by Toxic and strong self -medical mothers are a standard in the theater, from Mary Tyrone on the trip to the night from Mary Tyrone to Violet Weston in August: Osage County. Self -tabled, vain and hyper -critical, tend to pursue your stages like injured Löwinnen, your own descendants of the comfortable goals of your abuse and cynicism. The US dramatist Paula Vogel adds this list of Phyllis Herman (Sigrid Thornton) so monstrous and brittle.
While the mother game (the subtitle is a piece in five evacuations) flirts with the toxicity and listening of this history. Where Williams created the character of Tom as an author -Vogel gives us Martha (Yael Stone), who also wants to desperate to escape her mother’s claws while trying to understand what makes her tick. There is a deep melancholy under the piece, a feeling of everything that has been lost for the devastation of the time and forgetting.
Related: Sigrid Thornton: ‘A constant memory of your own mortality is important. It’s really good ‘
Like Williams, Vogel puts a lot of her own biography here – her mother was also called Phyllis and, after the collapse of her marriage, worked as a secretary for the postal service – and she pursues the outline of a family that slowly decreases and skill. The putrefaction is committed to moving boxes and furniture during the first evacuation when Martha and her older brother Carl (Ash Flanders) move around, while Phyllis drinks self -pity in a state of grotesque. The children are only 12 and 14, and yet they already seem to be like the parents for a persistent and irritated child.
In the course of the play and the narrative, the decades moves unstoppable – it is opened in the early 60s and ends in the present – this parental imbalance only deteriorates. Gin-through one another and combative, Phylli’s alternately insults, feelings of guilt and clings to her children like annoying support structures; In one moment she rejects her because she is gay in the next to grab her consent. She is devilish and cruel, but Vogel also lets us see the damage she has done, how it is shaped by the informal intersections of others. It is not as much a abuse cycle as a long off -the -off, which is oriented towards children’s forgiveness and stoicism.
Thornton is great and constantly lives for the gaping defects of the character without losing the central pathos that keeps us committed and sympathetic. It has a hard, steel quality under the gauchness and inappropriateness, which becomes softer in the course of the game and ultimately achieves a kind of tired dignity and attitude. Stone finds great depth and complexity in Martha, which is tortured by her mother’s sadism but is determined to see. Flanders is solid in the smaller part of Carl and together the cast painting a convincing and complicated family dynamic.
Director Lee Lewis makes many things right, what some people who understand them incorrectly seem somehow immense. These performances are beautifully calibrated and professionally positioned, but Vogels amazing sound shifts and narrative longueurs seem to be foamed. Too often production stalls and is in stupidity and warehouse. A scene in a gay bar – in which Phyllis dances a Conga line with her adult children, feels desperate, and the less is said about a huge cockroach, which the audience waves the better.
This reluctance seeps into Christina Smith’s design, which is surprisingly banal and unwieldy – although not their costumes, which are few treasure troops of the time and personality. The five different subscriptions of the family are also underdone and excessively complicated, which requires some chunky transitions. Niklas Pajanti’s inventive lighting helps and stands from glamorous to boring when the family’s assets changes. Kelly Ryall’s compositions are mercurially in a minute, in the next complaint.
Vogel is a fascinating and idiosyncratic playwright, and if this production of the mother game does not quite summarize, she still tells moments of beauty and calm awe. This period of time enables actors to pursue the emotional beats of their characters’ emotional beats on a map, and if political and social events disappear into the background, their impact on the interpersonal relationships of the family is violently underlined. The moral struggle between liberalism and conservatism, these ideological polarities that are currently tearing the United States apart are presented here as the cracks of the self and the family unit that come for a long time.
Memory games are fragmentary and elliptical by definition, so that the stakkato rhythms and tonal shifts may be required. The cliché of the monstrous female, in which the mother becomes a place of storage of all disease and perversion of the family, is subtly but surely unpacked and exposed. What we have left is a mother and a daughter reaches peacefully for care, compassion and connection. In this way it feels vital and contemporary.
• Melbourne Theater Company is on the Sumner Theater by August 2nd
