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Regional Reviews: St. Louis Mothers and Sons Also see Richard's review of Until The Flood
Or maybe: "The urgency and meta-themes of it all send our collective consciousness on a non-stop thrill-ride of twists and turns (or, shock and awe)." It is, intentionally, a convoluted and unbelievable statement. And yes, Terrence McNally's 2014 Mothers and Sons about a mother and what she finally (finally) learns about her son (who died of AIDS almost two decades earlier) probably is great if you had some sort of similar experience, i.e., if you or someone you love was young and gay and ran away from home to live in New York City, and abandoned his stubborn old mom down in faraway Dallas, Texas, because it's just so much easier than open and honest communication. That still happens, right? Or should Terrence McNally have written this play twenty years ago? In 2016, it's like opening wounds on a mummy. But I digress. There is a lot of urgency on stage, under the direction of Michael Evan Haney, although it's not at all the urgency of a time bomb ticking away under the table—it's more the arbitrary urgency of the play's fur-coated matriarch. She represents our own modern, spoiled, ironclad, customer-is-always-right subjectivity, which says (over and over, as if pounding on an invisible courtroom table) "Why didn't everything turn out exactly as I'd planned, secretly, in my own head?" And then there are those very odd moments when Mothers and Sons turns into Tennessee Williams' Suddenly, Last Summer, here with the intricately intelligent actress Darrie Lawrence as Katharine Hepburn's Mrs. Venable, apparently plotting her own frontal lobotomy in this particular case, rather than poor Elizabeth Taylor's. In Mothers and Sons Mr. McNally's Katharine also talks at length about how rare and magical her own connection was with her talented son (the late, lamented Andre) before he abandoned her. Harry Bouvy is Cal, Andre's longtime companion: nervous at the arrival of this flinty older woman after all these years. And now she's digging up all her own private grief and shoving it under his Christmas tree. Cal goes from nervous, to very nervous, to that final "stand up for yourself for once in your life, you repressed gay man!" type-of-scene, borrowed from the end of Torch Song Trilogy (it was Harvey Fierstein back on Broadway in 1982). We saw that same "discovery of fire" scene at the end of 2009's 1960s coming-out film A Single Man with Colin Firth. And here it is again, set (inexplicably) in 2014. God, I hope Mr. Bouvy doesn't read this. He's actually very good, steadily ratcheting up the anguish toward (what's become) the inevitable rebellion. And the formidable Ms. Lawrence makes for a great grand dame, somehow leaving the door open to likability. But it's two decades too late for this particular sort of dusty scenario, and the second-hand fur coat she wears becomes an unintentional metaphor for the whole thing. I didn't hate it, though—even if it is just the usual once-a-year "upper-class dramedy" at the Rep, full of elegant, successful characters we'd theoretically like to embody. As is common for this annual genre event, the grown-ups on stage lament the state of the world in a "pre-Armageddon America/17th century French Restoration" style: posing and pronouncing for, typically, about an hour and a half—which is as long as any sensible person could bear. But I didn't hate it, really. It's more the fact that Mr. McNally (Love! Valour! Compassion! and Master Class) seems to have turned into a caricature of a playwright. And I definitely do hate that. Through November 13, 2016, at the Studio Theater of the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis. For more information visit www.repstl.org. The Players Crew |
