By Adam Rafferty
Celebrated American playwright Paula Vogel has never been one to shy away from confronting political and social issues. In Mother Play, she tackles deeply personal subjects as she presents parts of her own life story on the stage that will likely strike a chord with many, just as deeply as any socio-political issues could.
Subtitled, ‘a play in five evictions’, this tale is told by Martha Herman (Yael Stone) a young woman, and avatar of Vogel, who starts the story as a twelve-year-old living with her older brother Carl (Ash Flanders) and single mother Phyllis (Sigrid Thornton) after the breakdown of her marriage. It’s 1964 and Phyllis, who is scraping things together, moves the family into a squalid basement apartment in Washington, D.C. The kids are barely teenagers but feel more like the solid foundations of the family unit than their gin-loving mother does.
In truth, and in her own admittance, Phyllis never wanted to be a mother and while her weariness over the task of parenting is ever present, she’s not one to be harried. When cockroaches threaten to overrun her kitchen and the landlord pressures her for the rent, she enlists the kids to catch and kill the little critters and posts the squashed bugs in the envelope with her rent cheque. So naturally evictions ensue.
Over the years, the places change, but the standard of living remains mainly the same. Christina Smith’s flexible set components shift and change to rearrange the rooms but keep the simple belongings of the Hermans in place. Phyllis is at turns casually cruel to her children, and then desperately seeks their approval. But Vogel clearly displays the root cause of this behaviour through Phyllis’ loneliness and bitterness from a lack of success in her life. The biggest shake-up in Phyllis’ world comes about when she learns that her son Carl is gay, causing her to at-first disown him. When Martha too comes out as queer, Phyllis bemoans the embarrassment of having no ‘normal’ children.
Suffice to say, the ‘mother’ of this play isn’t the kind that would win awards for being most caring or supportive, so Phyllis is a gift of a character to play, and Thornton embraces that gift with relish while embodying the role with a cunning brittleness and deep sense of longing. Costumes, also by Smith, beautifully reflect the passing of time and fashion eras for all three characters, but Phyllis gets the most visually delightful array of sartorial ensembles – no less than 14 custom-made outfits apparently, and 5 wigs to match – giving Thornton all the tools to create a towering performance. Yet somehow Phyllis’ acidity never quite packs the punch that one might expect her character to have.
Direction, by Lee Lewis, has a wildly varying pace, with some scenes jumping from one huge life revelation to the next at a belief-distorting speed, while another wordless scene goes on for what feels like at least five minutes of Phyllis living her lonely life at home, chain-smoking and microwaving TV dinners. While Lewis makes certain points beautifully, she seems to skim over others, while also overplaying Vogel’s often endearing silliness in a way that feels tonally disjointed.
This pacing does give Composer and Sound Designer Kelly Ryall a fantastic opportunity to underscore the emptiness of Phyllis’ life, which he colours in superbly when moments are slowed; but it also forces performances to be rushed at other times and doesn’t provide Williams with the room to give Carl the characterisation he deserves in the end, after delivering an otherwise well-detailed portrayal.
In the role of Martha, Stone is outstanding, presenting a polished and heart-breaking depiction of a woman left to ‘do the right thing’ for a mother that has never told her directly that she is proud of her. The truthful representation of elder care is the enduring outtake from this production that helps to balance the uneven presentation. Overall, Mother Play has a lot of interesting things to say about family relationships and for that reason it does feel highly relevant to all audiences.
Image: Brett Boardman
