The title Mother Play is so good you can understand why the playwright Paula Vogel held onto it for a decade and a half. Her new drama, she’s said in an interview, came from years of musing over the idea of fleshing out a play about her own mother and giving it that winking name. She finally put pen to paper and wrote the bulk of the work itself in a flash in late 2022. Vogel had already touched on their relationship in her masterpiece How I Learned to Drive, but evidently she wanted to give that oblivious yet exacting Southern matriarch more lines — understandable if you remember that play’s sharp-enough-to-cut-you monologue known as “A Mother’s Guide to Social Drinking.†There’s already wit and bite to the phrase “mother play,†given extra juice by the usage, originating in ballroom and now very online, of “mother†as a breathless compliment. (All-caps “MOTHER†baseball caps are available for purchase at the Hayes Theater.) That cleverness, however, has a domineering quality. Her title, like many theatrical matriarchs, is awfully hard to live up to, which is also what Mother Play struggles to do.
Vogel gives the play a brisk structuring conceit: Mother Play takes place over the course of five evictions, as Phyllis (Jessica Lange), and her children Carl (Jim Parsons) and Martha (Celia Keenan-Bolger, the Vogel stand-in, also looking back from approximately the present) bounce through apartments in and around Washington, D.C. Their father, as Martha explains in her opening monologue, had a habit of not paying rent, so they’re used to moving, but when the action kicks off he’s abandoned Phyllis and the kids — Martha is 11, Carl 13 — and they’re fending for themselves. They start out in a custodial sub-basement unit with Carl assigned to take out the building’s trash. David Zinn’s set is full of cardboard moving boxes and what you might call “well loved†furniture, all on wheels so that the actors can roll it around; Lange is introduced with the spin of an Eames chair. Occasionally, a projected cockroach scurries across the fridge and, in a few sequences orchestrated by director Tina Landau, the roaches stage a revolution of their own and puppets appear and dance along the ramparts of the set. Your mileage may vary on the concept of a creepy-crawly cockroach dream ballet, but I have to say I found it delightful.
Vogel’s script asks for that kind of theatricality from a director — “by the way: this play is not naturalistic,†she writes in her introduction — but those distancing flights of fancy need to be anchored by a strong sense of intent. Her script assembles the contradictions that make up her mother, but it doesn’t provide a route through them. Phyllis is resourceful and ingratiating, especially when she needs something from men, but can also become helpless and dependent on both men and alcohol. She’s cold and cutting, especially to Martha, whom she decides early on has little potential and may be gay, and supportive and exacting, especially to her beloved son Carl, her golden child (though she’d rather not think about his sexuality). Good material not yet fully refined and processed. Vogel adds more details about Phyllis — her close relationship with her own mother, the kids’ grandmother, emerges later on — but doesn’t synthesize them to insight. Phyllis turns on Carl when she discovers the truth of his sexuality, then on Martha. She has a late-in-life turn to crystal-ball fortune telling. The ands of her character pile up without a therefore to bring us somewhere new. Phyllis emerges as a fearsome, complicated, even pitiable figure, someone it must be hard to write about, but she never becomes someone I can see in full focus.
Vogel also tends to get caught in references to other works, which hang above Mother Play like thick vines, both in the writing and the performances. Carl, whom Vogel has also written about in her elegy The Baltimore Waltz, grows up fast and hyperliterate. He tells his sister to read Virginia Woolf (and to absolutely not read The Well of Loneliness, which her mother has given her, a great little detail) and encourages her to apply for colleges she doesn’t think she can get into. In his teenage playacting, Carl is fond of adopting the mode of a worldly aesthete, in the way that a lot of gay kids pretend to be a sort of Truman Capote or Tennessee Williams. Vogel encourages so many echoes between Mother Play and The Glass Menagerie that the sound of the latter starts to drown out the former. Carl really resembles Tom Wingfield, while Phyllis is surely an Amanda Wingfield (with a good amount of Momma Rose), and Martha is stuck with (and resents) being Laura. I would have appreciated more of her resentment, in fact; there’s a great premise in Laura trying to claw her way away from Amanda and Tom, if Vogel or someone else wants to take that head-on.
To that end, Lange played Amanda in 2005; Keenan-Bolger was Laura in 2013; Parsons always seems like he’s trying to audition for Williams when he gets serious; and here, all three actors’ performances get cramped and constrained, maybe owing to their sense memory of those other roles. Parsons, especially, struggles to get under Carl’s skin. He gives good exaggerated sashay and dewy-eyed fantasizing but doesn’t have a good way to pull back the energy and let other colors in. We get the performance he’s putting on, both to satisfy his mother and defy the world around him, but little sense of what lies underneath. Keenan-Bolger’s part is even trickier, requiring her to flit between memory and commentary, and she pulls it off straightforwardly, as she happens to be an expert in the particular field of being an adult playing a child (see To Kill a Mockingbird and The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee). But it would be nice to see her just get to play an adult.
As Phyllis, Lange has to carry the play, which she manages to do in fits and starts. What she can do is cast a spell. In a wonderful, wordless sequence when Phyllis has been abandoned by both Carl and Martha, she putters around an empty apartment, devoid of purpose but retaining the posture of a woman raised to be watched, finding humor and subtle tragedy in the way she slathers hot sauce on a microwaved dinner. In another scene, she instructs Martha how to walk across a room as a woman, chest up, hips Slinky-ing, lips pursed. It’s crackling, if indulgent — Lange giving the audience the steel-coiffured Southern grande dame she has played on TV for Ryan Murphy. And often, Phyllis has — is — just that kind of posture.
That performance needs another turn of the screw to get past that, and the script doesn’t give her enough torque. “Gay sons and mothers!†Martha says, exasperated by Phyllis’s hold on Carl. “Gay men carry a lifelong guilt because their little heads popped out of their mother’s vagina, which they think is sacred. Or some such bullshit.†The line is true of a dynamic, and it gets a nice laugh in the room, but it compartmentalizes Phyllis and Carl too neatly. Vogel’s characters are good at that — too good. They’ve spent their lives arranging their things into moving boxes, and they have the same hold on their emotions. In another too-on-the-nose exchange, Carl announces to Martha that “it’s over, isn’t it?†“What?†she says. “Childhood,†he says. Don’t you want to unpack that?
Mother Play is at the Hayes Theater.