This dramatic canon has always worshiped the wonderfully juicy perversions of motherhood. Think murderous media. Incest Jocasta. Even the ruthless Lady Macbeth constantly repeats unpleasant references to “terrible things”.
Like Amanda Wingfield, the anxious talker in Tennessee Williams' autobiography The Glass Menagerie, and the morphine-addicted Mary Tyrone in Eugene O'Neill's similarly life-based film, she has to run away from her sons. It's also ample space for mothers who don't have children. “A long day's journey into the night.”
And he loves to love and discipline women like Rose, the ferocious stage mother at the center of “Gypsy.” Since she first appeared on Broadway in 1959, she has been called a termigant, a gargoyle, and a monster, according to a New York Times critic. But Rose is deeply human, as Audra McDonald has proven to be a devastating influence on George C. Wolfe's current resurgence. It was always like that.
This time, she is also part of a subtle social change. There are an unusual number of strong, fully-portrayed mothers being seen on New York's big stages these days. In recent productions such as “Cult of Love'' and “Eureka Day'' currently on Broadway, as well as “The Hills of California'' and “Suffus,'' characters ask children how to There is far more interest in whether they are traumatized or how they deviate from the world. mother's ideal. They may cast a long shadow, especially on their daughters, but they are still multifaceted human beings just like any other man.
Rose, who has always had mixed feelings, distorts her daughters' childhood in the 1920s with her oppressive ambitions for them. But her indomitable exterior was forged to protect her from a world that shut her out.
“So, somebody please tell me, when is it my turn?” she sings, when she finally breaks down in tears. “Don't you have dreams?”
There doesn't seem to be much to ask.
collision with reality
Leslie Headland's Broadway play “Cult of Love” is set at the Dahl family farm in Connecticut during Christmas time, when one of the grown sons (played by Zachary Quinto) becomes a guest (played by Barbie Ferreira). I ask this. What about when you were young? ”
She replies: I didn't want to leave her side. ”
As children, the Dahl brothers learn that their strictly religious family, like the playwright's family of origin, feels the same way about their apparently myopic mother, Ginny (Mare Winningham), before being repeatedly influenced by reality. I get the impression that . Similarly, the four Webb girls in Jez Butterworth's California Hills are trained day and night in music by their single parent Veronica, who fosters them into a singing group in 1950s England.
What Veronica (Laura Donnelly) wants more than fame is to escape the soul-suffocating hard labor that so many ordinary women experience in her seaside town. When her teenage son is late for rehearsal, Veronica issues a stern warning. “Good luck with spending the night flirting with the boys at the Fun Fair and ending up grinding mangles on Ribble Road with five kids, love.”
This isn't the kind of graphic warning Mariel Heller gives in her new film Nightbitch. Amy Adams plays a woman who succumbs so thoroughly to the demands of motherhood that she loses herself, her creativity, her joy, and transforms into an animal. But Veronica imagines that her daughters will live a life full of adventure and be able to fend for themselves.
Decades later, one of them says: “All she wanted was for us to be safe.” A lenient sentence, and probably accurate. Veronica's love, no matter how flawed, is never questioned.
deny failure
The job of all these mothers, like all parents, is to nurture and protect their children. How these characters understand their mission and how they carry it out is an element of drama and of life. How we perceive our mothers shapes and is shaped by how we perceive our own mothers and how we perceive their roles in society.
If theater has made any progress in this regard, and this huge recent upsurge suggests some progress, it is partly due to gender equality. In other words, how many women are writing and directing on famous stages, and how many men are taking them seriously. It also comes from what we as an audience ever want to realize and understand. The essence of theater means that we always imagine parts of the whole character and complete the performance in that imagination.
Rose is a successful mother in Gypsy, a film by Arthur Laurents, Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim, based on the memoirs of Rose's biological daughter, burlesque stripper Gypsy Rose Lee. isn't it. The same goes for Veronica, who suffers from a tragic failure on her deathbed, and Ginny, who flatly denies her failures.
Ginny's last name is a homonym for doll, and perhaps she treated the grown baby too much like a plaything about which she could make up stories, no matter how loudly she declared her identity. Maybe. And yet, it is she who they cry to in times of emergency.
“I don't understand how you can be mad at me,” she says, even as she completely ignores her kind father (David Rush), who accuses her of controlling and ignoring them. I say this to my rebellious brethren. Furthermore, she added: “I just love you. And that's all I should have done.”
Suzanne, the primal, privileged earth mother played by Jessica Hecht in the Broadway production of Jonathan Spector's comedy Eureka Day, is a soft, gentle mama who gives her an aura of impeccability. It captures the atmosphere. She uses it skillfully in her position of power at the private school that faces crisis in the play.
A mother of six, she is tougher than she appears and has a well-hidden sadness at her core that makes her tenacious, a scar that makes her an object to all the students at her school. It is bound to cast an unwary shadow.
She's a kind of mirror image of the fiercely cautious title character in Amy Herzog's “Mary Jane,” played on Broadway by Rachel McAdams last spring. A single mother is desperately trying to keep her medically fragile son alive. Everything in her world is that child, yet she is neither a martyr nor a hero. She is a figure under siege and worthy of our curiosity.
The compassionate gaze with which we view these two mothers places them in the Venn diagram of grace in Mother Play, rooted in Paula Vogel's autobiography. It also opened on Broadway last spring, with Jessica Lange playing Phyllis in the title role.
An alcoholic, a divorcee, and an enemy to her children, she is not cut out to be a mother. Funny, bitter, treacherous, and cruel, this character could easily have become a monument to her daughter's bitter memories, but the play chooses understanding and forgiveness.
An unseen mother whose four daughters gather in her home to mourn her death, even as Katori Hall's recent off-Broadway play The Blood Quilt opts for an exorcism instead. There remains a distinct sense that the world was more than the sum of its disparate and crowded people. memory. And there's something deeply heartbreaking about the daughter, Gio (Adrian C. Moore), who was most emotionally damaged by her mother. He's having the hardest time letting her go.
“She raised a good child.”
Tony Award winner Shaina Taub's “Suffs” might seem like an outlier here, as it doesn't have a mother at its center. But this is one of the more recent shows that clearly and repeatedly confronts the long-standing cultural habit of romanticizing motherhood while patronizing mothers.
A musical about the suffragettes who fought for women's right to vote in the early 20th century, it begins with the song “Let Mother Vote,” a song of strategic obedience, and repeats more personal demands in the second act. .
The heartbreaking “Letters from Harry's Mother” stars Emily Skinner as a widow imploring her son, a Tennessee congressman, to vote to ratify the 19th Amendment for her and her young daughter. sang. As she puts together her case, she tells him something she has never said before: how painful it is to be a person without full legal personality.
“Please let me know that you raised a good child,” she begs him.
True, not all suffragettes were mothers, but they were all pioneers, and while they were preparing dinner, finding husbands, or doing needlework, they were also They face backlash for dedicating their energy to a cause. The show's relentless group of activists transgress social norms to change social norms, fighting for their daughters' daughters' daughters' right to vote, and their own right to vote.
There are many adjectives that describe someone who is bossy or arrogant. If such people are mothers, then “domineering” is almost exclusively theirs. But while being violent means confrontation, and implies an important theatrical element, it is not the same as being harmful.
Like the women of the Sakhs, mothers who have cast a long and strong shadow over their generations are making some brave but very incomplete attempts to reshape the world. There are some things. There's drama there too.
