calls the infant, tenderly.

In the real world Aya would be too young to talk, but in the heightened surrealism of this play — with its set (by Brendan Gonzales Boston) painted shocking pink, and lighting (by Stacey Derosier) that shifts into lurid reverie — age is no obstacle to dialogue.

“You’ve got a violent imagination for a baby,” Nur tells her, after Aya muses about chopping out parts of herself.

“I’ve seen some terrible things,” the baby says, and this is true.

So have Nur and Jaden, and when Jaden attempts to escape his own awareness by chewing psychedelic leaves from a cotton-candy-colored tree, that ugliness pursues him in the form of “rabbits with devil souls.” In his wrecked head, the upright-walking Burnt Fur Rabbit (Jeffrey Brabant) and Gunshot Wound Rabbit (Zack Segel) menace him and threaten Nur and Aya. (When, eventually, guns are involved, they are reassuringly, cartoonishly fake-looking.)

Predatory men are a lurking presence in this play, and under the influence of those leaves, Jaden becomes one of them, with Aya entirely at his mercy. This is, hands down, the most disquieting element of “Buggy Baby.”

Yet if there is a core to this show beneath the polychromatic cleverness, it remains elusive. Even when pure, battered realism breaks through, the dire circumstances of this unstable family are disturbing only at a distance: the peril they’re in, the pain they feel, the safety that lies somewhere just out of reach.

Buggy Baby
Through June 26 at Astoria Performing Arts Center, Queens; apacny.org/buggybaby. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes.