The Broadway Theatre Review: 2ST’s Mother Play
By Ross
‘A play in five evictions’, reads the subtitle of the new Broadway star-filled gem of a play, Mother Play, unpacking heartache, disappointment, and complicated attachments, literally, at Second Stage’s Hayes Theater. Its one compelling treasure trove of familial moments when connection and disconnection are unwrapped by a trio of pros doing some pretty darn fine work with the dynamic words of playwright Paula Vogel (How I Learned to Drive; Indecent). In she walks, down the aisle, surprising us with her casual entrance, as she starts this adventure off, climbing the stairs and turning to address us straight on. She tells us that there is a season for packing and a season for unpacking, and within an instant, we are well aware that this memory play that revolves around her and her mother is an unpacking of the most complicated kind, and we brace ourselves because the implications are right there in that cardboard box. It’s her brother that holds one of the latch keys, and he’s not there anymore to help her unlock this pandora’s box of emotionally stuffed animals and feminist books.
Making the grandest of swivel entrances to date, Jessica Lange (Broadway’s Long Day’s Journey into Night) snatches the spotlight once again, elevating the piece with her fine form and precise framing. Matching her work step by step, her cast mates Celia Keenan-Bolger (Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird on Broadway) and Jim Parsons (CSC’s A Man of No Importance) as her two children excel at every unpacking, doing most of the heavy lifting as they grow up under the unwatchful eye of this fierce woman. Their mother, while being a relentless survivor, might not win any mother-of-the-year awards any time soon (but she might win a few other less maternal awards this season), as we engage wholeheartedly in the chapters, chronicled by evictions and infestations (that never really seem to go away, metaphorically speaking). They are ceremoniously wheeled out on furnished platforms and rearranged by the children, as the mother stands by, supervising, thoughtfully and creatively designed by David Zinn (Broadway’s Stereophonic) accented well by the differentiating lighting designed by Jen Schriever (Broadway’s A Strange Loop) and delivered by the solid sound design by Jill Bc Du Boff (Broadway’s Summer, 1976). It’s a clever concept, that works for the most part, until it feels like it has become an overdone accessory, and should be thrown out like those infested garbage cans.
Directed with care by Tina Landau (Broadway’s SpongeBob….), each chapter hints at the symbolic destruction that happens when the world collides with this mother, and the sharpness of her tongue. “Revenge is next to godliness,” she tells her bug-crushing children, as she envelopes their first eviction of many, but it is there, in her evictions of others, where the true revenge boomerangs back at that righteous mind. Sometimes, the projection design, courtesy of Shawn Duan (Ma-Yi/Public’s The Chinese Lady), leans to heavily on the itchy queasy humour of things too slightly and ridiculously, but with stories drenched in numbered martinis, Lange’s mother figure cuts a captivating but messy form, reminiscent, at least in one moment, of a 70s sitcom star gone wrong, costumed well by Toni-Leslie James (LCT’s The Gardens of Anuncia). Lange bites down deep into the role, finding flavours in somewhat stereotypical forms and functions. She’s an eyeful of spectacular, stumbling strength, gnawing at the numerous olive branches held out to her by these two children who cling to her in some very differently formed ways.
Keenan-Bolger’s Martha does a lot of the unpacking for us, delivering the chapter titles and asides directly into our laps. Her tale is the one of interest, with Parson’s Carl getting the armchair in the back role delivering forth Anastasia performances with aplomb, but it doesn’t feel like he is given many new unique spaces to fill out. His unraveling under the harsh eye of his mother is the tragedy that Lange’s Phyllis creates all on her own, backed by the close-minded society she is desperate to navigate well after her husband leaves her for a younger woman. “Mother might just get through this,” is a statement made early on by her children, and even when it seems like her maternal vehicle is veering off a cliff into the ‘childless mother’ void, Lange holds our interest.
Carl is the chosen one, we are told, but the play is really about the difficult, almost competitive relationship between a mother and her wiser daughter, leaving the older women around me at The Hayes Theatre weeping wildly as the one-act play nears its ‘touching’ end. But the Mother Play left me a bit unmoved and resigned. Maybe I’ve seen similar mother/son dynamic played out before in somewhat stronger and more determined harrowing forms of Harvey Fierstein, his Torch Song, and the film’s costar, Ann Bancroft. I’m not sure, but that side of the apartment never felt fully unpacked, set-up, or occupied. But in that space between Keenan-Bolger and Lange, well, that flat is fully functional, complete, and precise. We feel for them both deeply, in very different ways, embracing their tangled up web of disconnection and deliverance with understanding and empathy.