Review: MOTHER PLAY: A Play in Five Evictions at Shakespeare & Company

MOTHER PLAY by Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Paula Vogel, and directed by Ariel Block follows hardheaded matriarch Phyllis (Tamara Hickey) and her children, Martha (Zoya Martin) and Carl (Eddie Shields), across four decades and five apartments, enduring cockroach infestations, painful conflicts, and the constant push-and-pull of love and expectation. Phyllis wants her children to follow a prescribed path, but each is determined to forge their own way.

The play had its Broadway Premiere in 2024, earning four Tony nominations, two Drama Desk Awards, and an Outer Critics Circle Award.

“Paula Vogel is one of the best-known, most performed, and most influential of contemporary American Playwrights,” Director Bock said. “Her work stands in the great American tradition of O’Neill, Williams, and Odets, transforming family drama into a universal exploration of what it means to be alive. MOTHER PLAY is a memory play inspired by Vogel’s own family—hilarious and heartbreaking, painful and funny—written with daring theatricality and compassion.”  I lean toward total agreement.

The creative team for this production includes Set Designer Omid Akbari, Light Designer Madeleine Herbert, Costume Designer Arthur Wilson, Sound Designer Bryn Scharenberg, with movement by Susan Dibble, projections designed by Brendan Doyle, cockroach art by Jim Youngerman, Stage Manager is Alex Magallanes, Assistant Stage Manager is Jayden Dudley.

Presented in one hour and thirty-five minutes (without intermission) the piece covers multiple decades in this non-nuclear family’s life and several of the major moments.  Perhaps too many given the relatively short run-time.  The significant life moments sometimes seem to be coming rapid fire.  I believe some could have been explored more fully, rather than spend quite so much time on transitions and events that seemed to receive more time and attention than required.  Having personally lived an uncannily similar existence over essentially the same time frame, I was able to fill in the missing bits of information.  Accordingly, I found MOTHER PLAY devastatingly powerful.  The standing ovation and calls of bravo made it clear that others in the opening performance audience felt so as well, even perhaps without the full forced direct gut punch.

While everyone associated with this production does fine and splendid work, I found the performances delivered by Tamara Hickey as Phyllis Herman (Mother), and Eddie Shields as her son, Carl, particularly noteworthy.  Both, by my calculations, being born near the end of the 1980s / early 1990s capture and present the dynamics between a self-absorbed divorced mother of two and her emerging “alternative” son so powerfully and realistically that this LGBTQIA+ child of the sixties sobbed and was emotionally undone.  Of course, individual results may vary.

It should be noted that Shakespeare & Company has issued a content warning as follows - “MOTHER PLAY: a play in five evictions contains mature themes and is not appropriate for patrons under the age of 14.”