Pulitzer Prize winner Paula Vogel (How I Learned to Drive) has written a bitingly funny and unflinchingly honest new play about the hold our family has over us and the surprises we find when we unpack the past.
It’s 1962, just outside of D.C., and matriarch Phyllis (Jessica Lange) is supervising her teenage children, Carl (Jim Parsons) and Martha (Celia Keenan-Bolger), as they move into a new apartment. Phyllis has strong ideas about what her children need to do and be to succeed, and woe be the child who finds their own path. Bolstered by gin and cigarettes, the family endures — or survives — the changing world around them. Blending flares of imaginative theatricality, surreal farce, and deep tenderness, this beautiful roller coaster ride reveals timeless truths of love, family, and forgiveness.
“Mother Play” is not as great as plays Paula Vogel has written in the past – perhaps not as great as she might be able to make it in time – but under Tina Landau’s direction, it is a mesmerizing production, albeit not always easy to watch. That’s not only because of the fully-invested acting, but also because of the fully-infested sets (thanks to projection designer Shawn Duan.)
At times it seems like Vogel has been inspired by Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie. At other times—with that problematic mother losing composure during a series of revealing telephone calls, that ignored and emotionally damaged daughter, that son itching to leave home and go out into the dangerous world—it seems like Vogel is consciously giving us an updated version of what might or could have happened to those forlorn Wingfields had they, and Williams, existed 30 years later. In any event, Vogel’s play and players merit a visit to the Helen Hayes. Only not as a Mother’s Day treat for dear old mom.
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