What better way to spend Mother's Day than watching a friend star in a play about a woman telling her mother she's going to commit suicide?
Such makes the premise of 'Night Mother by Marsha Norman, a searing bit of human drama.
Many plays in our time (and others) are presumed to have a "message" or "moral" to impart. This play does not, at least not beyond awareness of suicide and depression. Rather, it functions as an experience. We are not supposed to get any pre-determined lesson. Like history or simply life, you can get whatever you can from these two people and what we witness between them.
Jessie (Emily Asher Kellis) is a middle-aged divorcee living with her mother Thelma (Kimberly Demmary), and one evening as the two putter about with all the little tiny things making up their lives--gossip, what groceries are running low, etc.--Jessie tells Thelma her plan. She's going to shoot herself later that evening, and doesn't want Thelma to be prepared. What follows is the mother trying desperately but not at all brilliantly to get Jessie to change her mind. Along the way, much of this daughter's life and her mother's as well emerges. Not all. No, not at all. Because how could it?
Naturally enough Thelma pulls all kinds of cards to play, including guilt and rage, propriety and ideas about hope. But Jessie has been thinking about this for a long time, and planning it for months. What one cannot quite grasp, and the other hopes she can (pretty much the only real hope she has left) is Why? Thelma naturally enough is looking for a specific reason, for something concrete. Jessie on the other says these brutally simple things. She doesn't like living. She dislikes her life and sees no way it can get any better. There isn't anything she really likes, the way some folks love sports or blueberry scones. She still loves her husband, that is crystal, but also that the marriage is over, even dead. Her son, whom she says is so close to her in type, is a drug addict on a spiral she believes will end in prison at best. But those are surface details. Almost trivia.
Why does she do it? It says much about the performances as well as the direction by Brian Robert Harris that I left their theatre both knowing and not knowing. It hurt watching the sadness of these two women, but in my own heart the one I felt most akin to was Jessie. More than once I heard her speak and the hopelessness, the emptiness was so naked it stirred something in me. My heart broke, not just for Jessie (although, yes, for her) but for myself and for every depressed, sad individual I've known or heard of who roamed into these kinds of shadows.
But I did feel also for Thelma, feeling her own hopelessness and bafflement and fierce terror despair when Jessie finally says the title of the play.
I wept more than once.
'Night Mother is playing at the Elite Theatre Company, at a beautiful waterfront area at 2731 S Victoria Ave Oxnard, CA 93035 Fridays and Saturdays at 8pm, Sundays at 2pm with a special performance at 8pm on Thursday May 19, 2022 until May 22, 2022.
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