'Night Mother (review)

 Spoilers ahoy! 

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.  

Weapons (review)

Spoilers ahoy!

First--the world premiere play by Chris Collins now playing at the Lounge on Theatre Row is Weapons.  The program describes it as the third in a trilogy about a family in San Francisco.  After watching this play, I want to see (or at least read) those other two plays.

Second--this fits into the genre of family tragedy very much in the vein of Eugene O'Neil.  I felt reminded in some ways of A Long Day's Journey Into Night as well as maybe Mourning Becomes Electra.  This is high praise.  Higher praise is how the cast all managed to avoid the trap of such plays, at least for actors who haven't quite mastered some levels of craft.  A temptation to simply "ride the emotion" of the action exists in these kinds of works, and must be avoided at all costs.

The cast of Weapons avoided that trap.  What we see in every moment on stage are people trying--often desperately--to achieve goals, goals they long for with all their souls, but half the time have no real idea how to achieve it.  Several don't even know precisely what they themselves desire.  In other words, we see not actors performing roles but human beings struggling with life.

We see us.

The family in question consists essentially of five persons.  Paul (Cris D'Annunzio) is a retired cop now running a bar in San Francisco.  His wife died of cancer roughly a year past.  His daughters are teenage Lara (Jodi Wofford) and adult, estranged Sarah (Paige Herschell).  Living with Paul and Lara at the family home is May (Madelynn Fattibene), Paul's girfriend, when his brother Bill (Matt Kirkwood) comes for a visit at Lara's request.

Add to the brew Ellen (Katie May Porter), an old flame of Paul's from high school who recently showed up at his bar.

It made for a very harrowing night of theatre, watching this family tear itself apart, poking at open wounds often with what seemed like the very best of intentions. Sarah literally wants nothing more than to redeem herself and her father.  From what?  That is what people keep demanding of her.  Just as Paul clearly feels utterly lost, sans wife and job and one of his children--who then shows up to start making incoherent demands. Poor Lara tries to somehow keep things together while still dealing with such a tender merciless event as First Love.  Bill, at a crossroads in his acting career (he's really too old to be a leading man anymore) visits and dives into a what is clearly a sea of emotional poison--all the more deadly because he loves everyone else drowning there.

A dear friend asked me point blank what this play is about, and to my surprise a relatively straightforward answer came to mind.   This play is about a family that have never learned to forgive themselves.  Sounds simple does it not?  But like all genuine emotional states, it rarely end up that way.  Paul, Lara and Sarah in particular seem able (sometimes barely) to forgive others, but lash out in rage and self defense out of a stubborn refusal to let go and do the same for themselves.  Doing that would mean surrender.  Giving up what little power they might yet retain over their lives--losing the thorned crown of responsibility, i.e. guilt.

More, I must say the show's direction by Kiff Scholl helped achieve some real power, and the design--set by Pete Hickok, lights by Donny Jackson, sound by David B. Marling and costumes by Wendell C. Carmichael--helped enormously by creating a visceral sense of place.  San Francisco is my home town, and there is something wildly attractive in its chilly gloom, just as it remains a place of emotional isolation.  This play might take place somewhere else I suppose--Staten Island maybe, or from what some people have told me Montreal.

But if feels utterly right for San Francisco, and I felt the presence of that city from the moment I looked at the set.

Highly recommended for very good performances that get at the heart of tragedy without wallowing in the sentimental or superficial.  This is the real thing. 

Weapons plays Fridays and Saturdays at 8pm, Sundays at 7pm until May 8, 2016 at the Lounge Theatre 6201 Santa Monica Blvd. (one block east of Vine).