Theatre in Review: Mother Play: A Play in Five Evictions (Second Stage at the Hayes Theater)In the most remarkable sequence of Paula Vogel's new fractured family portrait, Jessica Lange silently communicates the state of her character's soul. She is Phyllis, a middle-aged Washington, DC divorcee, living alone and getting by as a typist for the Post Office. Having alienated her adult children -- again -- she arrives at home at the end of another tedious day. She puts on the TV, impatiently changing channels. She tries the radio. She microwaves dinner, which she proceeds to oversalt, causing her to spit up. She makes a drink, maybe two. She pulls out a crystal ball and tarot cards, anything to pass the time. Without overacting, and unsupported by a single word of dialogue, she gives us a devastating picture of boredom and loneliness. The sequence is brief, yet it contains an entire life revealed with unsparing honesty. It's also crucial to the success of Mother Play, for Phyllis is both a pitiable figure and a hellacious parent; as the above subtitle indicates, her loved ones are in for a bumpy ride. "I'm lucky to be so close to my children," she says, after her husband, an advertising executive, walks out. Those children may have a few thoughts about that statement. Frankly preferring her son, Carl -- "I think in a past life you were my husband," she coos at him, alarmingly -- she adds of her daughter, "Martha is unremarkable. She is to find an unremarkable man who doesn't have enough imagination to cheat and drink and whore himself around town like her father does." After her fourth -- or is it her fifth? -- martini, she regales the kids with the following memory: "Your dad said: 'I've got a rubber. Don't worry.' When your father pulled out of me, I found out that in his haste, he had shredded the condom he'd found in the bar." Later, in a moment of exasperation, she admits, "All right. I am not going to win Mother of the Year." When did you first notice, dear? The ticking bomb in this family unit is the fact that Phyllis, a committed homophobe, has birthed a gay son and a lesbian daughter. This creates an undertone long before the news comes out. "Why do you know so many designers?" she queries Carl, eyeing him suspiciously as he tries to guess the provenance of her new outfit. Informing Martha that she walks like a man, she nevertheless casually gives the fourteen-year-old a copy of The Well of Loneliness, Radclyffe Hall's once-notorious lesbian tearjerker, here summed up by Carl as "a depressing autobiographical novel written by an invert." When Carl gets caught fooling around with men at a bus station, Phyllis tosses him out; Martha, the in-house peacemaker, coaxes her mother into attending a few PFLAG meetings before taking her to a gay bar, an adventure that begins promisingly and ends in disaster. And because the action covers half a century beginning in the 1960s, AIDS will cast its fatal shadow. Don't expect tearful reunions or forgiveness scenes, however; tragedy comes without redemption here, climaxing in an act of rejection that might give pause to Medea. As most theatregoers know, Vogel's autobiographical breakthrough work, The Baltimore Waltz, focuses on a woman coping with her brother's death from HIV. Amazingly, more than forty years later, she is still finding dramatically gripping and highly theatrical ways of treating this terrible event. (She has also gifted actresses of a certain age everywhere with a new and entirely hair-raising lead role; you can expect Mother Play to spread like wildfire through the regional theatre circuit.) In Tina Landau's compact, inventive production, all three stars deliver some of their very best work. Celia Keenan-Bolger's Martha is a perpetual outsider, always sitting a few feet away from her mother and brother or, standing against the proscenium, watching from a distance. Heartbreakingly vulnerable when recalling a bullying incident on a school bus, she grows a tough protective layer until the final scenes, when she treats her lifelong tormentor with a certain wary tenderness. Jim Parsons' Carl regards Phyllis with a combination of deep devotion and annihilating rage, these warring emotions threatening to tear him apart; whether pretending to be a lost Romanov princess; insisting, desperately, to Phyllis that his feelings for other men are "sacred;" or facing the most terrible of the five evictions, he is locked with her in a terrible, destructive intimacy. Lange is peerless as Phyllis, magically producing the oddest objects from her purse; giddily modeling the designer suit she nabbed at a used clothing store; pitifully trying, in a phone call, to wheedle a note of affection out of her mother; or, on unfamiliar ground with Martha, muttering, "I don't know this neighborhood. It looks like a place where mothers are murdered." (Her moments of Auntie Mame charm act as an early warning system, signaling troublesome behavior ahead.) Even when she commits unforgivable acts -- which she does repeatedly -- she remains a tragic figure, passing on her narcissistic wounds to the son and daughter she professes to love. For a play that proceeds through a series of apartment settings, David Zinn has created a cunning solution, treating the stage like a furniture warehouse and having the actors rearrange the same pieces to suggest different locations. A small overhead grid disburses different hanging lamps for each new residence. Jen Schriever's lighting creates subtly different atmospheres for each. Because the family's first post-divorce apartment is infested, projection designer Shawn Duan calls up a round of dancing cockroaches set to Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass. The latter selection is only one entry in a scene- and time-setting playlist, curated by sound designer Jill BC Du Boff, which includes Manfred Mann's "Do Wah Diddy Diddy," Rodgers and Hart's, "There's a Small Hotel," Henry Mancini's "Moon River," Mason Williams' "Classical Gas," Max Steiner's "Theme from A Summer Place," and The Trammps' "Disco Inferno." Toni-Leslie James, the subtlest and most effective of costume designers, effortlessly takes Carl and Martha from middle school to middle age, aided by Matthew Armentrout's hair and wig designs. Towering over everything is Lange's Phyllis, a victim, a survivor, a nurturer, and a killer rolled into one. A portrait drawn in scalding candor, Mother Play is, strangely, also an act of love. Vogel gambles that Phyllis, seen up close and in detail, will fascinate; it's a roll of the dice with a big payday. --David Barbour 
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