Review: Jessica Lange as a Parent From Hell in Paula Vogel’s Emotional Mother Play

At the beginning of Paula Vogel’s Mother Play, now making its Broadway debut with Second Stage at the Hayes Theater, protagonist Martha (Celia Keenan-Bolger) notes “family in, family out.” She’s not only talking about the many times her family has been evicted from their home. Parents break from children when they don’t meet their expectations, and the children come back when there’s a possibility of change. Though the story of Mother Play treads familiar ground, the virtuoso performances make it feel fresh and engaging.

Mother Play begins when middle-aged Martha unpacks a box of her deceased brother’s things and goes into the memories of her childhood, starting with 1964 in Washington, D.C. It’s the middle of a turbulent decade for America, but the Herman household is consumed by the domestic. Siblings Martha and Carl (Jim Parsons) have moved so many times that they have memorized exactly which boxes to pack and unpack with their mother Phyllis’s (Jessica Lange) most important possessions: a martini glass and a bottle of liquor.

The family dynamic is immediately clear: Mother dotes on her hyper-verbal, occasionally flamboyant son, and relegates her daughter to cleaning the house and taking typing classes. According to Phyllis, the brilliant Carl is going to college, while Martha can become a secretary so she can always support herself. But Carl wants Martha to go to college too, and he quietly subverts his mother’s plans by assigning Martha a reading list that includes feminist theory and Virginia Woolf.

The battle over Martha’s future between her brother and mother is dramatized in ways that are delicious to watch. When Carl gives her a private lesson about how to walk assertively, he implores her to wear his clothes and imagine her breasts as “a pair of gatling guns that will mow down any male stupid enough to try you.” Later, her mother’s walking lesson, an effort to get her to be “more like a woman,” grows increasingly vampy and ridiculous as she struts about the room. The actors’ respective physicality shine here, and they each find every comedic beat available to them, particularly Lange, who is clearly having a blast.

Parsons adds to the fun as the cunningly clever but vigilant older brother. He constantly monitors his mother and sister, playing the court jester for one and reassuring the other that he’ll protect her against their queen. Parsons and Keenan-Bolger have developed a believable sibling shorthand that is largely nonverbal. Watching them watch each other is one of the highlights of the play.

Matching Parsons beat for beat, Keenan-Bolger grows from a child caught in the middle of two dynamos to being a powerhouse in her own right. She portrays her character from ages 11 to 50 over the course of less than two hours in a way that is so seamless, it left me mystified. How could donning a pair of glasses make her visibly age 20 years?

As Martha grows up, the story becomes more predictable, as it becomes obvious that Martha is not going to follow her mother’s plans for her life and new central conflicts arise. Still, there is much that demands our attention, particularly in Lange’s performance. In the last ten years, Lange has remade her career by playing people’s awful mothers, so it’s not surprising she can convey the level of vitriol the character demands. But I was surprised at how much empathy she was able to create too. Phyllis could easily be reduced to a Ryan Murphy-esque caricature, yet Lange instead gains the audience’s sympathy in unexpected moments. In an extended, single-person scene, Phyllis faces an evening at home alone after alienating both of her children. Lange wrings the most emotion possible out of the smallest actions, somehow making your heart break by simply taking out a deck of cards, shuffling once, then putting them away again. She cycles through nonchalance, extreme anguish, distraction, and even moments of contentment – though of course, they’re very fleeting.

In a play that shifts from realistic to surreal, Tina Landau’s direction perfectly showcases the actors’ performances. Her conception of the more surrealistic moments works, but there are too few of them to make them feel built into the world. Are they remnants from a child’s magical thinking? It’s a question not fully explored, which feels unfinished rather than purposeful. A standout element are projections by Shawn Duan, which are so effective that the first time they were used, I almost jumped out of my chair.

There’s a surprising amount of levity in this dark play, and in that, author Vogel reveals a hard truth: Even terrible parents can be fun and loving sometimes, and that keeps their children coming back to them. Mother Play ends exactly as expected, but the emotional rollercoaster is worth the ride.