Pulitzer Prize winner Paula Vogel (How I Learned to Drive) has written a bitingly funny and unflinchingly honest new play about the hold our family has over us and the surprises we find when we unpack the past.
It’s 1962, just outside of D.C., and matriarch Phyllis (Jessica Lange) is supervising her teenage children, Carl (Jim Parsons) and Martha (Celia Keenan-Bolger), as they move into a new apartment. Phyllis has strong ideas about what her children need to do and be to succeed, and woe be the child who finds their own path. Bolstered by gin and cigarettes, the family endures — or survives — the changing world around them. Blending flares of imaginative theatricality, surreal farce, and deep tenderness, this beautiful roller coaster ride reveals timeless truths of love, family, and forgiveness.
“Mother Play” marks Lange’s fourth engagement on Broadway but the first time she has originated a role there. In its excellence, her work in “Mother Play” recalls what she did on stage as Mary Tyrone in “Long Day’s Journey into Night” in 2016. The only difference is that Vogel gives Lange a few more notes to explore, most of them above the staff in the comic stratosphere. Before this review makes “Mother Play” sound like a dirge, it is really a very funny play. When Martha doesn’t accept Phyllis’ attempt to make amends, Carl cautions, “Don’t gnaw on the olive branch!”
Thirty or so years ago, Vogel told a reporter, “I like theater that makes me feel like it’s a healing.” That’s what “Mother Play” is, a balm that comes in cardboard boxes and packing tape. It honors the dead by making them alive again and nurtures the living by providing a place to put a daughter’s love and rage. Martha’s box is not Pandora’s. It’s just another way of organizing a life.
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