MOTHERS OF US ALL

Paula Vogel's "Mother Play," Shaina Taub's "Suffs," and Amy Herzog's "Mary Jane."

- HELEN SHAW

Classic American drama is haunted by monstrous mothers. Vain, vampiric mamas prowl through plays from Tennessee Williams's "The Glass Menagerie" to Eugene O'Neill's "Long Day's Journey Into Night," from Edward Albee's "Three Tall Women" to Sam Shepard's "Buried Child." For those guys, mothers are either harpies or sirens-villains or traps. Yet, suddenly, this season we're surrounded by richly human mothers, each with a compassionately observed interiority. (It's maybe not a coincidence that 2024 has been a bumper year for women's writing on Broadway.) In fact, Paula Vogel's "Mother Play," Shaina Taub's musical "Suffs," and Amy Herzog's "Mary Jane" all happen to contain a long moment during which we are invited to simply sit and study a woman's face. In a world where we don't fear mothers as Medusas, perhaps we'll choose to look at them forever.

In the autofictional "Mother Play," at Second Stage's Hayes Theatre, Celia Keenan-Bolger stars as Martha, a lightly disguised version of Vogel, and Jim Parsons portrays a version of the playwright's brother Carl, who died of complications from AIDS in 1988. The play, which begins by flashing back to the early sixties, follows Martha and Carl for four decades as they deal with their hard-drinking, self-regarding single mom, Phyllis, played with a wonderful, lurching grace by Jessica Lange. Vogel's work is subtitled "A Play in Five Evictions," referring both to Phyllis's struggle to keep her family housed in tenement apartments-the projection designer Shawn Duan puts images of scuttling cockroaches on fridges and trash cans and to her vicious expulsion of sweet, bookish Carl after he tells her that he's been sleeping with men.