Theater Review by Samuel L. Leiter . . . .
As the 2023-2024 Broadway season hurtled through its overstuffed last week before the annual awards deadline, two plays about motherhood—one more affecting than the other—opened within days of each other. The first, opening on April 23, was Amy Herzog’s Mary Jane, the second Paula Vogel’s The Mother Play: A Play in Five Evictions, debuting on April 25 at Second Stage’s Hayes Theater. Each features a movie star—Rachel McAdams in the former, Jessica Lange in the latter—who, like the plays themselves, has been nominated for a Tony.
Mary Jane, about a stressed-out, saintly mother caring for a chronically ill toddler, shows the maternal instinct in its most selfless, protective guise. The less consistently loving mother in Mother Play, raising her son and daughter across the years, is destructively self-centered, inviting mutual heartache when her maternal ideals clash with the needs of her offspring.
A semi-autobiographical memory play that strongly recalls Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie, Mother Play is a three-hander whose titular character is Phyllis (Lange), a glamor-conscious divorcée of Southern Catholic upbringing never far from a drink or cigarette. Her children are Carl (a familiarly fey Jim Parsons) and Martha (Celia Keenan-Bolger, at the top of her game). We first see them in 1962, when Phyllis is 37, Carl 14, and Martha 12. (Vogel’s mother’s name is Phyllis and she had a brother named Carl. Another brother, Mark, is not part of the play, which is dedicated to him.)
Martha is the Pulitzer Prize-winning Vogel (How I Learned to Drive) avatar, moving in and out of the action to narrate an episodic tale of family affection and dysfunction, much of it focused on Phyllis’s homophobia. The stage directions place the final scene in “the present,” which, if taken literally, would mean the two characters involved, Phyllis and Martha, would, respectively, be 99 and 74. As can be imagined, Mother Play offers Lange, 75, Parsons, 51, and Keenan-Bolger, 46, a marvelous platform for demonstrating their skill at playing multiple ages, a task at which Keenan-Bolger and Lange excel. The most obvious technical assistance—apart from the changing fashions indicated by Toni-Leslie James’s costumes—comes from Lange’s white wig (hair and wig design: Matthew Armintrout) worn at the end.
David Zinn’s deliberately bland set is a greenish wall upstage that remains until near the very end; downstage, the same assortment of furniture (most notably, a splendid Eames chair), refrigerator, and cartons is moved by the actors into new configurations each time the family is evicted and forced to move from one address to another in the Maryland areas near Washington, D.C. An overhead grid is equipped with a variety of lighting fixtures, each new residence seeing its own upgraded chandelier descend. Lighting designer Jen Schriever does a fine job of giving atmosphere to the otherwise neutral design.
When we first meet the family, they’re financially strapped, living in a sub-basement apartment where, to save on rent, Carl has the custodial responsibility of taking out the building’s horrible-smelling garbage. A cockroach infestation, however, becomes unbearable and, when Phyllis can’t get the landlord to act, the first of the family’s five evictions kicks in.
Projection designer Shawn Duan creates some terrific creepy crawlies that actually seem to race across the props; however, while the idea of expanding these into a cartoonish cockroach chorus line playing across the rear wall as we hear the strains of “La Cucaracha” is entertaining, it would seem to belong to another play.
Each new apartment is on a higher floor and larger, symbolizing a step up in the family’s fortunes, although Vogel is silent about the income source making the moves possible; we’re forced to surmise that Phyllis has an increasingly well-paying job. Phyllis rules the roost like a queen bee, even demanding that Martha mix her cocktails. She’s particularly concerned about the sexuality of her bookish, effeminate son, whose nighttime excursions disturb her, and tomboyish daughter. Martha, bullied by boys on the school bus, gets a lesson from Carl on how to carry herself like a man, but from Phyllis she receives a broad, hip-swaying demonstration of how a girl is expected to walk, which, of course, Martha can copy only with comic awkwardness. Like the cockroach bit, it’s amusing (and has its point) but seems stylistically out of sync with the rest of the play.
The central issue erupts when both Carl and Martha step out of the closet, and Phyllis, for all the sophistication one might assume from her fashionable clothes and attitude, expresses severe distaste. Given her children’s—especially Carl’s—airs, she’s either been in denial or is unbelievably obtuse. A scene at a gay disco is central when, after the family seems to be having a good time, even dancing together to “Disco Inferno,” with the initially uptight Phyllis laying down some cool dance moves, she comes down hard on Martha for kissing a girl. Estrangement follows.
This is a play designed to push your emotional buttons, so it’s predictable that, given the years traversed, Carl, like the real Vogel brother, will contract AIDS, fatally. The crisis offers a shot at rapprochement when Phyllis, surprisingly, allows her maternal love to overcome her disappointment in Carl’s orientation and she squeezes him supportively. Such hugging, even of one’s son, may not be easy to accept for those who remember how frightening just being near an AIDS victim was for most people in the 80s, much less for someone like Phyllis. But, at least here, maternal instinct rises to the occasion, and she even readily offers to care for him at her home. Not for long, however; when the task proves beyond her powers, he’s forced to leave.
Afterward, a striking scene occurs showing Phyllis alone in her condo, drinking, smoking, eating a prepared meal at a TV table, and listening to romantic music, like “All the Things You Are,” even, in her red silk wraparound, getting up to dance around the room (choreography: Christopher Gattelli). For an extended sequence, not a word is spoken but, under the delicate direction of Tina Landau, Lange could not make Phyllis’s devastating loneliness and despair more heartbreakingly palpable.
Ultimately, Phyllis ends up in an expensive facility, wheelchair-bound and suffering from dementia. She doesn’t recognize Martha, who, at considerable emotional and financial sacrifice, looks after her welfare. The scene between the mentally challenged mother and her loving but resentful daughter, now the one in charge, is strong stuff; but, like much else here, it’s been done often enough to border on cliché.
Mother Play touches on familiar issues to which many Broadway playgoers will relate, even if they sometimes smack of contrivance. It didn’t move me nearly as much as Mary Jane, but I can’t deny that the mere opportunity to see Jessica Lange bring her great beauty, intelligence, vocal power, and sensitivity—not to mention her ability to smoke convincingly!—to the stage within the Hayes Theater’s intimate environs is sufficient reason to commend a visit to Mother Play, especially now, with Mother’s Day so fast approaching.
The Mother Play: A Play in Five Eviction. Through June 16 at the Hayes Theater/Second Stage (305 W. 44th Street, between Seventh and Eighth Avenues). www.2st.com
Photos: Joan Marcus