What goes around comes around in an unexpected way in the gut-twisting and affirming
Mothers and Sons
at Uptown Players.
The regional premiere of the 2014 Tony Award-nominated play at Uptown Players brings the emotional trajectory of the AIDS crisis full circle for the embittered subject Terrence McNally first conjured in
Andre’s Mother
. That Emmy Award-winning teleplay was part of PBS’s American Playhouse in 1990.
The mother in that play, like many family members at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, rejected her son for being gay, leaving him to die in the care of the family he created with his partner, Cal, and his friends.
When
Mothers and Sons
begins, 20 years after Andre’s death, it’s Andre’s widowed mother, Katherine, who is alone, staring out at the view through the window of the lavish New York apartment Cal shares with his husband, Will, and their son, Bud.
Marjorie Hayes’ Katherine, raging under a chillingly controlled veneer of icy civility, isn’t dying physically as her son was, but spiritually. What remains to be seen is if she, too, will be able to form a new kind of family that’s based not on blood, but on love.
Under the bold direction of Bruce R. Coleman, Hayes’ Katherine dares to be ugly under her perfectly coiffed wig and elegant clothes. She erupts with accusations so unfair and unforgivable, it’s a wonder that Gregory Lush’s Cal, who responds with a complex constellation of anger and grief, doesn’t toss her out. Instead, Cal keeps asking to take Katherine’s fur coat, and she keeps refusing.
It’s an apt metaphor for the way Katherine refuses to accept the man her son loved and her resistance to staying — even though she was the one who dropped in unannounced and now can’t bring herself to leave.
Kevin Moore’s Will provides his own tough take on the proceedings. He’s not crazy about being reminded of Cal’s late, adored partner and he doesn’t understand why Cal is allowing himself to be maligned by a woman that he sees as a monster. But he loves Cal enough to defer to his lead in their interaction with Katherine.
Alex Prejean is so sweet as Bud, you’re willing to cut him slack at the unlikeliness of a 6-year-old being so much wiser than the adults around him. He epitomizes the hope at the heart of the play with its unapologetic belief in the transformational power of compassion.
On the one hand, Katherine may not deserve to stick around, but on the other, as Robert Frost wrote in “The Death of The Hired Man,” “Home is the place where, when you have to go there,/They have to take you in./I should have called it/Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.’”
Plan your life
Continues through June 19. Uptown Players at the Kalita Humphreys Theater, 3636 Turtle Creek Blvd., Dallas. $25-$40. 214-219-2718.
. Performance reviewed was Friday. Running time: 1 hour, 32 mins.
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