The characters age perhaps more than 40 years in the play’s 105 minutes. Another actress as Phyllis might have done more to communicate the small ravages of time, but Lange concentrates instead on her ageless ferocity and charm. She is supported, sturdily, by Keenan-Bolger, who imbues Martha, a playwright like Vogel, with goodness, righteousness and a gift for plain speaking, and by Parsons, a born clown savvy enough to show the pain behind the buffoonery.
The director Tina Landau, a longtime collaborator, embraces that buffoonery, almost to a fault. During scene changes, the roaches don’t scurry out of sight. Instead they dance, to a jazzy version of “La Cucaracha.” There is more dancing, when Lange and Parsons burn, baby, burn in a duet set to “Disco Inferno.”
Does that sound too silly for a play about death and estrangement? Probably. But silliness has always been a signature of Vogel’s work and, at least for me, sometimes a source of frustration. Reading her early plays, I have thought, Can’t you be serious? But Vogel, who loves a dirty joke, knows that laughter is a way of taking things seriously. Sometimes the best way.
By comparison with “The Baltimore Waltz,” its obvious companion piece, “Mother Play” is a quieter show, softer and less shattering. The wounds that Vogel prods have largely scabbed over, and the concluding mood is one of compassion and release. When it comes to Phyllis, Martha knows what the playwright knows: that you can love someone without forgiving them, and that love is preferable to the alternatives.
Thirty or so years ago, Vogel told a reporter, “I like theater that makes me feel like it’s a healing.” That’s what “Mother Play” is, a balm that comes in cardboard boxes and packing tape. It honors the dead by making them alive again and nurtures the living by providing a place to put a daughter’s love and rage. Martha’s box is not Pandora’s. It’s just another way of organizing a life.
Mother Play
Through June 16 at the Helen Hayes Theater, Manhattan; 2st.com. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes.