“Mother Play: A Play in Five Evictions” is the newest work from Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Paula Vogel and is running now at Broadway’s Hayes Theater.
It’s also a personal work inspired by Vogel’s family’s story. Jessica Lange stars as Phyllis, a single mom struggling with alcoholism and her finances. She is delighted by her oldest son Carl, played by Jim Parsons, and seems confused and disappointed by her daughter Martha, played by Celia Keenan-Bolger.
The play follows this family from the mid-1960s, when the kids are still kids, through the next 40 years as they are evicted, move again, battle cockroaches and try to figure out how to please their mercurial mother.
“I just never dreamed that I would get to be in a new play by Paula Vogel,” said Parsons, who described his role as “a treasure chest of things to work on as an actor.”
Lange, Parsons and Keenan-Bolger have each been nominated for Tony awards for their performances in “Mother Play,” which is also up for Best New Play.
They spoke with Kousha Navidar on a recent episode of “All of It,” discussing their process, working with Paula Vogel and more.
Below is an edited version of their conversation.
Jim, what attracted you originally to the show?
Jim Parsons: The fact that it was Paula Vogel. I’ve grown up with Paula Vogel’s plays around me, in my consciousness, since I was an acting student.
Since I’ve been working in New York, I’ve met people who were in original productions of Paula’s plays. I just never dreamed that I would get to be in a new play by Paula Vogel.
Before I even read it, when I saw the email saying that I had an offer to do it, I knew I was going to say yes, no matter what it was, because I was like, “I’m not missing the opportunity.”
What drew you to Carl?
Parsons: I see lots of myself in Carl. The thing about the character is that it’s based on Paula’s brother, Carl, and Paula loves her brother so much, and he was such a major influence on her. I wouldn’t have known this until doing it, but because of all that, it really ends up being a treasure chest of things to work on as an actor: full of colors, full of backstory, fully evolved and a whole human.
When the author loves that person so much and is trying to put them on the page, there’s so many things that she offers for him to do and say and think and be.
In that way, I think it’s one of the real reasons — other than working with the two of them every night — that even, I don’t know what you’d call it, on our worst night, whatever that would be, it’s still so much fun. I just love it. I look forward to it every single time, even if I’m tired.
Celia, as Martha, you are sort of a Paula stand-in. What conversations did you have with her that helped you better understand Martha’s character?
Celia Keenan-Bolger: When you’re making a family play, you cannot help but bring in your own family. I think we all wanted to know a lot of where the play began and where it overlapped with Paula’s story and where she was taking some liberties.
When we were rehearsing, we had photos up on the wall of just the different places where the Vogels lived.
Paula is such an unbelievable collaborator. She would give us all the background and then she would say, “leave it if it’s not helpful. Just take this wherever you need to go.”
Parsons: She’s so generous with not only her family story but the work she’s doing as a playwright doing this new play. There’s no defensiveness on her part about keeping things a certain way. It’s all about collaborating and making sure that it shines through the vehicles of the particular people that are now inhabiting these characters. It’s quite amazing.
Jessica, for you, a lot of your previous work on stage, if I’m correct, has been with revivals of classics, right?
Jessica Lange: Yes.
How has it been for you working with a playwright who is right in front of you?
Lange: It’s very different. One of the great things about Paula is, yes, she wrote this about her family. It is a memory play. It is not naturalistic, like other memory plays we’ve done. Like “The Glass Menagerie” or “Long Day’s Journey into Night” or whatever.
I think with Paula, because she is very generous and understands the process, she was there to give us whatever information we asked but she never expected us to be those people. She just turned it over to us and we all used what we could and our own personal experiences.
She was wonderful in that way. She was in the room for the whole rehearsal period, also for the workshop, and was willing to change things. If we’d say, “this doesn’t feel right,” or, “can I do this instead?” or whatever, she was very generous with that.
I think it’s such an important element of setting that up, but then letting the players play.
Lange: Yes. You have to.
Especially, I think, for this kind of show where two of the main characters play as children as well as adults. I found that to be so moving from both you, Celia and Jim.
Lange: Well, also, I have to play 40 years younger.
True, fair enough.
Lange: Come on, give me a little credit here.
A child in adult clothing, right? Celia, let’s start with you. You’ve played a child as an adult on Broadway a few times. One of them was in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” for which you had a Tony-winning performance. What were some of the keys to playing a kid in this instance?
Keenan-Bolger: So much of our aging process inside of the hour and 45 minutes that we do the play was built in this container that Tina Landau, our director, introduced.
We did a two-week workshop before we started rehearsals for the actual production. She has written a book with Anne Bogart about viewpoints, which is a kinesthetic physical response of how actors can move through space in a theater.
She asked a lot of questions about how we move at different ages. Also, so much of what I think I’ve heard a lot of people say about the three of us is that it actually does feel like we are in the same family.
She talks a lot about what makes a family. When you see a family together, how do you know that they’re a family? What is the physical language that can be established that helps an audience understand like, “oh, this unit has existed long before I was able to drop in on them.”
Jessica there’s a moment in this play for you where it is all physical. There is no dialogue in one long scene in the middle of the play, just you on stage as Phyllis at home, making microwave dinner, pouring a drink, fiddling with the TV and the radio. It’s to show how lonely you are without your children there. When you’re doing that scene, what’s going through your head?
Lange: What’s interesting to me is the depth of the investigation into what it means to be alone. When I read the script and I saw it ends up being about 12 minutes in length, I thought, “that is a great challenge. Are you going to be able to hold an audience’s attention for 12 minutes, whether you’re the only one on stage and you’re doing fairly menial things, taking your shoes off, putting your robe on, listening to the radio?”
It’s been a wonderful exercise in how you command an emotion through just the physical movement. It’s not big movement. It’s sitting on a sofa and staring off into space for, as it says in the script, longer than we’re used to watching someone.
Is that what it said in the script?
Lange: Something very similar to that.
Yes, well it definitely did hold the attention from one person’s perspective.
Lange: That’s good to know. I keep waiting for somebody in the audience to yell, “get up!” But so far that hasn’t happened.
There is a lot of drama and sadness in the play. There’s also a lot of humor. Celia, without giving too much away from the play, I was also interested in your bio because it says you’re training to be an end-of-life doula. Before the play started, I was really struck by that. I was just wondering if you could talk about how that experience has informed your approach to this part.
Keenan-Bolger: A big tension in the play is that she never becomes a mother herself. This idea that the greatest caregivers in a society are mothers. I think something that this play does is say the role of caregiver can be given to anyone. This idea that, at the end of one’s life, we have either our chosen family or our family of origin with us. I feel in this play Martha does end up taking care of her mother.
I think about just what it is to be faced with that at the end of one’s life. When I was pregnant, there was so much information about how to bring a child into the world. And my mother died when I was just out of college. I was like, “gosh, there was nothing, there was no information to talk me through what it’s like for someone to leave this world.” I just felt, “what would it have been if there had been some support there for me as I was going through that?” I think Martha could probably use some of that support in our play.
Everyone.
Keenan-Bolger: Yes, many, many people.
“Mother Play: A Play in Five Evictions” is scheduled to run through June 16 at the Helen Hayes Theater.