Terrence McNally loves opera. It figures in plays like THE
LISBON TRAVIATA and one, MASTER CLASS, even places prima donna assoluta Maria
Callas center stage. McNally often appears on the Metropolitan Opera’s Saturday
radio broadcasts as a panelist for their delightful “Opera Quiz.” I reference
all this because MOTHERS AND SONS (@ SpeakEasy Stage through June 6th)
seems to me to be his most operatic script.
A mother has traveled all the way from Texas
to New York City
for “revenge,” she tells us, not once but twice. Her son, she maintains, was
not gay before he came to New York
and she wants to know who infected him with AIDS and killed him twenty years
ago. Not only does she embrace denial with a vengeance, she foolishly
entertains the notion that patient zero might be still alive.
The opera canon is certainly full of characters bent on
payback but one jumped across the footlights to me the moment this mother
confesses her “real” motivation. The gypsy Acuzena sings not one, but two
“revenge” arias in Verdi’s IL TROVATORE because of a dead son. And what ruin
she wreaks!
Nancy
E. Carroll plays the steely mother from hell who asks outright of her son’s
former partner, “Why haven’t you been punished?” Michael Kaye gives an
exquisitely wrought performance as the overly patient and impossibly kind man who
grieved and found a second chance at love—and
who inexplicably doesn’t pitch the woman out on her ear. Carroll’s character
has ice in her veins and comic timing in her bones, so that a delayed barb
makes us laugh as we’re horrified by her conduct.
McNally crafts a nifty balance between the two and director
Paul Daigneault gets top notch performances all around. (There are two more
characters, Kaye’s hip, younger husband, portrayed with an edge by Nile Hawver
and an adorable son, played with a lot of heart by Liam Lurker). Kaye’s
character has a raft of touching speeches about what was lost to the world when
its best and brightest were taken in their prime—and Kaye eloquently conveys a lifelong sorrow hiding just below
the surface. It’s a lovely turn.
I was reminded of the inappropriate mother in Edward Albee’s
THREE TALL WOMEN when Carroll’s character tells Kaye about a liaison she
confessed to her son… not to mention her line, “I lost a son: Can I order
another?” which had THE MIKADO intruding into my thoughts. All this larger (and
much more peculiar) than life behavior kept me interested in how this woman
would exact her pound of flesh.
Then McNally makes an about face, abandons the operatic and magically
reforms her without any ghosts of Christmas past! He spends a lot of time and
effort showing us that this woman is incapable of love (even as she claims her
son was the incapable one). I just couldn’t buy the instant milk and cookie
reformation.
