Jessica Lange Talks ‘Mother Play’, Bad Moms & How To Mesmerize An Audience With 12 Minutes Of Silence – Deadline Q&A
deadline.comTowards the end of Paula Vogel’s hit Broadway drama Mother Play, all dialogue comes to a halt for 12 long, mesmerizing minutes, and Jessica Lange is on stage, alone, for every second of them.
Her character Phyllis – the mother of the title, based on the mother of the playwright – has alienated her two adult children, Martha (Celia Keenan-Bolger) and Carl (Jim Parsons), after a lifetime of pretty odious behavior, most damningly her abandonment of the son she seemingly loved as he’s dying of AIDS.
Set in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, Mother Play, directed by Tina Landau, is based on Vogel’s real-life family events, including the death of her beloved brother, and knowing the source only makes the tragedy onstage more affecting.
Somehow, though, Mother Play, with its moments of grace scattered here and there and rarely where you expect them, feels infused with a hard-won humanity for each and every corner of this familial triangle, never more so than when those 12 minutes of loneliness tick by as Phyllis attempts to busy herself in the silent apartment once filled with the sounds, some happy, many sad, even more angry, of family.
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