FringeArts presents Lee Minora’s Baby Everything

A hit in the 2025 Philadelphia Fringe Festival (here’s the BSR review of the premiere), Baby Everything continues Minora’s exploration of how the personal and political intersect in contemporary activism. Like White Feminist—which introduced me to her acumen as a solo performer at the 2018 Fringe (here’s a BSR review), and which has been revived several times—her raucous yet deeply considered monologue forces the audience, and perhaps the performer herself, to confront painful truths about their beliefs and activism.

Baby is back

Here, Minora plays Baby, a Starbucks-sipping, navel-gazing elder millennial who desperately wants to spend her day off disengaged from the horrors of the contemporary world. Fat chance. Instead, she spars over the phone with her mother, whose politics she finds abhorrent but who still supports her lifestyle, and meets a friend for coffee who stridently implores her to consider leaving the country. (Depending on where she would move, Baby wonders, would she be considered an expat or a refugee?) Awash in hypochondria, Baby’s day is further derailed when she detects a lump on her breast, which casts her emerging midlife crisis in existential terms.

Skilled both as a comedian and a physical performer, Minora gets the crowd laughing through even the tensest and most agonizing moments of Baby’s story. She also brings a welcome, unforced humanity to a character that could easily come across as a stereotype or caricature. In Baby, we can recognize our own privilege and our own solipsism, and we can empathize with it. We can also see the good intentions evident in a person who might seem superficially vapid and dismissible.

Unprecedented times?

Minora surrounds Baby’s story with multiple entertaining asides, including a time travel back to the waning days of Mussolini’s Italy and the rally of a motivational speaker determined to convince his audience they live in history’s most extraordinary times. These sections are unfailingly enjoyable, though they sometimes pull focus from the central story line. An extended art history lesson performed under the guise of an elderly PMA docent could be shorn to half its length and still not lose its purpose in the proceedings.

The motivational speaker’s message carries what seems to be Minora’s operating theme for Baby Everything: a full-scale rejection of cynicism. It’s admirable, and even biting, to suggest that even with all that Americans face today, we are still safer and better advantaged than most people in human history, up to and including most of the contemporary world. But it sometimes feels that Minora hasn’t ideally balanced her satire and her sincerity. Baby Everything is best at its sharpest, even when it wants to be heartfelt.

Looking for a longer run

That’s underlined by the production’s ending—no spoilers!—which resolves on an uncertain note, even after Baby receives a stroke of nominal good news. Minora and Rebecca Wright, taking over directorial duties here from Alice Yorke, leave the audience with an image that correctly reflects the current climate, where a person can be ebullient one moment and unsure the next.

The return of Baby Everything is all too brief: four performances only (concluding with shows at 2pm and 7pm on Saturday, February 28). Let’s hope Minora can settle down somewhere soon and give the production the extended run it deserves. The topics she covers won’t be any less relevant in the near future.