Joan Marcus
Let us be clear: it is mesmerizing, a delicious treat, a little surreal, and utterly thrilling to watch Jessica Lange act on stage in Paula Vogel’s Mother Play: A Play in Five Evictions (2nd Stage, to June 16). In this Broadway play, she plays Phyllis, the louche, erratic, loving, and extremely not-loving mother of Carl (Jim Parsons) and Martha (Celia Keenan-Bolger). The play, set in various apartments inside and outside the Beltway of Washington D.C., spans 1964 to the 21st century, and Martha in various stages of detachment from her children and the world around her.
The one constant is this season’s most skin-crawling special effect: Shawn Duan’s projections of cockroaches, who—in the five evictions the title mentions—range freely over refrigerators, and even march in relentless unison all over the walls. You may go home and look up the number of an exterminator.
Those evictions seem a strangely inert dramatic device. Rather like the relationships between mother and son, and mother and daughter, they flare into life and flare down. The characters are also types, who we don’t really get to know, except in relation to Phyllis; here Parsons plays a gay son, who wants acceptance, and who will forgive his mother her ugly homophobia out of a deeply felt devotion. Martha, who also comes out, is less forgiving, especially as Phyllis seems far more judgmental and sniping towards her. Carl is warm and fluttering, impervious to Phyllis’ viciousness, while Martha remains a block of suspicion and disbelief at their mother’s words, deeds, and blithe lack of care.
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