Classic American drama is haunted by monstrous mothers. Vain, vampiric mamas prowl through plays from Tennessee Williams's "The Glass Menagerie" to Eugene O'Neill's "Long Day's Journey Into Night," from Edward Albee's "Three Tall Women" to Sam Shepard's "Buried Child." For those guys, mothers are either harpies or sirens-villains or traps. Yet, suddenly, this season we're surrounded by richly human mothers, each with a compassionately observed interiority. (It's maybe not a coincidence that 2024 has been a bumper year for women's writing on Broadway.) In fact, Paula Vogel's "Mother Play," Shaina Taub's musical "Suffs," and Amy Herzog's "Mary Jane" all happen to contain a long moment during which we are invited to simply sit and study a woman's face. In a world where we don't fear mothers as Medusas, perhaps we'll choose to look at them forever.
In the autofictional "Mother Play," at Second Stage's Hayes Theatre, Celia Keenan-Bolger stars as Martha, a lightly disguised version of Vogel, and Jim Parsons portrays a version of the playwright's brother Carl, who died of complications from AIDS in 1988. The play, which begins by flashing back to the early sixties, follows Martha and Carl for four decades as they deal with their hard-drinking, self-regarding single mom, Phyllis, played with a wonderful, lurching grace by Jessica Lange. Vogel's work is subtitled "A Play in Five Evictions," referring both to Phyllis's struggle to keep her family housed in tenement apartments-the projection designer Shawn Duan puts images of scuttling cockroaches on fridges and trash cans and to her vicious expulsion of sweet, bookish Carl after he tells her that he's been sleeping with men.
この記事は The New Yorker の May 13, 2024 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、9,000 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
すでに購読者です ? サインイン
この記事は The New Yorker の May 13, 2024 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、9,000 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
すでに購読者です? サインイン
YULE RULES
“Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point.”
COLLISION COURSE
In Devika Rege’ first novel, India enters a troubling new era.
NEW CHAPTER
Is the twentieth-century novel a genre unto itself?
STUCK ON YOU
Pain and pleasure at a tattoo convention.
HEAVY SNOW HAN KANG
Kyungha-ya. That was the entirety of Inseon’s message: my name.
REPRISE
Reckoning with Donald Trump's return to power.
WHAT'S YOUR PARENTING-FAILURE STYLE?
Whether you’re horrifying your teen with nauseating sex-ed analogies or watching TikToks while your toddler eats a bagel from the subway floor, face it: you’re flailing in the vast chasm of your child’s relentless needs.
COLOR INSTINCT
Jadé Fadojutimi, a British painter, sees the world through a prism.
THE FAMILY PLAN
The pro-life movement’ new playbook.
President for Sale - A survey of today's political ads.
On a mid-October Sunday not long ago sun high, wind cool-I was in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for a book festival, and I took a stroll. There were few people on the streets-like the population of a lot of capital cities, Harrisburg's swells on weekdays with lawyers and lobbyists and legislative staffers, and dwindles on the weekends. But, on the façades of small businesses and in the doorways of private homes, I could see evidence of political activity. Across from the sparkling Susquehanna River, there was a row of Democratic lawn signs: Malcolm Kenyatta for auditor general, Bob Casey for U.S. Senate, and, most important, in white letters atop a periwinkle not unlike that of the sky, Kamala Harris for President.
