Review: A Virtual MOTHERS AND SONS from MetroStage

MetroStage's online production of Terrence McNally's "Mothers and Sons" is introduced as a play reading, but it is much more than that.

Presented free on YouTube in a Zoom format through this weekend, each actor inhabits their own box as fully as their own character.

In a story about a bitter mother of a son who died of AIDS, reuniting with his former partner 10 years later, the frames provide a good metaphor - each are literally stuck in their own box as they try to bridge some sort of understanding.

"Mothers and Sons" is the 2013 sequel to McNally's 1990 "Andre's Mother" that first introduced the matriarch who wasn't aware her son was gay, or reasons behind his death. At the time, the world was roiling with AIDS deaths.

The sequel is just as important, for pointing out that a generation later, that dreadful plague era is starting to be forgotten, even as survivors have to remind others that not so long ago, it was a very different time, when gay marriage was unlawful.

Things aren't all that different for Katharine Gerard, the widowed mother, who stops unannounced at the Central Park West apartment of Cal Porter, Andre's former lover. "Very little amuses me," she says as she struggles to adjust to accepted modern terms and concepts, and drops any feigned cordiality by insinuating that Cal either gave Andre AIDS, turned him gay, or both.

Director Stefan Sittig works with a splendid cast. Ilona Dulaski, who provides a perfectly sour and prickly Mrs. Gerard, had worked with MetroStage before on another McNally work, portraying Maria Callas in "Master Class" back in 2017.

Tom Story is great in his role, trying to be as accommodating as possible, but pushing back when he has to and sharing in the grief of his last love - even as he has a happy household now with a younger husband and son. It's an emotional gut check for him to see this face from the past and we see his every reaction to it. Story is familiar to both this theater company and a certain verisimilitude - he played 40 different characters in the one-man "Fully Committed" there in 2016.

Dulaski keeps her fur on for half the show, as she does for her visit; Story's Zoom background has the kind of abstract art that seems fitting for a fancy apartment. It is the script by McNally that helps fill out the picture, as Cal points out the landmarks across the park from the windows, or fully describes a scene that transports the audience.

The addition of the new husband Will (played by Ewan Chung) and especially their young son Bud adds a further dimension. The latter is played with charm and disarming honesty by Jesse Coleman, an 8-year-old third grader from Falls Church, the son of a past MetroStage actor, Marni Penning.

It's very close to a play in that their boxes disappear when they leave the room. After his bath, Bud returns in wet hair and with pajamas. Wendy Roome did a good job as video editor; there seemed to be only a couple of detectible cuts. The only minor thing I'd say is that when Katharine and Cal are looking through a box of Andre's old artifacts that it would be better if we saw an occasional edge of the papers to complete the illusion.

The pandemic has kept audiences from gathering at theaters for 10 months, but it has afforded MetroStage the opportunity to get Chung, a former Virginian who lives and works in Los Angeles, to take part in the production, or to have young Jesse do his job without having to stay up late every night for a curtain call. Likewise, a wider audience can take in the exceptional play from anywhere with an internet connection.

Talk of the AIDS crisis in the play also has some resonance in the Covid era, and indeed it was from complications of the coronavirus that took McNally at the age of 81 last March.

While the streaming of "Mothers and Sons" is free to viewers, the theater is taking donations towards its $1 million capital campaign as they build a new theater they hope to open when restrictions rise.

Running time: About 90 minutes, no intermission.

Photo: Clockwise from top left, Ilona Dulaski, Tom Story, Ewan Chung and Jesse Coleman. Provided by MetroStage.

'Mothers and Sons' streams free online until Sunday, Jan. 17 at 7:30 p.m. Donations are encouraged for MetroStage's Capital campaign online or by sending a check to MetroStage, P.O. Box 1152, Alexandria VA 22313.

Here is a feature I wrote on McNally from last year.