“Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominately in the heart.”
—Tennessee Williams, stage directions for The Glass Menagerie
Martha Heman’s mother is a hoot. She’s a character. A sharp dresser with an eye for poetic retribution and well-placed pettiness. Phyllis Herman is also a creature of her time: Born in 1925, she moved to DC in the fullness of WWII employment and the companionship of men in uniform; hit the limitations on married women in the 1950s; and finds herself on the other side of a volatile marriage, a divorced single mother of two children in 1964 as the play begins. She’s also exacting. Self-focused. A hard but disciplined drinker who self-medicates with pity and gin. A mother determined to protect her the genius of her son and the prospects of her distinctly unfeminine daughter.
If Phyllis is one pole of Martha’s adolescence, the other is her brother Carl, an erudite and acerbic teenager two years her elder. Carl offers Martha advice on reading material and the shape of her future, and serves as an antidote to the shame that Phyllis is steeped in through her own conditioning and temperament. The siblings serve as each other’s witness, favorite audience, and cheerleader, burning with an unshakable love that buoys them through their teen years.
The Mother Play traces 40 years in the life of this family and the United States around them. Playwright Paula Vogel—daughter of a Phyllis and younger sister to a Carl—offers up this memory play in episodes as the family moves from one squalid apartment to another in a changing suburban Maryland. Martha narrates from 2004, when she is in her 50s, untangling her mother’s limitations and decisions as they reverberate and coalesce in the choices that Martha faces in her present day: What is her duty to the woman who shaped her sense of humor and justice, and whose neglect and betrayal continue to shape Martha’s adulthood?
Because The Mother Play is not, in the end, the portrait of a monster. “I love my mother. She was never dull,” says Phyllis’s real-world daughter. “I walked through the door and I knew it was going to be a challenge, but I knew it was going to be original.” And indeed, The Mother Play is not focused on scoring points against its eponymous and flawed central character, or even dwelling on the most painful points of Martha’s life. “I would describe Mother Play as a comedy until it isn’t,” says Vogel. “But it is also a ritual, a ritual of forgiveness. Because time is incredible hard, incredibly connected, and incredibly long. I think in everything I write, comedy is the road to forgiveness.”