Mother Play.

We saw Mother Play last night. I just joined a Facebook group called Gay New York 1970s and 80s, people sharing memories and photos of places and people. It’s very joyful and moving, wistful, fun. That span of time, the 70s explosion of culture and community in the wake of Stonewall, and then in the 80s that culture and community responding to the plague and the stark realization that we had to save ourselves because they had every intention of letting us die.

I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say the play includes a gay character in the 1970s and 80s who dies of AIDS. It made me think how we (American people, culture, government) didn’t reckon with that carnage but just moved on to marriage and love is love, and now AIDS and its terrifying signs (Kaposi’s lesions, pneumonia, wasting) are just tropes, emotional triggers, in a story about something else.

But, Mother Play: Jessica Lange’s screen performances have always been riveting, but seeing her on stage is something else, no matter the material, she casts a sustained spell. There are several sequences I could point to, but one in particular, a scene several minutes long in which her character is alone on stage, just being alone, I don’t think I took a breath until it was over. Of course it’s a high level of skill and experience—and this role, vulnerable, tense, extremely exposed, always at least half drunk, couldn’t sit more squarely in her wheelhouse—but there’s something ineffable, too … anyway go see it to see her.