Conversations with Mother, a new off-Broadway play by Matthew Lombardo at Theatre 555 on 42nd Street, is an entertaining, often touching two-hander about a combative relationship between a troubled gay man and his aggressively obnoxious but deeply devoted mother that spans five decades. It is both sweet and tender, noisy and unsettling, and since Harvey Fierstein got there first, scarcely original. Color it likable but uneven. The operative word is uneven.
No matter how much you root for mother and son, the bitchy punchlines are inescapably reminiscent of the lifelong verbal conflict in the war against conformity fought by Mr. Fierstein and Anne Bancroft in his memorable film Torch Song Trilogy. This time, the central characters are not wisecracking New York Jews but Italian Catholics from Connecticut whose front-line strategy seems to be something they learned from the movies. The son is Bobby Collavechio, played by Matt Doyle, the handsome, award-winning musical star of the most recent Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Company, who is loaded with buckets of charisma and talent, and his annoying, long-suffering mother Maria is essayed by the scene-stealing Caroline Aaron, who enchanted TV viewers for five seasons in the series “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.” As co-stars, they work together like bookends with unmistakable, unwavering charm, although the fact must be faced that she has the best-written part with the most balanced character evolvement. Living through almost 60 years in 90 minutes without intermission, they cover a lot of ground and do it remarkably well, but it is the mother who gets the best lines and chews them like steak tartare.
Well aware of her son’s homosexuality since youth, Maria accepts it grudgingly, without much more than a jaundiced eye and a well-placed retort—a limited view I found questionable. This is too bad, because the author, Matthew Lombardo, is a good writer. I loved his play High, a short-lived Broadway vehicle for Kathleen Turner as a modern nun in jeans who compromised her vows in unconventional ways of devoting herself to saving a tortured teenager from drug addiction, and his intelligent dissection of flamboyant Tallulah Bankhead, played by Valerie Harper, in Looped. Neither of those plays were the critical and commercial hits they deserved to be, and I fear the surface humor that overwhelms the hidden, heartfelt substance in Conversations with Mother might meet the same fate. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth seeing. When Bobby runs away to New York to become a writer and gets a job in a gay bar called the Meat Hook, Maria thinks it’s a delicatessen. “That guy who was involved in M and M’s?” she asks. “That was S and M, Mom.”
The passage of time covers thorny chapters in the lives of these two characters that delve gingerly into Bobby’s abusive love affair with a disastrous thug who beats him up, drug addiction and rehab at the Betty Ford Center, comprising a childhood monologue, 11 scenes and an unnecessary epilogue that reduces the play to awkward sentimentality when Bobby, at age 65 but still a knockout with graying hair, is visited by his mother, who returns from the dead to spoil his found-at-last happiness and peace of mind by announcing the date of his own forthcoming demise. But even here, she shows a surprising affection beneath her tough façade. It all works to keep the audience happy, too, in moments that avoid darkness and concentrate on lightening the mood. “If you try to figure out who you don’t want to be,” says Mom in a rare moment of introspective advice, “you just might fall into who you really are.” Before the audience has time to wipe away a tear, Bobby, without missing a beat, counters with, “That’s pretty deep for a woman who still has shag carpeting.”
I laughed in spite of myself, always wishing for more depths of feeling that never materialized. Sometimes, the writing comes close. The play has its ups and downs, but Lombardo is nothing if not honest about his Mom, himself and even his own writing. (The play is openly semi-autobiographical). Critically talking about the points she wants Bobby to make in the eulogy she has written for him to say at her funeral, Maria says, “I was a good mother to you.” “Naah,” says her son, “you were the best.” “See,” she snaps, “it’s sayings like that that make the critics not like you.” Maria has five other children who are never seen, creating gaps in the narrative that leave the viewer short-changed. There’s no serious inner quest for three-dimensional character revelation. Still, the two veteran actors keep saving the day with perfect timing enhanced by the canny direction of Noah Himmelstein. Caroline Aaron displays a fascinating ability to balance the cliches of domineering motherhood as a career choice with the hidden inner confusion of a matriarch who loves too much and shows it too little. And Matt Doyle makes you care about the kind of man who thinks he knows everything there is to know about his mother and probably does know more than he should—but never knows enough.
I liked Conversations with Mother in spite of its flaws, but like I said earlier, the operative word is uneven.
Conversations with Mother | 1hr 15 mins. No intermission. | 555 Theatre | 555 West 42st Street | (646) 410-2277 | Buy Tickets Here
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