Friday March 29, 2024
MOTHERS AND SONS
Review

MOTHERS AND SONS

September 2 2015

MOTHERS AND SONS, Ensemble Theatre, 21 August-27 September 2015. Photography by Clare Hawley: above: Tim Draxl, Thomas Fisher and Jason Langley; right: Anne Tenney.

Terrence McNally’s 2013 play continues his exploration and depiction of all the facets of 20th – and now 21st  century gay life with, this time, husband and husband Cal (Jason Langley) and Will (Tim Draxl) in their Upper West Side apartment. Their comfortable life is disrupted one afternoon by the unannounced and unwelcome arrival of Katharine (Anne Tenney) the bitterly unhappy, lonely and homophobic mother of Cal’s first love Andre, dead from AIDS nearly two decades before.

In a conventional narrative, Katharine would be the interloper, the harbinger of change. And at first she is, but McNally is too experienced a hand to be that obvious. In this play the absence of the dead Andre looms while the presence of Cal and Will’s all-seeing and guileless six-year-old son is the inadvertent catalyst of the drama. 

Cal is 15 years older than Will and Will is only too aware that he was preceded by a classically tragic figure: the promising actor destined for stardom whose life was tragically cut short. Mostly they’ve got over this potential for tension – until Katherine sticks her oar in. She has not turned up to reminisce about old times, rather, she seems to want to rip open old wounds and see blood and pain to match her own.

Katharine is a cold fish, apparently, and would appear to be as disgruntled with her recent widowhood as she was with her late husband insisting they live in Dallas. And like so many women of her kind, she is as concerned with appearances (keeping up) as she is with the bigger things in life. It’s pretty clear why Andre left home all those years ago, never to return. In contrast, Cal and Will are raising their son with open intelligent kindness, even managing to rise above Katharine’s inquiry as to which of them is the boy’s “real” father.

MOTHERS AND SONS

Mothers and Sons  is a timely and bold play to program at Kirribilli. At the Saturday matinee, the audience was attentive, laughed in the right places and generally engaged in the slice of 21st century family life that unfolds in real time. 

Inhabiting designer Rodney Fisher’s wood-panelled, comfortably masculine New York apartment with casual aplomb, Jason Langley as the seen-it-all-and-I’m-still-here Cal is beautifully judged and brimming with conviction. Cal is a gay man of the bleak end of 20th century who now finds himself living the unanticipated joy of love and family. That he has found love again – and a son as the cherry on top – is beyond Katharine’s bitter wold view. But for Tim Draxl’s Will, for whom the AIDS scourge is history and who has grown up with the belief that he is entitled to what he has with Cal, there is a difference in the way he is in his  world that is profound. It is a subtle and lovely performance.

The play is absorbing in the hands of these fine actors but there should be more tension and the crackle and snarl of clashing cultures and revenge. The somewhat somnolent pace as directed by Sandra Bates militates against that as does some peculiar choices. (For instance, Anne Tenney delivers a major speech with her back to the audience which undercuts it horribly and makes her job more than difficult.) Nevertheless, it’s an exceptional and sometimes profound entertainment that provokes laughter and tears. It also has a lot to offer to 1950s Sydney. Recommended.

 

 

Subscribe

Get all the content of the week delivered straight to your inbox!

Register to Comment
Reset your Password
Registration Login
Registration