Marisa Tomei, Arliss Howard, and Gracie McGraw in Babe. Photo: Monique Carboni

A lot of style-section ink gets spilled over generational clashes: “OK boomer” versus millennial entitlement and avocado toast versus Gen Z’s earnest self-righteousness. Gen X, I can say as a card-carrying member, often gets left out of the bashing from both directions; we’re just over here trying to get by. That’s a quick and reductive, but not entirely inaccurate, summary of Jessica Goldberg’s Babe, a new play that sets generational crosshairs on the perhaps too-easy target of the music business, home for famously bad behavior encompassed not just in the “sex, drugs, and rock n roll” cliche but the even less savory pits of sexual harassment, bullying, and all round bad behavior. EXA Records, the fictional record company where the action takes place here, is no exception.

Gus (Arliss Howard), head of A&R, freely admits to being a boomer dinosaur, and wouldn’t change a thing: not his gross comments about women, not his rough working-class upbringing, not his insistence that he might be a shit, but he’s never been a hypocrite. Now in his late sixties with a fifty-year string of hit records to his credit, he’ll acknowledge the ways his industry has changed, the way music has changed, but never that he might need to move with the times. He’s easy to mock, and Goldberg, along with director Scott Elliott and a rollicking performance from Howard, make him easy to hate, but you can’t deny the force of his convictions or the power he throws around like it’s never occurred to him anyone might challenge the way he wields it. 

We meet Katherine (Gracie McGraw) at her job interview. She is a young millennial/old Gen Z, brimming with self-possession, self-certainty, and self-righteousness. She’s easy to poke fun at, too, with her “sound baths for the unhoused” and her Berkeley psychology minor, or even when she starts pouting over not having a successful pitch in the first six months of her career. (The sound baths are a detail one might wish had been left out; it’s too obvious a joke for someone as analytical in her ambition as this character.) But one can be both self-righteous and right, and although this isn’t true as often as Katherine thinks it is, she’s not wrong to be horrified by the environment at the company she’s fought so hard to work at. McGraw brings a glorious smugness to her performance; like Gus, Katherine enjoys utter confidence in her own identity. (McGraw doubles as Kat Wonder, a 1990s post-punk riot grrl discovery of the label’s, and Kat is quite the opposite, spiky with frustration and rage.) Katherine is willing to police every boundary and interaction–and yet she’s also capable of making an inappropriate pass at her boss. 

All that rather facile opposition is laid on the table early, and while the clashes between Gus and Katherine bring heat, there’s very little nuance. Gus wants nothing to change, to his continued benefit; Katherine wants everything to change, to further her ambitions and ethics. But Babe is a three-character play, and the third, Abby (Maria Tomei), is the center of it. She does complicate this polar opposition (Gen X again, sandwiched in the middle), though that character herself remains frustratingly opaque. 

Abby is Gus’s Gen X right-hand woman, a second-in-command whose job has clearly evolved to include monitoring Gus’s tone and keeping his behavior palatable to civilians and artists. She’s been in the room where it happens for thirty years now, but never gets the credit she deserves–or drops her guard for a moment. No one has ever asked her what she wants, and she’s better at trying to figure out her own way to get it than at asking for it. She brought Kat Wonder to Gus’s attention, and she’ll spend the rest of her life blaming herself for everything that followed. Gus has been married multiple times and has various groups of kids, but we don’t get the impression Abby has anyone outside her work; this is why she’s undergoing chemo for a cancer only Gus knows about. She’ll subtly nudge Gus toward an opinion, but rarely be the first to explicitly express it. (We don’t ever really hear the music of any of the label’s artists beyond tinny headphone leak, which is a clever note on the part of Jessica Paz’s sound design, but saps the sense that Abby and Gus are–or were–passionate about their work. The preshow playlist of female-heavy modern punk says more about the characters’ relationship music than most of what happens in the piece itself–the main exception being Kat Wonder, who gets to play in a climactic triumphant flashback to Abby’s salad days, with music by the band BETTY.) As a teenager, Katherine idolized Abby–who she recognizes from a famous photo with Kat outside CBGB, And when Abby finally does get some power, she’s immediately held accountable for everything she failed to fix. 

Tomei brings her usual grounded earthiness to Abby, but Abby remains more ballast than character: making Gus more human; inspiring Katherine’s dreams in a way that’s part idol, part crush; battling her own body and anchored in her own past. Because we also meet a younger Abby and Gus, in the glory days where Abby the waitress brings Gus to see Kat Wonder’s band, and then cajoles Kat into taking the deal Gus offers her as a solo artist, and continues to encourage Kat into the career Abby and Gus envision for her, until it all ends in an overdose. 

Kat first appears as sort of a conscience for Abby in a chemo haze, reminding her of her own blinders. That ghost Kat of Abby’s mind is more intriguing than the Kat of more ordinary flashbacks, which don’t give us all that much insight into present-day Abby or Gus–possibly because neither Howard nor Tomei fares as well as their younger self. We don’t feel much of a different energy. The play could use more of the internal dialogue we see Abby having with herself in these moments.

Elliott’s staging keeps all three actors on the raised platform that anchors Derek McLane’s set (serving as both the EXA office and in one nifty scenic trick, Abby’s record-filled apartment); the actor who isn’t in a two-person scene lurks on the periphery, not watching but still somehow present. It’s an odd choice that makes them all feel trapped in this dynamic, when the more interesting truth would be about the choices each of them has made along the way. What has Abby compromised to succeed? How does she feel about those choices? Do Gus or Katherine ever waver into self-doubt? But Babe doesn’t give us any of that.