The Mothers on Broadway Are Finally More Than Monsters

The dramatic canon has always adored a nice, juicy perversion of motherhood — think the filicidal Medea; the incestuous Jocasta; even the ruthless Lady Macbeth, with her enduringly jarring mention of having “given suck.”

It makes ample space, too, for mothers who must be escaped by their sons, like the anxious chatterbox Amanda Wingfield in Tennessee Williams’s autobiographical “The Glass Menagerie” and the morphine-addicted Mary Tyrone in Eugene O’Neill’s similarly inspired-by-life “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.”

And it does love, and love to chastise, a woman like Rose, the hellbent stage mother at the center of “Gypsy.” Since she first arrived on Broadway in 1959, she has been called a termagant, a gargoyle, a monster — and that’s just by reviewers from The New York Times. But as Audra McDonald is proving to devastating effect in George C. Wolfe’s current revival, Rose is deeply human. Always has been.

This time around, she is also part of a subtle social shift: an unusual abundance of forceful, fully drawn mothers seen lately on New York’s larger stages. The current Broadway shows “Cult of Love” and “Eureka Day,” and recent ones including “The Hills of California” and “Suffs,” are interested in a lot more than how those characters traumatize their children, or how far they deviate from the maternal ideal. They might cast long shadows over their girls in particular, yet they are human beings as multidimensional as any man.

Rose, who has been emotionally complex all along, warps her daughters’ 1920s childhoods with the tyrannical ambitions she has for them. But her unyielding exterior was forged for protection against a world that shut her out.

“Well, someone tell me, when is it my turn?” she sings when at last she breaks down. “Don’t I get a dream for myself?”

It doesn’t seem too much to ask.

Colliding With Reality

In Leslye Headland’s Broadway play, “Cult of Love,” set at the Dahl family’s Connecticut farmhouse at Christmastime, one of the grown sons (played by Zachary Quinto) asks a guest (Barbie Ferreira): “What’s the first thing you remember craving? When you were young?”

She answers: “My mother. I never wanted to leave her side.”

You get the impression that the Dahl siblings felt the same, when they were little, about their determinedly myopic mother, Ginny (Mare Winningham), before their snug family unit — strictly religious, like the playwright’s family of origin — suffered repeated impact with reality. Likewise the four Webb girls in Jez Butterworth’s “The Hills of California,” being drilled in music night and day by their single parent, Veronica, who in 1950s Britain is raising them to be a singing group.

Even more than fame, what Veronica (Laura Donnelly) seems to wish for them is to escape the soul-suffocating drudgery that is the lot of ordinary women in their seaside town. When her teenage eldest is late to rehearsal, Veronica issues a dire warning: “You want to spend your nights at Funfair flirting with boys and end up grinding a mangle on Ribble Road with five kids, just keep it up, love.”

It is not as graphic a caution as Marielle Heller gives with her new film, “Nightbitch,” in which Amy Adams plays a woman who loses herself, her creativity and her joy so thoroughly to the demands of motherhood that she morphs into an animal. But Veronica envisions her girls living adventurous lives, able to fend for themselves.

Decades later, one of them says: “All she wanted was for us to be safe.” A generous verdict, and probably accurate. Veronica’s love, no matter how flawed, is never in question.

Denying Failure

The task of all these mothers, as of all parents, is to nurture and protect their children. How these characters understand that assignment, and how they carry it out, is the stuff of drama and also of life. The way we perceive them shapes and is shaped by the ways we perceive our own mothers, and the role of mothers in society.

Any progress theater has made on that score — and this recent profusion suggests some, anyway — is down partly to gender equity: how many more women are writing and directing for prominent stages, and how many more men are taking women seriously. It also stems from what we as an audience are willing by now to recognize and understand. The nature of theater means that we are always imagining some piece of a character’s whole, and in that imagining, completing the performance.

Rose, in “Gypsy” — which Arthur Laurents, Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim based on the memoirs of the burlesque stripper Gypsy Rose Lee, the real Rose’s daughter — is not a smashing success as a mother. Nor is Veronica, who on her deathbed is tortured by her tragic failure, or Ginny, who would deny hers categorically.

Ginny’s family name is a homophone for doll, and maybe she has treated her grown-up babies too much like posable playthings whose stories she can make up, no matter how loudly they declare their own identities. Yet she is the one they still cry for in an emergency.

“I don’t know how you can be angry at me,” she tells her restive brood, who accuse her of controlling and neglecting them, though they let their genial father (David Rasche) totally off the hook. She adds: “I’ve done nothing but love you. And that is all I was ever supposed to do.”

Suzanne, the pristinely privileged earth mother played by Jessica Hecht in the Broadway production of Jonathan Spector’s comedy “Eureka Day,” cloaks herself in the kind of soft, gentle mommydom that confers an aura of irreproachability. She leverages that astutely in her position of power at the private school that faces a crisis in the play.

A mother of six, she is steelier than she means to appear, with a well-concealed grief at her core that makes her tenacious — a wound that leads her to cast a heedless shadow over all the school’s students.

She is a kind of mirror image to the ferociously vigilant title character of Amy Herzog’s “Mary Jane,” played on Broadway last spring by Rachel McAdams: a single mother desperate to keep her medically fragile little boy alive. Her entire world is that child, yet she is not a martyr or a hero; she is a person under siege, worthy of our curiosity.

The compassion of the gaze through which we view both of those mothers places them in a Venn diagram of grace with Paula Vogel’s autobiographically rooted “Mother Play,” also on Broadway last spring, starring Jessica Lange in the title role of Phyllis.

An alcohol-addled divorcée turning her offspring against her, she is not made for motherhood. Funny, caustic, foiled, cruel, the character could so easily have been a monument to a daughter’s bitterness, but the play opts for understanding and absolution.

If Katori Hall’s recent Off Broadway play “The Blood Quilt” chooses exorcism instead, there is still the distinct sense that the unseen mother, whose four daughters have gathered in her home to mourn her death, was more than the sum of their disparate, jostling memories. And there is something horribly poignant in Gio (Adrienne C. Moore), the daughter most psychically injured by their mother, having the greatest trouble letting her go.

‘She Raised a Good One’

Shaina Taub’s Tony Award-winning “Suffs” might seem the outlier here, because it does not have a mother at its center. It is, however, the one recent show that explicitly, repeatedly confronts the longtime cultural habit of romanticizing motherhood while patronizing mothers.

A musical about the suffragists who fought for women’s right to vote in the early 20th century, it opens with a song of strategic subservience, “Let Mother Vote,” and in Act II reiterates the request more personally.

The heart-rending “A Letter From Harry’s Mother” was sung by Emily Skinner as a widow pleading with her son, a Tennessee state legislator, to vote to ratify the 19th Amendment, for her and for his toddler daughter. Assembling her case, she tells him things she never has before — about how painful it is to be a person without full legal personhood.

“Let your mama know she raised a good one,” she entreats him.

The suffragists certainly are not all mothers, but they are all foremothers, getting pushback for devoting their energies to a political cause when they could be making dinner, say, or finding a husband, or doing needlepoint. Transgressing social norms in order to change them, the show’s bevy of relentless activists fight for their daughters’ daughters’ daughters’ right to vote, and for their own.

Plenty of adjectives exist for bossy, overbearing people. When those people are mothers, “domineering” is reserved almost exclusively for them. But being forceful — which implies conflict, that cherished theatrical ingredient — is not the same as being harmful.

As with the women of “Suffs,” sometimes the mothers who cast a long, strong shadow down the generations are trying, pretty valiantly and with highly imperfect results, to reshape the world. There’s drama in that, too.