Abigail’s mother has just died, but she can’t afford to pay for her funeral, so to raise the needed funds she decides to write a play about the death of her mother and the difficulty of affording a funeral.
That’s more or less the actual 70-minute play that playwright Kelly Jones has written – but with a couple of additional twists, both pointed and surprisingly comic — in “My Mother’s Funeral: The Show,” an Edinburgh Fringe award-winning production that is opening tonight intact as part of the International Fringe Encore Seriesat SoHo Playhouse.
Abigail (Nicole Sawyerr) doesn’t want to write a play about her dead mother. Yes, she’s a playwright, but that’s not the sort of play she does; her latest (which was only her second) is entitled “Astro-mite,” and is about gay bugs in Outer Space. But the artistic director who commissioned “Astro-mite” has rejected it, and won’t pay her for it. “Our audiences want real stories, told by real people, a chance to see into a world unlike their own, in every way, to both challenge what they believe about people like you and confirm it.”
“People like you” is the key phrase here. The director (Samuel Armfield) wants something “gritty” from Abigail, something that reflects her “unique lens.” This is why, out of desperation, Abigail suggests doing a play about a daughter whose mother has just died (without telling the director it’s about her own life). Much of the humor – but also much discomfort –comes from the way the director pushes Abigail to turn the mother and daughter into stereotypes. He insists, for example, the mother character be an alcoholic.
Now, New York theatergoers would be forgiven for assuming that the director is making a racial reference when he talks about “people like you.” Sawyerr is Black, and Armfield is white (and his character is not just white, but as he puts it, “a white middle-class able-bodied cis-het man.”) But it’s not just the heavy British accents of the three performers that signal how British “My Mother’s Funeral: The Show” is. The play reflects British class-conscious culture, so much more is clearly made of Abigail being working class. Much of the point of Kelly’s play seems to be how out of touch the (unnamed, possibly generic) director is with the working class.
This is carried to an absurdist extreme. While Abigail can’t find anywhere near the £4,000 she needs for a private funeral, the director boasts of how “when my dog died we got him made into a tree…My aunt was made into a paperweight” Funny, but also…confusing. When Abigail recalls her mother joking that she wants white doves for her funeral, “or a few bleached pigeons but don’t go to any trouble,” the director and the actor take the comment literally, to comic effect.
Underneath the surreal comedy are some unsubtle digs at how clueless the theater in general is about the lives of regular people (and, by extension, how oblivious the entire middle and upper classes.) Abigail must go along in insulting her mother and thugging up her own stand-in character in order to get money to avoid a state-run pauper’s funeral, while the body of her actual mother is stored with an increasingly impatient funeral director who affects a spot-on false tone of concern (“Sorry to bother you at this difficult time…If Linda isn’t claimed and we don’t hear from you within 14 days, we will have to refer her to the state.”)
What happens when you turn your experiences into art – allowing people to make aesthetic and in effect moral judgments about your life? “My Mother’s Funeral: The Show” seems to be leading us to conclude that the artistic processing of reality is corrupt — in practice, if not in theory — which strikes me as simplistic. The barbs are also often too obvious. But this short play also manages to have some lovely familial scenes, flashbacks between Abigail and her mother (Debra Baker, who also portrays the actress portraying the mother in Abigail’s play); and some nuanced and ultimately touching moments between Abigail and her brother Darren (also portrayed by Samuel Armfield, a more grounded and credible character than the director.) In these scenes, it feels as if the actual playwright Kelly Jones and the actual director Charlotte Bennette are giving us what the fictional director demanded from the fictional playwright: real stories told by real people.
“My Mother’s Funeral: A Show” is at SoHo Playhouse through January 25. Written by Kelly Jones and directed by Charlotte Bennett. Cast: Samuel Armfield, Debra Baker and Nicole Sawyerr. Photographs by Nicola Young.
