The setting is a small house on a lonely country road, which is shared by Jesse and her mother Thelma. As the play begins, Jesse tells her mother she intends to take her own life that night. At first she doesn’t believe her daughter, but as Jessie cleans the house and makes lists of things for her mother look after, the play moves slowly but inexorably towards a tragic conclusion.
New York Magazine said ‘night, Mother is “…honest, uncompromising, lucid, penetrating, well-written, dramatic and…unmanipulatively moving…,” while the New York Times called it “…a shattering evening…”