Mothers Behaving Badly

Mothers 

If you’re one of those people who only likes books, or movies, or plays, with “likable” characters, you might want to give a wide berth to Mothers, currently oozing its venom at The Gift Theatre.  Seldom will you find a work of theatre with more rebarbative characters than this exhaustingly combative play by Anna Ouyang Moench.  

Mothers, directed by Halena Kays, at first appears to be a rather broad and mean-spirited satire about a group of snide, brittle, passive-aggressive and ceaselessly competitive mothers (and one self-consciously stay-at-home father) at a child-care center who devote most of their energies to complaining about how difficult their lives are, bragging about how successful they and their babies are (yes, in the world of this play, even babies can be successes or failures) and making their fellow mothers feel miserable about their lives and their bodies.  Along the way, their conversations touch upon pretty much every au courant topic you’d expect from a bunch of anxiety-ridden moms: Breast pumps, infant formula, weaning, vaccines, GMOs, security lines at airports, social media, sleep training, adoption, “news diets” and selfies.  Their entire lives, in fact, appear to be “selfies” — they speak about, and care about, only themselves.  At some point in the first act, audience members would be forgiven if they found themselves wishing for a bomb to be dropped on the whole lot.

Until one actually does drop.  Or, rather, many — bombs and other munitions, launched by some sort of invading army that causes the self-absorbed Mommies and their babies to become trapped in the day-care center without food or water, whereupon they all come together and rediscover their common humanity.

Actually, I’m only joking about that last part.  They actually become worse.  Much worse.

The invading army is never identified by Moench, although there is a brief reference to “insurrection” in the first act.  We never learn much about them, except that — as the lone father reports, having abandoned the mothers to join the marauders — they are in search of women and older children to rape.  Trapped in the Pepto Bismol pink child care center (the production’s only set, complete with a ball pit and teddy bears that stand in for the babies and toddlers) the mothers battle over water and breast milk one of the moms has pumped in order to stay alive while hiding from the invading hordes.  It is never explained why the invaders don’t just overrun the day-care center, which they might plausibly consider to be a prime target “audience” for their depredations.

The mysterious provenance of the invaders is both a strength and a weakness of the play.  There are a few subtle hints of an American civil war, and there is also a fleeting suggestion that the attackers may be an ISIS or Hamas-like group.  This ambiguity, and the nameless dread it invokes, gives the production a doomy ambiance, but at the same time it suggests that the playwright might be awkwardly evading some contentious issues.  

There’s also seems to be a vague sort of racial element to the play — two of the mothers are Black, and two are Asian, and there are frequent references to “beige” people (the term is used in a mostly neutral and non-ironic way, and seems to be a reference to White people.)  But not much develops out of these racial references, and the audience is left wondering what point, if any, Moench was attempting to make. 

The play’s apocalyptic mise en scene is helped along immeasurably by a fantastically effective sound design, with music, by Jeffrey Levin.  The lighting design, also impressive, is by Joseph Croegaert.  The performers — Krystel McNeil, Stephanie Shum, Caren Blackmore, Lynnette Li and Alex Ireys — are all fine, though none is a particular stand-out.  Their dialogue is often hard to hear — deliberately so to some extent, I assume, in the very noisy scenes when fighter jets and helicopters are roaring overhead, but probably not so deliberately in some very quiet and introspective scenes, where one wishes that the director had instructed the actors that characters can be portrayed as speaking very quietly without rendering their words as actually inaudible. 

The play itself seems confused from time to time, and its overriding point seems to be the too-obvious one that awful people under pressure become even more horrible.  Maybe there’s also a point in there, somewhere, that bickering moms, as bad as they get, can’t compare to the male of the species and their sadistic behavior in battle.  Still, this Lord of the Flies for the 21st Century does make an intermittently powerful impact, there is some wicked satire in the first act, and there are a few moments of anguish and depravity in the second act that won’t be easily forgotten.  

Recommended

Reviewed by Michael Antman

Presented through March 3 by Gift Theatre at Filament Theatre, 4041 N. Milwaukee Ave.

Tickets are available at thegifttheatre.org.

Additional information about this and other area shows may be found at www.theatreinchicago.com.