Zinn, David

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    Review: Jessica Lange Stars in Paula Vogel’s ‘Mother Play’

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    Jessica Lange stars as a ferocious matriarch alongside Celia Keenan-Bolger and Jim Parsons in Vogel’s latest family drama.In the first scene of “Mother Play: A Play in Five Evictions,” Paula Vogel’s antic, mournful new drama, Martha, a character modeled on the playwright, offers a version of Ecclesiastes.“There is a season for packing,” Martha (Celia Keenan-Bolger) says as she slits open a cardboard box. “And a season for unpacking.”Vogel, 72, has spent the majority of her career unpacking. Her work is not strictly autobiographical, but as in the plays of Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee or Adrienne Kennedy, she has a canny way of rearranging the emotional furniture of her lived experience into tragicomedy.Here, at Broadway’s Helen Hayes Theater, that furniture includes a mother, Phyllis (Jessica Lange), and a brother, Carl (Jim Parsons), named for Vogel’s own family. The story begins in 1964 with the family moving into a basement apartment in a Washington, D.C., suburb; Carl is 14, Martha 12. Phyllis is in her mid 30s, barely treading water after a foundered marriage. At times, when she can pry her hands from a gin bottle, she clings to her children as if they are life rafts. Otherwise, she regards them as jetsam. Phyllis, we learn, never wanted to be a mother.On finding herself pregnant: “I thought: Other women aren’t mother material, but they get through it. Just hang on, Phyllis, hang on. But it is never over. It’s a life sentence.” How’s that for a bedtime story?As a single working mother, Phyllis can afford only custodial apartments, and those early evictions come when she complains too loudly about the roaches and maggots. The vermin are brought to life, extravagantly, in Shawn Duan’s projections. And David Zinn’s flexible set nimbly conveys each new abode. The later, more fraught expulsions come when Phyllis rejects first Carl, who comes out as gay in college, and then later Martha, who is also queer.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Once Upon a Mattress’ Review: Sutton Foster as a Perfectly Goofy Princess

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      The Encores! series returns with a concert staging of the 1959 musical, which also stars the very funny Harriet Harris and Michael Urie.Some casting choices are blindingly obvious. That does not make them lazy; it makes them right.Such is the case with Sutton Foster as the eccentric Princess Winnifred in the Encores! revival of “Once Upon a Mattress,” which opened Wednesday at City Center. The central role in this broadly goofy musical was exuberantly, indelibly originated by Carol Burnett in 1959.While Foster has displayed range over the course of her musical-theater career — she’s stepping into Mrs. Lovett’s kitchen in “Sweeney Todd” on Feb. 9, five days after completing this show’s two-week run — many of Foster’s best roles, like Janet Van De Graaff in “The Drowsy Chaperone” and Reno Sweeney in “Anything Goes,” are imprinted with an ebullient, joyful relish in the very act of performance. And Winnifred, described by another character as “a strangely energetic swamp girl,” is an ideal outlet for that sensibility.“Once Upon a Mattress” is nobody’s idea of a great musical, but it is many people’s idea of a fun one. Based on the fairy tale “The Princess and the Pea,” this vaudevillian lark — which The New York Times described, possibly not in a good way, as “a child’s introduction to Broadway” in a review of a 1964 CBS telecast — is celebrated for helping to kick-start Burnett’s career and for being the composer Mary Rodgers’s sole Broadway hit.That last clearly represents a loss: Rodgers, paired with the lyricist Marshall Barer, demonstrates startling ease with musical-theater idioms and the late-1950s vernacular. (Winnifred’s “The Swamps of Home” works as both an earnest ballad and a sly spoof of the goopy nostalgic yearnings of some numbers by Richard Rodgers, Mary’s father, and Oscar Hammerstein II.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More