REVIEW: Mother Play: a play in five evictions at Shakespeare & Company
Through 10/5 @ Shakespeare and Company
Photos by Nile Scott Studios
“Vogel has no fear of pushing at the boundaries of an audience’s expectations or limits.”
Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Paula Vogel (How I Learned To Drive) has taken a look back in anger at her family with Mother Play: a play in five evictions now playing at Shakespeare and Company through 10/5.
You can tell by the play’s subtitle that we are not going to be comforted by fond memories of a nurturing home, but that is frequently the case for homosexual children who grow up outside the heteronormative model. You can also tell that the play will be episodic in nature as we move from eviction to eviction.
We open with Phyllis Herman and her two children, Martha and Carl, unpacking boxes in their new home (spare set by Omid Akbari, lighting design by Madeleine Hebert) a basement super’s apartment in D.C. in the 60s. You may recognize Carl and his stuffed rabbit from Vogel’s far more satisfying The Baltimore Waltz (1990), which dealt with her brother Carl’s death from AIDS with a fantasy trip to Vienna, creating an absurdist modern classic. Phyllis is 37 and starting over after divorcing her abusive, philandering husband. She never wanted children and it appears that her only support is smoking, drinking, and daily phone calls to her mother.
Zoya Martin and Eddie Shields are delightful as the teenage Hermans in the 60s, dancing to the top of the pops and goading their mother, consummately played by Tamara Hickey, into wearing a denim pantsuit with a peace sign emblazoned on the back to Martha’s graduation. The characters age thirty years and the starry Broadway cast of Jessica Lange, Jim Parsons and Celia Keenan-Bolger have nothing on our Berkshire trio. This family of players is tight. It is awfully good to see Zoya Martin back at S&Co after working her similar magic on another less than stellar script “Dear Jack, Dear Louise” two summers ago.
Mom pushes Carl to reach for the stars and he attends Johns Hopkins but encourages her daughter to take up typing. The play is shocking in its confrontations and even on a second visit, I was left breathless at the mother’s denunciations. Two poor audience members angrily and noisily stomped out after a disparaging comment about priests. Vogel has no fear of pushing at the boundaries of an audience’s expectations or limits as also evidenced by a couple of scenes turned over to the other residents of the Herman apartments: the cockroaches. There is a great aching pain watching Martha become the caretaker for the elderly, demented Phyllis who could never muster tender feelings for her daughter.
Director Ariel Bock takes all the disparate elements and unifies them as much as possible but I was still left with a sour taste that evoked pity for the circumstances but little light or hope for the future…except knowing the playwright will go on to create far greater works.
Mother Play: a play in five evictions plays at Shakespeare & Company through 10/5. Tickets:www.shakespeare.org
Sound design by Bryn Scharenberg. Costume design is by Arthur Wilson.
