Review: Conversations with Mother, a Familiar Double-Act for Caroline Aaron and Matt Doyle

In Matthew Lombardo’s time-leaping Conversations with Mother, playing at Theater 555, Maria Collavechio (Caroline Aaron) and her bambino Bobby (Matt Doyle) savor a tenderly sardonic relationship through the decades. From writing homesick camp letters in 1966 to receiving family visits at rehab in 2004, Bobby remains his mom’s wayward best friend.

As if striving for a convivial familiarity, Lombardo (playwright of the short-lived High and Looped on Broadway), titles each short vignette with classic mom-isms projected across the stage, like “If Everyone Jumped Off A Bridge, Would You?” and “I Know What You’re Doing Before You Even Do It.” But most of the time, we know what Lombardo’s doing before he even does it.

Throughout this genially formulaic two-hander, Doyle (a 2022 Tony winner for his breathlessly neurotic “Getting Married Today” in Company) plays, at least in one regard, the straight man, to Aaron’s broader, feistier Maria. Portraying Bobby from elementary school to senior citizenship, Doyle persuades us that this is a guy both openheartedly gullible enough to make wrong decision after wrong decision, and sweetly foolish enough to be forgiven repeatedly for that guilelessness. But aside from being gay and reckless, there isn’t much depth to Bobby or specificity in his central relationship with Maria. Aaron has a bit more to work with, and she intricately weaves glimpses of Maria’s sadness, at her widowhood and her son’s struggles, through a lengthy queue of one-liners.

From the start, the sitcom punchlines come fast and furious from Maria, with not quite enough hits to forgive the many groaners. When Bobby says his nogoodnik partner wants an open relationship, Maria muses, “What’s that, you don’t close the doors in your apartment?” Reflecting on Bobby’s bad choices, she wisecracks, “You get involved with more disasters than State Farm Insurance.” Aaron summons all the corrosive charisma of the comparable character she played on The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel when Bobby reminds his mother that The Meat Hook, the gay club where he bartends, is not remotely a delicatessen, and she claps back, “Well, I’m telling people it is, so if anyone asks, know your meats!”

It’s not that Conversations with Mother needs a heavier helping of pathos. Even laced with bon mots, the weepy epilogue still feels too tawdry, and there’s a wildly overdramatic crystal meth video montage of glass pipes and dilated pupils. In fact, the production, directed with straightforward elegance by Noah Himmelstein, pulls off a hysterical sound cue in the play’s final minutes that suggests Conversations with Mother may be served best by an absurdly farcical tone rarely achieved in the dialogue.

Lombardo seems to deliberately take up the tropes of family sitcom setups, structuring them, without comment, around a gay son’s open and unapologetic communication with his mother. But by making Maria an Every Mom and also a Catholic woman who never bats an eyelid at accepting and celebrating her son’s sexuality in the 1970s, Conversations with Mother passes up an opportunity to explicitly explore the radical acceptance that undergirds this otherwise unremarkable mother-son relationship.

It’s with the same intention that Lombardo breezes past the AIDS epidemic, an obvious gap in the timeline, the only reference being a slight running joke. But it’s hard to fathom that Bobby, a budding playwright working at a gay bar in New York in the late 1980s and early 1990s, wouldn’t be deeply impacted by loss in a way that might show up meaningfully in his exchanges with mom. The well-meaning attempts to stave off predictable tropes that audiences expect from late 20th century queer coming-of-age stories — no scenes set at St. Vincent’s are found in this play — come across instead as glib.

And the late-blooming metatheatrical flourishes in Lombardo’s script only go so far. He has his characters comment on their unoriginal language, but simply pointing out cliché doesn’t do much to subvert it. “I was a good mother to you,” Maria says, now old and ill. “Nah, you were the best,” Bobby counters, triggering an acerbic rejoinder from his mother: “See, it’s sayings like that that make the critics not like you.” Guilty as charged.