Review of Mother Play on Broadway

I will admit, despite being very into theater, I was not aware of the existence of Mother Play for a hot minute. My boss, who has a Second Stage subscription, randomly invited me to go when I was up in New York in March 2024, and I just agreed to it because of how it was a free Broadway show.

I had no idea who was in it, and when we showed up to our mezzanine seats, greeting the house staff because we knew the, I also realized I had never seen a Vogel play before. I’d heard her name so many times, yet never had the opportunity to see her work on the stage.

This was the second preview we saw, though, and there was definitely work to be done. Some of the actors were flubbing their lines and having to rerun to the start of the sentence, as they messed up, which is the classic sign you’re watching a show before it’s finalized the opening night.

Let’s get into the review, shall we?

The story of a family, told through their evictions.

We begin in the present day, when one of the main characters, Martha, opens up a box from her brother Carl. We then go back in time to the first eviction. The matriarch of the family, Phyllis, is an alcoholic whose husband just abandoned her and the two kids.

She gets an apartment in a custodial unit, which means they have to take out the trash for the occupants. That also means it’s full of roaches, but for Carl and Martha, they dream of doing more with their lives. Martha is bullied at school for being a girl, and boys are trying to touch her.

Carl tries to teach her how to stand up for herself, and then we progress through the rest of the play. Each scene is a different eviction in a point of time in the family’s lives, and Phyllis, who grew up with traditional Southern parents around Washington D.C., is slowly unraveling.

However, her kids, who increasingly identify as LGBTQ+, are going to be a direct clash between her faith and what she believes is the right thing to do. Lange portrays her as a harsh woman who doesn’t seem to actually care for her kids at times, with some of her actions borderline cruel.

Martha and Carl’s relationship is one of the shining lights of the play for me. There are a lot of humorous gags involving these two, and they really feel like brother and sister. I also thought that Parsons was the standout actor in this three-person play, but they’re all pretty good.

I won’t spoil the play and what happens in the later half, but it should be known this isn’t a really happy play. The two women sitting right behind us left it sobbing their eyes out, and I thought that this was something that could induce some tears. But the humorous moments are funny, the tragic ones especially sad and striking because of that.

There is also no intermission for this play, which almost clocks in at two hours. Now that’s a decision—it went by really quickly for me, but I could see how other people could be in dire need of resting their needs and legs.

Overall Thoughts

I really enjoyed the play and its acting, but I found it to be a little too disjointed at times. Although the conflict between the mother and her kids is the driving force of the play for a good chunk of it, I found that it felt a little unfinished and not as fleshed out as the relationship between Martha and Carl.

And yes, that’s a point: they don’t have a good relationship with their mother, who served as an antagonist even at times. But I wanted more focus on the brother and sister in the end, and less on the mother—if that makes sense?

I could see how other people loved this play. I saw firsthand how the women behind me got emotional while watching it. Those last few scenes hit home really hard, that’s for sure.

Go see if it you’re interested!

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