Jessica Lange is unforgettable in Paula Vogel’s unforgiving portrait of the title character in “Mother Play,” her semiautobiographical new play opening tonight on Broadway — a role that is so demanding that it feels tantamount to actor abuse. The actress is called on to age forty years on stage, frequently and ferociously in a heightened state of emotion, whether drunkenly oversharing, uncontrollably raging, bitterly regretting, or coldly rejecting her two children.
Celia Keenan-Bolger and Jim Parsons give superb performances as those children, Martha and Carl, in what starts as Martha’s memory play, somewhat reminiscent of “The Glass Menagerie.” Like Amanda Wingfield, Phyllis Herman comes off initially as a colorful, self-dramatizing lady in straitened circumstances who makes too much of her genteel Southern upbringing. But the tone of wistfulness is soon enough shot through with anger and even disgust.
We first see Phyllis in 1964, newly divorced at age 37, with Martha, 12, and Carl, 14, who are practiced at lighting her cigarettes and preparing her martinis, moving into a roach-infested basement apartment — one of their many, many moves before and after; “Mother Play” is subtitled “A Play in Five Evictions.”
Carl, bright and airily precocious, engages in playful banter with his mother, albeit with an edge.
“Your music makes me want to slash my wrists,” Carl tells Phyllis, who has turned to an easy listening station.
“Martha,” Phyllis calls out, “have you unpacked the knives yet? Your brother needs to slash his wrists.”
Phyllis has great hopes for Carl’s future, and barely notices Martha. She doesn’t want her daughter to make the same mistake she did of marrying a seductive ne’er-do-well (“he could charm the skirt off Eleanor Roosevelt”), but she also doesn’t respect Martha’s own ambitions. (“You know what my mother taught me? You can tell a woman’s education by the condition of her floors. The filthier the floors, the higher her degrees.”)
The indifference is mutual. Martha’s bond is really only with her brother. He’s her idol; her mentor and protector. In one amusing scene, after Martha comes home terrified after an incident of school bus bullying, Carl teaches Martha how to dress and walk like a man: “I want you to walk urgently but with command like Napoleon when he has to take a piss. “
Several years and apartments later, Phyllis turns on Carl when, as a college freshman, he comes out as gay; she evicts him from the apartment, and bans Martha from communicating with him.
Carl is devastated, with Parsons bursting into sobs, then segueing into a strange and possibly fanciful account of a liberating sexual encounter.
Later there is a respite, when Martha convinces Phyllis to attend a meeting of PFLAG (Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) and the three go dancing at a gay D.C. disco. (Lange busts some great moves – choreographed by no less than Tony winner Christopher Gattelli.) But then during that night out, Phyllis sees Martha kissing a woman. “Was it too much to ask for one normal child? “
Her disappointment with her children eventually turns ugly when Carl is dying of AIDS.
“I don’t know if I can ever forgive her,” Martha says near the end, and it’s not clear that it’s only the playwright’s character speaking.
Paula Vogel has dramatized family trauma and family monsters before. The first play that gained her national prominence, in 1992, “The Baltimore Waltz,” was an imagined holiday between a sister and a terminally ill brother, also named Carl (as was Vogel’s brother, who died of AIDS in 1988.) In Vogel’s best-known play, “How I Learned to Drive,” which finally debuted on Broadway in 2022, a quarter century after it won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, an adult recalls how when she was a child her uncle taught her how to drive and also sexually abused her. There is a level of compassion and nuance in the portrait of the offending relative in that play that isn’t matched in the new play about Phyllis (which is also the first name of Vogel’s mother.) “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.)
Mother Play
Second Stage’s Hayes Theater through June 16, 2024
Running time: One hour and 45 minutes, no intermission.
Tickets: $109 – $310
Written by Paula Vogel
Directed by Tina Landau
Scenic design by David Zinn, costume design by Toni-Leslie James, lighting design by Jen Schriever, sound design by Jill BC Du Boff, projection design by Shawn Duan, hair and wig by Matthew Armentrout, and vocal coaching by Gigi Buffington.
