You can’t say that Mother Play doesn’t throw a lot into the mix.
This clearly personal, three-character work by Paul Vogel (How I Learned to Drive) deals with — among other things — alcoholism, sexual orientation, AIDS, financial struggles, dementia, and the eternal struggle between children and disapproving parents. And oh, did I mention the dancing cockroaches?
Memory plays such as this one can be tricky. Sometimes, as with Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie (an obvious influence, and there’s a lot of Vogel’s own The Baltimore Waltz in here as well), they turn out to be masterpieces. More often, as with titles too numerous to mention, they come across as unfocused and self-indulgent.
The latter proves to be case with this clearly personal effort receiving its world premiere by Second Stage at Broadway’s Hayes Theater. Despite its top-flight cast consisting of Celia Keenan-Bolger, Jim Parsons, and a sublime Jessica Lange (making her first Broadway appearance in eight years and the first time she’s appeared in a new play as opposed to works by Williams and O’Neill), Mother Play covers too much ground without providing enough emotional depth to overcome its familiarities.
[Read Steven Suskin’s ★★★★☆ review here.]
Which is not to say that there aren’t many amusing and moving moments along the way, thanks not only to the performers but also the universality of its themes and the playwright’s trenchant wit. But it’s hard not to groan when, early on, Lange’s matriarch announces to her two children, “Today’s the day our lives get better,” and you know, you just know, that they really won’t.
The play covers roughly four decades, from the early 1960s on, in the lives of Phyllis (Lange) and her two children Carl (Parsons) and his younger sister Martha (Keenan-Bolger), the latter serving as the narrator and a clear stand-in for the playwright. When first seen, the characters are age 37, 14, and 12, respectively, which might be hard to swallow except for Lange’s radiance and Parsons and Keenan-Bolger’s perpetual youthfulness.
After having been abandoned by their husband and father, about which Martha is deeply embittered, they’re clearly struggling to make ends meet, living in a run-down basement apartment in the Washington, D.C. area. It’s but the first of their many dwellings, as indicated by the work’s subtitle A Play in Five Evictions, with Martha announcing each one to the audience at the beginning of certain scenes.
As the play proceeds through its intermissionless 105 minutes it depicts the complicated emotional entanglements among the three characters. But it’s not hard to see where it’s going when Phyllis orders her children to make her martinis and they fulfill their request with the expertise of seasoned bartenders, or when Carl demonstrates a precociously deep knowledge of contemporary fashion designers and the works of Virginia Woolf.
The evening, which features the actors moving the scenery so much around the stage they should be unionized as stagehands, also has its eccentric, surreal elements, including a bizarre obsession with cockroaches, which are plentiful in the family’s less than hygienic living conditions. At one point we see a fleet of them performing a synchronized dance (don’t worry, they’re merely projections) to the tune of, what else, “La Cucaracha.”
Under the direction of Tina Landau, Keenan-Bolger and Parsons are predictably fine in their roles, even if they’re not being stretched much. But it’s Lange who commands the evening, displaying the sort of star power and stage command that make her a Broadway diva. Just the sight of her in various outfits, including ‘60s-era hippie denim, is a pleasure, and it’s worth the price of admission to see her launch into disco dancing (the audience, predictably, goes wild). She’s even given a lengthy silent, solo interlude in which she listens to music, has a drink, smokes, and attempts to eat a frozen meal that’s made no less unpalatable by generous doses of hot sauce. Other than conveying the character’s loneliness in her older years, the scene doesn’t have much reason for being. But as brilliantly played by Lange, it’s an acting lesson that every budding thespian should study.
Mother Play: A Play in Five Evictions opened April 25, 2024 at the Helen Hayes Theater and runs through June 16. Tickets and information: 2st.com
