“You look like you have the labia of a five year old.”

This is uttered in the first two minutes or so of Baby Face, atop an uncomfortable and unrelenting thrum of white noise and feedback. The show begins with creator/director/writer/actor Katy Dye stating her name and her age. Factual. Innocuous. Normal. She then states that she’s often mistaken for being younger, and that she’s at the age where getting ID’d could be considered a compliment. Again, completely innocuous, something I’ve thought of myself, in fact. But she knocks off a year, then another. And it gets weirder and more uncomfortable which each “positive” attribute listed and each year shaved off.

Juxtaposition, contradiction and hypocrisy are all centre stage in Baby Face – a show centred on the bizarre, and entirely normalized, infantilisation of women – along with Dye herself and a lone, haunting high chair.

This jarring opening sequence helps set Dye’s intentions with the show in stone from the get go. She wants us to question what we find personally acceptable, as well as what we consider acceptable from society. At what point (at what age) do we, the audience, become uncomfortable with what she’s saying and, more importantly, why doesn’t all of it make us squirm?

One of the most interesting elements of Baby Face is its dependence on the audience. There is certainly traditional audience participation, as you’d expect – at the show I attended, a man in his forties stated that it was perfectly acceptable to be attracted to a fifteen year old, as long as you don’t act on it – but what’s often almost as intriguing as the show itself is simply observing the astonishingly different reactions amongst audience members.

I found myself confused a number of times. A few members of the audience – yes, usually male – would laugh at moments that I found unsettling, or flat out horrifying. Don’t get me wrong, there are certainly funny moments in Baby Face, but they’re pitch black and this is by no means a comedy. Although judging by certain reactions…maybe I’m wrong?

Baby Face is designed to educate and confuse at the same time, another of its core contradictions. Perhaps the most important thing that Dye has done with Baby Face – and the most important contradiction at the heart of them all – is that this is a show by a woman that is very much not intended for women – because the chances are pretty high that if you’re a woman then you already know everything that Dye has to say.

Baby Face seems to have been created almost exclusively with men in mind as its target audience and I suggest you go and see it the next opportunity you have. You might learn something and be left shaken by the experience, like myself. Or maybe you’ll leave entirely unmoved, something Dye clearly understands is very likely of a lot of men in the audience. But if you’re one of those people who calls their partner ‘baby’? Yeah, you’re definitely going to feel weird about that.

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