TheaterMania.com: Critics and audiences came up with all sorts of analyses of this absurdist piece when it opened Off-Broadway in 2001 after its world premiere in London and its American premiere at the Alley Theatre in Houston. For those unfamiliar with the "plot," here is a précis: An innocent young couple, identified only as Boy and Girl, apparently have a baby, but the joy of their new parenthood is obliterated by the arrival upon the scene of a jaded, middle-aged couple identified as Man and Woman. These two first say that they have come to take the baby and later say that there never was a baby at all. The play ends poignantly with Boy and Girl alone onstage, at first asking each other if they can hear their child crying and eventually convincing themselves that they cannot.
One popular theory about all of this has been that, in fact, the young couple are only deluding themselves and that their baby never existed. (Freudian Slip Department: When discussing the piece with others, I have sometimes found myself referring to it as The Play Without the Baby.) But Albee himself has confirmed that the baby is meant to be real even though we never actually see it. Even if the details of the story and their ultimate meaning remain head-scratchingly elusive, the overall themes presented here -- corruption of innocence, the often scarifying relationships between parents and their children, the blurring of reality and fantasy -- are as clear and potent as they are in so many of Albee's previous works, most pertinently Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (According to Albee, the young couple in TPATB "realize they cannot take the pain and loss of having a baby, so it ceases to be real." This points up the author's thesis that "reality is determined by our need." Ain't it the truth!)