ajhlovestheatre

MOTHER PLAY – A Play In Five Evictions

by Paula Vogel

directed by Tina Landau

The Hayes Theater, New York City – until 16 June 2024

https://2st.com/

An all-star cast headed by a member of American acting royalty making her return to Broadway after almost a decade in a new play by a Pulitzer prize winner, staged by one of the New York theatre scene’s most respected and innovative female directors… On paper, Paula Vogel’s Mother Play – A Play In Five Evictions starring Jessica Lange, Jim Parsons and Celia Keenan-Bolger sounds like a sure fire winner. On stage however, Tina Landau’s production is a mixed bag, with moments of genuine power jostling up against a surprising amount of dead air.

Like much of Vogel’s work, this is an autobiographical play, explicitly so. Lange plays Phyllis (which was Vogel’s mother’s actual name) across multiple decades as daughter Martha (Keenan-Bolger, in a really lovely demonstration of truthful, selfless stagecraft) recalls, in a series of memory-vignettes, life with this narcissistic alcoholic (there are shades here of The Glass Menagerie‘s Amanda and Long Day’s Journey‘s Mary Tyrone, both of which Lange has portrayed on Broadway and in the West End), and also the loss, to AIDS, of her beloved brother Carl (Parsons). The text makes it clear that this isn’t a naturalistic play, yet Landau’s production works best when it isn’t firing off the bells and whistles and focuses on letting these fine performers, particularly the two actresses, do their thing.

Landau has liberally applied lashings of stage magic to Vogel’s brutal, witty, somewhat meandering text, pointing up the fanciful tricks that memory can play. Some of it is wonderful (the two siblings seem to conjure Lange out of thin air, sparking some of the most heartfelt entrance applause currently on Broadway), some of it subtle (look out for the apparently bottomless handbag, à la Mary Poppins) and some of it plain bewildering (projection designer Shawn Duan has created a festering cockroach effect to denote the squalor of one of this family’s homes that makes your skin crawl, which is followed by a sequence involving a giant dancing bug that is more of a head scratcher).

Lange is magnificent, and brave. Phyllis, for all her fun flamboyances such as the knock-off designer outfits (costumes by Toni-Leslie James) and the exuberant disco dancing, is a bit of a monster. She’s vindictive, she writes off her own daughter while idolising and nearly suffocating her son. Then there’s the homophobia, which is probably the bitterest pill to swallow here: she rejects both of her gay children and reacts to her son’s life-claiming illness with a load of self-dramatising grandstanding and not one ounce of compassion. While I’ve no doubt this is an accurate picture of Ma Vogel it makes the character impossible to like, and renders the final scene -dementia-afflicted Phyllis, in a wheelchair, being tended to by a daughter who doesn’t want to be there- deeply depressing rather than moving.

There’s a particularly telling section, exquisitely rendered by Lange and Landau, that goes on for several minutes and is completely wordless but shows the emptiness and loneliness of this woman’s life as she gets progressively drunker, reacts to music and the television and settles down to a microwave dinner….it’s the minutiae of a solo life, self-inflicted after years of wearing everybody else down. It’s incredibly bleak but riveting in its precision and understanding of human behaviour.

Mother Play is frequently not an easy watch, which is understandable given the subject matter some of which might be more suitable for the analysts couch rather than the stage, but Vogel’s guilt and rage infused writing has some real bite, even if it’s not her best work. The switches between real and fantastical are clunky, and Parsons is disappointingly bland, although his few moments of rage feel authentic. Great as Lange is, it’s Celia Keenan-Bolger who holds the evening together, painting a touching, haunting picture of a kind soul whose needs and anger were repeatedly subsumed into a peripatetic existence and the needs of more obviously robust personalities.