Mother Play
Opening Night: April 25, 2024
Theater: Helen Hayes Theatre
Website: 2st.com
It’s 1962, just outside of D.C., and matriarch Phyllis is supervising her teenage children, Carl and Martha, 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.
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April 25, 2024
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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April 26, 2024
Paula Vogel may be playwriting royalty, but if her latest work “Mother Play” is any indication, she has not lost sight of the instruction in the first half of her job title: play. In this new, often funny mashup between a memory play and an apartment tragedy (Vogel calls it “a play in five evictions”), the dramatist turns her typically insightful lens on her own family.
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April 25, 2024
Still, despite its imperfections, “Mother Play” is a genuinely engaging examination of a family trying to find equilibrium. It honors the glimmers and low points of mothering and explains why, in some cases, the role is transposed onto those who were never called to it in the first place.
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April 25, 2024
Her title, like many theatrical matriarchs, is awfully hard to live up to, which is also what Mother Play struggles to do.
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April 25, 2024
But mostly, Mother Play feels a cold, airless, and puzzling tundra to orienteer—despite the can-this-be-happening electricity of watching Jessica Lange perform on stage.
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April 25, 2024
Tina Landau directs. Her sure hand navigates the play’s many moods — hilarious one moment, tragic the next.
READ THE REVIEWApril 25, 2024
Mother Play is all about the mother’s touch and what it means to mother and be mothered, in all senses of the role. Martha says in the play, “There is a season for packing. And a season for unpacking.” Mother Play leaves the audience with lots to unpack.
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April 25, 2024
Bringing decades of experience to bear, Lange is riveting—and so, by extension, is Phyllis. In this painfully honest tribute, Phyllis’s pain is part of the picture. Vogel does her mother dirty, but she does her mother proud.
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April 25, 2024
April 25, 2024
But while the final scene—Phyllis, in a nursing home, repeatedly wails, “I want to go home,” and fails to recognize Martha as her daughter—has a piercing sadness as Ms. Lange’s performance reaches a rending climax, too much of “Mother Play” feels evanescent, more a personal exercise in exorcising ghosts than a play that resonates on deeper levels.
READ THE REVIEWApril 25, 2024
First of all, it feels like we could’ve taken another crack at this title. A play about a mother and her relationship to her children, and it’s just called Mother Play? There’s minimalism, and then there’s calling Moby-Dick “Whale Book.” This complaint isn’t incidental, but indicative of how the new work by esteemed playwright Paula Vogel excels in some aspects, but feels incomplete in other regards.
READ THE REVIEWApril 25, 2024
With “Mother Play,” playwright Paula Vogel has created a deeply personal play about life with her late mother, Phyllis Rita. She surely would have been delighted to be portrayed by no less than Jessica Lange, an actress fully capable of turning her into a boozy but sympathetic hybrid of Mama Rose in “Gypsy,” Joan Crawford in “Mommie Dearest” and Tennessee Williams’ Amanda Wingfield.
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