THE ORIGINAL LAST WISH BABY, Frump Tucker Theatre Company, at Bailiwick Repertory. This play and production deserve each other: in a marriage made in theater hell, Ohio comic book writer William Seebring’s tedious script is yoked with Errol McClendon’s nitwit staging. Seebring means to mock the media but mistakes the silly and stupid for the satirical. Assorted caricatures of the press indulge in a feeding frenzy over the tawdry “miracle” of a Cleveland baby born without a heart. Then a woman in New Jersey accidentally delivers the missing organ, but when the baby and its heart are reunited, the heart survives and the baby decomposes around it. This half death inspires an “antifuneralist” movement–and just as you’d expect in a comedy that’s brain-dead on arrival, the condition of the heart rather than the head determines the life-and-death decision.
