Poisonous and heavily self-medicating mothers are a standard in the theatre, from Mary Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey into Night to Violet Weston in August: Osage County. Self-absorbed, vain and hypercritical, they tend to stalk their stages like injured lionesses, their own offspring the convenient targets of their abuse and cynicism. US playwright Paula Vogel adds Phyllis Herman (Sigrid Thornton) to this list, as monstrous and brittle as any of them.
While Mother Play (the subtitle is A Play in Five Evictions) flirts with the toxicity and histrionics of those antecedents, it feels closer in spirit to Tennessee Williams’ “memory play” The Glass Menagerie. Where Williams created the character of Tom as an authorial surrogate, Vogel gives us Martha (Yael Stone), who is likewise desperate to escape her mother’s clutches while trying to understand what makes her tick. There’s a deep melancholy working under the play, a sense of all that’s been lost to the ravages of time and forgetting.
