THE BABYSITTER
And sometimes even baby-sitters.
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In his short story, The Babysitter, Robert Coover brilliantly ridicules the sexual fantasies triggered by a teenage girl. And in his fine adaptation of the short story, director Victor D’Altorio, working with the Parallax Theater Company, cleverly intensifies the absurdity and violence that Coover finds implicit in such fantasies.
But Coover provides several other outcomes. In one of them, the baby-sitter’s boyfriend calls, she tells him that the Tuckers don’t want her to have friends over when she baby-sits, and he accepts that. In another version, he comes over anyway to watch TV. In yet another version, he recruits a friend to go with him, and they peer into the bathroom window and discover her naked, getting into the bathtub. And in other versions, the boyfriend and his companion actually go into the house, where their adolescent sexual fantasies come true amid shocking violence.
This adaptation gives Matt Diehl as Mr. Tucker the same opportunities. While driving to the party with his wife, he fantasizes that the baby-sitter is attracted to him. “She had seemed to be self-consciously arching her back, jutting her pert breasts, twitching her thighs,” the narrator says as Mr. Tucker drives, “and for whom if not for him?” When his wife, pulling at her girdle, asks, “What do you think of our baby-sitter?” the embarrassed, wide-eyed shock on Diehl’s face provides a laugh that’s not in Coover’s story.
