Philly Fringe 2025: Lee Minora presents Baby Everything

Her 2018 show, White Feminist, satirized the white women who enjoy the spotlight of their own goodness (and their own abject apologies) a bit too much to effect any change. Baby Everything is a worthy successor, though it takes aim at everyone who is melting down about the state of the world as seen through our screens.

The current-affairs activist

Minora becomes Baby, a spunky, stressed-out young woman living in a house her parents bought. Streaks of blue makeup decorate her face like tearstains. She wakes up on her day off, determined it will not be “squandered crying and worrying.” Baby, who vividly describes the symptoms of a panic attack, and the times she “almost” got malaria and Lupus, still manages to stay informed: “current affairs is kinda my activism.”

In a hectic, hilarious sequence, Minora enacts the many videos that slide through Baby’s feed. Watching one person physically embody a scrolling session underlines Baby’s quip that it’s hard to tell “the difference between something terrible happening to me and feeling like something terrible is happening to me.”

We’ve been here before, actually

Other segments in the show remind me of creators like Amanda Nelson (of Amanda’s Mild Takes) and the brilliant political historian Heather Cox Richardson (of Letters from an American)—not because Minora evokes the style of these commentators, but because in a sea of pundits crying that “this is not who we are” or claiming that this is an unprecedented moment in America, Nelson and Richardson remind us that we have, in fact, been here before.

Minora transforms into her own Italian ancestor, clutching a baby to her breast in the aftermath of WWII. She quizzes the audience on whether we have many children that we didn’t want to have, or whether we must work in the fields to keep our family from starving, or if we were denied education. Then she becomes a friend who just got home from a European vacation, whispering that she’s “thinking about leaving the country…permanently.” Where is there a little less climate change? Isn’t there a country that doesn’t have a complicated past?

Minora gets us sighing over the dire state of the world and then pelts us with reasons things are going better than ever. Who likes indoor plumbing? How about global literacy? The eradication of smallpox? About 120 years ago, half of all children didn’t survive into their mid-teens; now it’s over 95 percent. In the show’s funniest segment, Minora plays on our most desperate desire: that our mom would read the articles we send her and say that we were right: crime rates in liberal cities are falling, and late-term abortion is actually extremely rare.

A Yorke/Minora triumph

Minora stands out on Philly’s solo clown scene for sharp writing combined with physical performance and consummate interactive improv. Alice Yorke does yeoman’s work in this year’s Fringe, directing this debut as well as writing and starring in Lions (another must-see), and her touch is evident in the show’s engaging mix of monologue, movement, and apt, messy feelings. Sharp lighting, sound, and evocative costume pieces bring it all together (Matteo Scammell is credited as the show’s “creative team”).

Do we have everything?

I left Baby Everything wrestling with uncomfortable questions, but beyond its timely satire, I’m not sure where the show is pointing me. Yes, we need to check ourselves if we’re panicking about authoritarianism while we’re also the ones who are, more or less, still unaffected—and obsessively consuming the news is not a substitute for action (“it’s not like knowing about it is going to change anything,” Baby observes).

“I have everything,” Minora urges us to say to each other, and for a majority-white audience spending a night at the theater in a major American city, that’s probably at least mostly true. Is our overt anxiety about politics a result of our empathy for others, or is it our determination to imagine ourselves at the center of every crisis? Baby Everything skewers our doomscrolling paralysis, but does that snap us out of it? Does it offer an alternative?

Deserving more space

The show runs through September 26 at the MAAS Studio, which has always been a tough venue—it’s hard to get to, has no lobby to speak of, and the second-floor space is accessed only by a steep, narrow, poorly-lit staircase. (The MAAS complex’s garden, which served as a lovely outdoor bar in the past, isn't open this year.) The Fringe site lists the venue’s address as 1320 N. 5th Street, but the entrance is actually around the block, on Randolph Street.

Minora premiered White Feminist at the Wilma’s studio space in 2018, and later the show ran upstairs at the Skinner Studio at Plays & Players—another venue that many cannot access. I hope Baby Everything, or whatever Minora does next, returns in a bigger, more welcoming space. Her talent deserves it.