Interview: More Than a Mere Footnote: A Conversation with MAMA'S BOY Playwright Rob Urbinati, Star Betsy Aidem, and Director Brian P. Allen

Some images are seared into the communal consciousness forever. The tragic assassination of John F. Kennedy and its tumultuous aftermath are just such indelibly tragic events which haunt memory. Playwright Rob Urbinati, whose new work Mama's Boy will receive its world premiere at Portland's Good Theater on October 29, 2015, was six years old in November 1963 and recalls seeing Lee Harvey Oswald murdered on television. It was an image which would resurface in his writing decades later.

Urbinati's new play focuses on Marguerite Oswald, her two sons Lee Harvey and Robert, and Lee's wife Marina in the year prior to the assassination and in the days after, offering an unusual prism on the events through the eyes of Marguerite. The play, however, is not really an historical drama, but rather a domestic drama in which Urbinati, Actress Betsy Aidem, and Good Artistic Director Brian P. Allen have tried to imagine the family context from which the Oswald phenomenon emerged.

"Some people will come with knowledge of the historical events, but many younger people will not remember them," Urbinati says. "My play contradicts none of the facts - it does conflate a little for dramatic purposes - but the historical information is accurate. The history slides into a family drama, but also slides out very easily. The family drama exists completely on its own even if you know absolutely nothing about the events. And it is surprising how touching, traumatic, even funny, and hopefully very compelling it is!".

Director Brian P. Allen concurs, recounting how the decision to bring the premiere to Portland came about. "Rob and I are old friends from our days with the Brunswick Music Theatre (now Maine State Music Theatre), and I had done his play Death by Design at the Good. Rob had come up to see that production and liked our space. We found ourselves walking down 43rd Street in Manhattan together and Rob was lamenting that despite numerous readings and workshops, he had not had a full mounting of Mama's Boy, and I said, 'I'll do it!' And here we are." Urbinati was excited because he knew the quality of the work done at the Good and because he could look forward to a full house and enthusiastic knowledgeable audience.

The process of developing and producing a new work can be challenging. Urbinati, who has just published a book, Play Readings: A Complete Guide for Theatre Practitioners, about the development of plays in both New York City and in regional theatre, is well aware of the vagaries of shepherding new scripts from page to stage. "There have been at least nine readings," Urbinati says, "one of which Betsy [Aidem] was in."

The New York-based actress, who has a long resume of Broadway and regional theatre credits, as well as film and television roles, says most of her stage performances have been in new works, but that Marguerite Oswald "is the role of a lifetime. It's exciting to create from the beginning, to have a sense of ownership with no iconic performers or performances in your head. It makes the whole process very free."

Allen says the four-person cast and he began with "a couple days of table work, reading, discussing, picking apart the characters and situations before working on the staging."

Urbinati, who came up to visit rehearsals last week, says it "has been fun watching this come to life. Because I am also a director, when I write plays, I try not to have a rigid idea of how they will be staged. They [the Good cast and Allen] have made choices that wouldn't have occurred to me, but are absolutely right."

Before reaching this stage, however, everyone involved had immersed himself in a fair amount of research. Urbinati said he read all the books about the assassination, and recommended a number to Aidem, among them Gerald Ford's Write It When I'm Gone and Norman Mailer's Portrait of an Assassin. Aidem calls herself "a research junky." Laughing, she recounts how when she recently played Lady Bird Johnson in All the Way, she not only visited the LBJ ranch and library in Texas, doggedly slogged through everything in the Lincoln Center Library, including yards of microfilm, "until the rest of the cast tried to do a research intervention." In preparing to play Marguerite Oswald, she read the source material, but she deliberately "tried to avoid You Tube," because she did not want to create an imitation. Like Urbinati, who says he wished to "invent Marguerite," Aidem wanted to try to understand the woman from the inside. "To play someone who was so loathed and so isolated, such a behemoth of a part, such a fierce person, I wanted to try to let her own words speak through me. I wanted to try to understand why someone like Marguerite would start a life, go through three marriages with three children, how it felt to be the mother of one of the most loathed persons in history, and where she could go after those terrible events. I was interested, too in the effects of her focusing all her attention on one child to the alienation of the others."

Just as the actress has worked to get inside Marguerite's motivations, Urbinati talks about how the imaginative process of fleshing out Marguerite, Lee Harvey and his other characters. "I never set out to write autobiographical plays," he says, "but I do turn to models from my family and friends. There are some specific lines in Mama's Boy that are borrowed exactly from things my own mother used to say. Marguerite is informed by my mother, and that helps me make her character richer emotionally and less like a case study. I intentionally gave the play an anodyne title to keep the story universal and help people find their own way into it."

Thus, in Mama's Boy the personal drama intertwines with the public tragedy. "It's hard to separate the event which was such a huge loss for the nation, the Kennedys, from the Oswald family's own tragedy," Aidem says. "And Marguerite Oswald did not endear herself to the American public with her pathological lack of sympathy for what Lee's actions had done to the country. In this play we see the events all through her prism. It becomes all about her. She cannot accept responsibility for having failed as a mother. She has a victim complex along with a very strong survival instinct."

Urbinati continues, "Though all the characters do blame themselves at one point in the play, Marguerite never says a good thing about the government nor does she make apologies for her son 'if he felt this country wasn't great.' In fairness to her, she was a single parent who worked hard, who tried to defend her son in his time of need, though she was her own worst enemy in the things she said."

Asked if the character of Marguerite has a moral compass, Aidem replies that "she thinks she does, but it is skewed. In the play she calls her heart her own church, and she points out the terrible hypocrisy of men of the cloth refusing to hold a burial service for Lee Harvey. She talks about her own 'sorrowing family.'"

And this is what Urbinati wants to present to audiences. "By centering the play on Marguerite, I hope even people who knew the events will come to experience them a little differently. I am going for the emotional impact rather than any message about the historical events. I hope the play gives audiences two hours of theatre that pulls you in, makes you laugh and cry rather than making a statement."

Allen believes the Good's production will do just that. "I think Mama's Boy is highly entertaining. We have an extraordinary cast with an exemplary performance in the leading role. People are going to be knocked out by seeing such powerful performances in this intimate space. I don't think theatre gets much better than this!"

Urbinati assents, adding," We all have our hopes, combined and separate, for the future of Mama's Boy, but I feel confident this will not be its last production."

And perhaps even more important is the impact all three envision the play's having on audiences. Allen thinks the spectators will "be entertained, a little shocked; they will grapple with an understanding of how the actions of one person can effect so many others and how those actions deeply affect his own family, and ultimately - perhaps to their own surprise - they will come to feel some sympathy for Marguerite Oswald."

By giving Marguerite Oswald a voice center stage, Urbinati, Aidem, and Allen believe that this controversial and complex woman's family drama will be viewed as more than a mere footnote to history.

Photos Courtesy Good Theater

Mama's Boy runs at the Good Theater, 76 Congress St., Portland, ME October 28- November 22, 2015 www.goodtheater.com 207-885-5883