Jessica Lange in Mother Play.Photo: Joan Marcus

Paula Vogel is writing a book about playwriting, I learned this week on social media. In a post, she talks about the varieties of dramatic structure, and the way the American canon all too often seems wedded to the linear narrative, to the third-act plot twist, to the creation of suspense by the withholding of information. But you know from the outset that her new work, Mother Play: A Play in Five Evictions, isn’t going to withhold anything: the spine of its plot is basically the subtitle, and its most consequential event is revealed in the opening moments: Martha’s brother has died, leaving behind just one box of his treasured possessions. (If you know Vogel’s work, you may not even need that opening scene, because you’ve known of Carl’s death for thirty years, since her earlier play The Baltimore Waltz; if you know that play, your heart breaks a little the minute you see a stuffed rabbit come out of Carl’s box.) 

Mother Play, Vogel says, is a genre play, and in genre we know the rules before we show up: “Does anyone go to a western and say: oh my god, there are horses again!” And it’s also a pattern play: “In pattern, the plot is not about new incidents happening which we didn’t see coming . . .  It is about the ‘how’ or why the same plots keep repeating.” Genre and pattern are structural, the scaffolding a writer has used to start building this object. You’re watching to see how an artist has made the model her own; you’re watching with the full consciousness of the thing as a created piece of art. (I, for example, often love spoilers, because knowing the outcome means you can watch for craft rather than comprehension.)

A mother play hinges, of course, on the mother at its center, and Jessica Lange’s Phyllis, under Tina Landau’s direction is a revelation, her surface polished to a mirror shine over a howling pit of rage and despair. (Toni Leslie-James’s costumes and Matthew Armentrout’s hair and wigs for Lange convey so much about her character; this is less true for their work with Martha and Carl.) “You are never a true woman till you have children,” she says at one point, but then later confesses, “I never wanted to be a mother. . . . It is never over. It’s a life sentence.” Her worth defined by the thing she hates, and yet when she does have the chance to live alone as an adult–after she’s kicked out both of her kids–she’s even more alone. Vogel’s script calls the scene the “Phyllis ballet”–a long silent sequence in which Phyllis makes herself a sad dinner, times the moments till she can start drinking, moves restlessly through the apartment in a gorgeous fuschia satin robe. Phyllis still looks glamorous, but the loneliness is palpable. (The sequence evokes the German playwright Franz-Xaver Kroetz’s Request Concert, which stretches this wordless evocation of an ordinary life to full-length, and then ends it with a suicide.)

One joy of genre (I say as an obsessive reader of mystery novels) is in how each individual narrative uses that scaffold to build a different building, fills what might seem a rigid structure with its own color, its own shape–and how it riffs off the other entries in its category. One almost inevitable work to riff on in the genre of mother play–especially a memory play about a domineering mother and her two children; especially when that mother is played with exceptional richness by Jessica Lange–is, of course, Tennessee Williams’s Glass Menagerie. Here, Lange is Phyllis, mother to Martha (Celia Keenan-Bolger) and Carl (Jim Parsons): like Tom and Laura, a son who leaves and a daughter who feels trapped by staying. But where Menagerie is Tom’s memory play, Mother Play is Martha’s: it has to be, because she is its survivor. And for Martha–and to a certain extent, perhaps to the playwright herself–this play serves as both expiation and exorcism, a way of going back into the formula in order to sever oneself from it: the way to break free of the “mother play” is to abdicate the role of child. 

And what also makes Mother Play a different entry in the genre than Glass Menagerie is that not all its central relationships are sucked centripetally back to the mother. Its catharsis may come through Martha’s forgiveness of Phyllis, but its emotional core is the rock-solid bond between brother and sister. That unconditional love is the play’s emotional core even as their mercurial, damaged mother puts condition after condition on them, even as the bedrock of her life becomes her relationship with alcohol rather than with her children. 

With pattern, too, the joy comes through watching the craft: finding the pattern’s tiny dropped threads, the spots where the next iteration is just the tiniest bit different than the last: pattern as ever-so-slow evolution. From home to home, the furniture on David Zinn’s set remains the same, just rearranged by the actors, but the light (designed by Jen Schriever) shifts–with different practical fixtures descending from the grid and the space getting gradually brighter–and the cockroaches (horrifyingly brought to life by Shawn Duan’s projections) grow fewer.  On the surface, this is a pattern spiraling literally upward: each new eviction leads to a slightly “better” home, on a higher floor, with more financial security–but there’s another pattern in the undertow, a pattern of Phyllis’s broken relationships: evictions of the heart, triggered by Phyllis’s alcoholism or brittle meanness or narcissism. 

Phyllis was kicked out of her parents’ home and heart for getting pregnant and marrying a Jew (though she later rebuilds that relationship; one of the last times we see Phyllis, Martha, and Carl together is after Phyllis’s mothers funeral). In a sense, she is evicted from her marriage. And then she evicted her children in turn, first her son and then her daughter Martha for being gay; then her son again as he’s dying of AIDS. Again, it’s up to Martha to break the pattern: a task she can only accomplish slant, by building a relationship of care, rather than blood. Keenan-Bolger’s Martha is an exercise in restraint–even as the child Martha, she’s always looking three beats ahead, always trying to predict Phyllis’s next move.  It takes till the end of the play for her to put down the weight of the future and simply live in a moment with her mother as what it is.

Mother Play ends with the letter the real Carl Vogel wrote to his sister laying out his funeral–a letter that also runs in the published script of Baltimore Waltz. But where Baltimore Waltz spins a fantasy in the hope of avoiding the truths in that letter, Mother Play opens up to let rawer, less stylized emotions in–and to let back in the mother pointedly excluded from that earlier work. Which is not to say it’s a classically realist play: it’s a memory play, and a play set specifically in Martha’s memory, which may or may not be an accurate representation of events as they occurred. There are times when I wish the production leaned farther into the unreliable nature of memory, lifted off its realist frame just a little bit more: a little more of the dark whimsy of the cockroach ballet would make the Phyllis ballet all the starker. 

Mother Play doesn’t always feel like it’s for the audience; the catharsis in it is for Martha, not us. But it does feel like a release of the scaffolding of fantasy that let Baltimore Waltz look at these then-rawer griefs; a deeper, richer recognition of the sibling bond between Anna/Martha and Carl; and an attempt to grapple with the imprint Phyllis left, in ways that are both brutally honest and tenderly resigned. In an article in The New York Times, Vogel says, “I’ve tried to craft a funny, secular ritual of forgiveness, and I’m really feeling released.” It is Martha’s quiet embrace of forgiveness, and the unexpected reward that brings, that stay with me.