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” is not as great as plays Paula Vogel has written in the past – perhaps not as great as she might be able to make it in time – but under Tina Landau’s direction, it is a mesmerizing production, albeit not always easy to watch. That’s not only because of the fully-invested acting, but also because of the fully-infested sets (thanks to projection designer Shawn Duan.)
In addition to her years of teaching playwriting at Brown and Yale, Vogel is best-known for her Pulitzer-winning 1997 play How I Learned to Drive, which finally made it to Broadway in 2022 and remains unquestionably one of the very best works of recent American theater. That’s a hard standard to match, especially since the various twists and turns are almost impossible to predict when watching How I Learned to Drive for the first time. By contrast, Mother Play probably isn’t the first story you’ve ever seen about American parents failing to understand their children during the ‘60s and '70s. Some creative choices don’t pay off, but Vogel’s latest hits the emotional beats it needs to, and is certainly a powerful reminder to call your mom now and then.
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