The dramatic canon has always favored a good, juicy perversion of motherhood. the incestuous Jocasta; Even the merciless Lady Macbeth, with her constant disparaging mention of “sucking.”
It also makes plenty of room for mothers who must avoid their sons, like the restless chatterbox Amanda Wingfield in Tennessee Williams’ autobiography.The Glass Menagerie“And the morphine addict Mary Tyrone in the similarly inspired life of Eugene O’Neill”A long day’s journey into night“
And it loves, and loves to punish, a woman like Rose, the mother of hell at the center.Gypsies” Since she first arrived on Broadway in 1959, she has been called a termagant, a gargoyle, a monster — and that only by New York Times reviewers. But as Audra MacDonald in George C. Wolfe’s current revival Proving a devastating effect, Rose has always been deeply human.
This time, she’s also part of a subtle social shift: an unusual abundance of super, fully groomed moms who’ve been seen on New York’s big stages lately. The current Broadway shows “Cult of Love” and “Eureka Day” and recent shows including “The Hills of California” and “Suffs” are more interested in how the characters traumatize their children, or How far do they deviate from it? The ideal of the mother. They can cast a long shadow, especially over their girls, yet they are as multifaceted as humans.
Rose, who has always been emotionally complex, confounds her daughters’ 1920s childhood with the cruel ambitions she holds for them. But his unyielding exterior was built to protect against a world that shut him out.
“Well someone tell me when’s my turn?” she sings when she finally breaks down. “Don’t I have a dream for myself?”
It doesn’t seem like much to ask.
A collision with reality
In Leslie Headland’s Broadway play, “Cult of LoveSet in the Dahl family’s Connecticut farmhouse at Christmastime, an older son (played by Zachary Quinto) asks a guest (Barbie Ferreira): “What’s the first thing you remember? When you were little?” “
She replies: “My mother. I never wanted to leave her side.”
You get the impression that the Dahl siblings felt the same way, when they were younger, about their determined mother, Ginny (Mare Winningham), before their sophisticated family unit—strictly religious, as The playwright’s original family—repeatedly clashed with reality. . Likewise Jez Butterworth’s Four Web Girls.Hills of CaliforniaBy his single parent, Veronica, who is raising him to form a singing group in 1950s Britain, he is dabbled in music day and night.
More than fame, what Veronica (Laura Donnelly) seems to want for them is to escape the soul-suffocating drudgery of ordinary women in their coastal town. When her eldest teenager is late for rehearsals, Veronica issues a stark warning: “You want to spend your nights flirting with the boys at the Funfair and grinding a mangle on Ribble Road with five kids, that’s it.” Keep it up, love.”
It’s not as graphic a cautionary tale as Meryl Heller’s new film, “Night Bitch” In which Amy Adams plays a woman who loses herself, her creativity and her joy to the demands of motherhood so thoroughly that she turns into an animal. But Veronica envisions her girls living adventurous lives, capable of fending for themselves.
Decades later, one of them says: “She just wanted us to be safe.” A generous decision, and probably the right one. Veronica’s love, however flawed, is never in question.
Refuse to fail
The job of all these mothers, like all parents, is to nurture and protect their children. How these characters perceive this assignment, and how they carry it out, is the stuff of drama and of life. The way we see them shapes and is shaped by the ways we see our mothers, and the role of mothers in society.
Any progress the theater has made on that score — and this recent flurry suggests something, anyway — is partly down to gender equality: how many more women are writing and directing for prominent stages, And how many more men are taking women seriously. It also stems from what we as an audience are so far ready to recognize and understand. The nature of theater means that we always imagine the whole part of a character, and in that imagination, complete the performance.
Rose, in “Gypsy” — based on the memoir by Arthur Laurents, Jules Stein and Stephen Sondheim of burlesque stripper Gypsy Rose Lee, Rose’s real-life daughter — is no less successful as a mother. Neither is Veronica, who is tormented by her tragic failure on her deathbed, or Ginny, who will clearly deny it.
Ginny’s family name is a homophone for doll, and she may have treated her older children too much as if they were playthings, whose stories she could make up, however loudly. Declare your identity. Yet he is the one to whom they still cry in emergency.
“I don’t know how you can be mad at me,” she tells her troubled child, who accuses her of controlling and neglecting them, even though they’ve met their biological father (David Rashe). left out completely. She adds: “I’ve done nothing but love you. And that’s all I should have ever done.”
Suzanne, the quintessentially privileged Earth Mother, played by Jessica Hecht in the Broadway production of Jonathan Spector’s comedy.Eureka Day“wraps herself in the mantle of the gentle, gentle mother that gives off an aura of irreverence. She takes advantage of this in the play from her position of power at a private school in crisis.
A mother of six, she is stronger than she appears, with a well-hidden grief at her core that makes her tough – a wound that makes her a target on all the students at school. Heedless casts a shadow.
She’s a sort of mirror image for Amy Herzog’s hyper-vigilant title character.Mary JanePlayed on Broadway last spring by Rachel McAdams: A single mother desperate to keep her medically fragile little boy alive. His whole world is that child, yet he is not a martyr or a hero. He is a man under siege, worthy of our curiosity.
The kind of gaze through which we see these two mothers places them in a Venn diagram of grace with Paula Vogel’s autobiography.Mother Play,” also on Broadway last spring, starring Jessica Lange in the title role of Phyllis.
An alcoholic divorcee is turning her children against her, she is not made for motherhood. Ridiculous, caustic, failed, cruel, the character could so easily have become a monument to Betty’s bitterness, but the play chooses understanding and forgiveness.
If Katori Hall’s recent Off-Broadway play “A quilt of blood“Choosing exorcism instead, there is still a clear sense of the conflicting, stirring memories of the unseen mother, whose four daughters have gathered at her home to mourn her death. There was more to the collection than Gio (Adrienne C. Moore), the daughter most psychologically scarred by her mother, is having the most trouble letting go.
‘He had a good upbringing’
Shaina Tab’s Tony Award-winning “Sophs” Here the greatest can be seen, because it does not have the mother at its center. However, it’s a recent show that, frankly, repeatedly confronts the longstanding cultural habit of romanticizing motherhood while patronizing mothers.
An early 20th-century musical about suffragettes fighting for women’s suffrage, it opens with a song of strategic submission, “Vote for Mother,” and a personal plea in Act II. It has been repeated.
heartbreaking”A letter from Harry’s mother” was sung by Emily Skinner as a widow pleading with her son, a Tennessee state legislator, to vote to ratify the 19th Amendment, for her and her young daughter. Putting together her case, she tells him things she never has before – about how painful it is to be a person without full legal personality.
“Tell your mama she had a good upbringing,” she implores him.
The suffragettes are certainly not all mothers, but they are the forerunners of all, when they are cooking dinner, or telling, or finding a husband, or pointing a needle, their energies to some political cause. Getting pushback for devoting to Breaking social norms to change them, the show’s tireless activists fight for their daughters, daughters, daughters’ right to vote, and themselves.
There are many adjectives for bossy, bossy people. When those people are mothers, “dominant” is almost exclusively reserved for them. But being forced—which implies conflict, which is a key component of theater—is not the same as being harmful.
As with the women of “Suffs,” sometimes mothers who cast a long, strong shadow over generations are trying, very bravely and with very imperfect results, to reshape the world. There is drama in that too.