Theatre in Review: Conversations with Mother (Theatre 555)If it's 1984 and you're tending bar at a gay bar called The Meat Hook and your mother calls you at work, it's safe to say you have a problem. So it is with Bobby, the male lead in Matthew Lombardo's new play, locked in an invasive, deeply codependent relationship with his flamboyant, disapproving mother Maria. It's a challenge for the audience, too, watching these two characters undergo round and after round of confrontations that restate the obvious while yielding little in the way of laughter or real feeling. The years go by, but these Conversations with Mother remain distressingly the same. In a play that spans the mid-1960s to today, Bobby's homosexuality fuels much of the mother-son conflict. In a brief prologue, the seven-year-old boy, eager to come home from summer camp, gets his way by intimating that he is looking forward to being molested by one of the counselors. Next, he is 12, confessing how he and another altar boy at his Connecticut parish, assigned to serve at a wedding, devoured a bag of communion hosts, got buzzed on altar wine, and promptly got caught playing doctor in the sacristy. Busted, they hop a bus to New York, Bobby obtaining the fare by pawning the gold crucifix his parents gave him. Clearly, Bobby is a handful in training. This not terribly amusing scene establishes the pattern for everything that follows. Bobby grows older but never grows up, moving to Manhattan but neglecting his playwriting ambitions, committing petty theft, getting beaten up by a faithless lover, and falling into drug addiction. Through it all, Maria cracks wise. When Bobby says his boyfriend wants an open relationship, Maria snaps, "What's that? You don't close the doors in your apartment?" Commenting on his dating insurance, she snarls, "You get involved with more disasters than State Farm Insurance!" She keeps calling Bobby's place of employment a delicatessen, insisting, "A place called The Meat Hook should at least serve cold cuts!" And so it goes, one not-ready-for-the-The Golden Girls line after another. That Maria is in the hands of Caroline Aaron is the best possible news; handed a lazy laugh line, her steely delivery gives it a good swift kick, making it funnier than it has any right to be. Her dismissals of Broadway classics are reliably amusing. (On Oliver: "Another show I hated. I mean, clubbing a prostitute to death in a children's musical??") She even manages to be touching here and there, and, showing up at the Betty Ford Center to deliver a double dose of tough love, one shares her exasperation. Too often, however, the character is a one-joke joke, a wisecrack machine whose supposedly adorable manner often comes off as castrating. As Bobby, who can be counted on to make the wrong decision in any situation, Matt Doyle has little to do but look angry, woebegone, or, occasionally, amused. The actors work at making their characters likable but it's a struggle. How a lengthy discussion of post-bowel movement hygiene made it into the final draft is beyond me. When Bobby finally becomes a successful playwright, we see him and Maria at the theatre, watching his new hit, which recycles dialogue from the early scenes of Conversations with Mother. The chuckling, applauding audience supplied by sound designer John Gromada is far more appreciative than the crowd at Theatre 555 on the night I attended. Noah Himmelstein's production tries to wrangle the clashing tones of a script that mixes sitcom antics with borderline tragic events, generating wild, neck-snapping mood swings. Wilson Chin's spare scenic design provides a canvas for Caite Hevner's projections, which, among other things, provide evocative images of New York in the 1980s. On the other hand, a nightmarish crack-pipe montage belongs to a PSA about drug addiction, not this sentimental comedy -- and why is Maria's final resting place an empty field? Did the local cemetery run out of plots? Ryan Park's costumes, Tom Watson's wig and hair, and Elizabeth Harper's lighting are solid. As boulevard entertainments go, Conversation with Mother is often creepy rather than charming. The play shows Maria brusquely intervening and stage-managing every crisis in Bobby's life. She wonders repeatedly why he is so immature; a look in the mirror might provide the answer. It's typical of this strange piece that Lombardo arranges a finale, following Maria's death, that is meant to be touching, suggesting that the parent-child relationship is eternal. Frankly, the effect is macabre. Bobby will never get a moment's peace on either side of the grave. --David Barbour 
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