Mother Play: A Play in Five Evictions Reviews

Washington Post- Highly Recommended

"...DMV native Paula Vogel has previously taken inspiration from her brother and her mother for "The Baltimore Waltz" and the Pulitzer-winning "How I Learned to Drive," respectively. "The Mother Play: A Play in Five Evictions," which director Margot Bordelon has brought to Studio Theatre following its Jessica Lange-starring Broadway debut last year, is Vogel's most openly autobiographical drama. It traces 40-odd years in her relationship with hard-drinking single mom Phyllis and sensitive brother Carl from 1964 through the 2000s."

DC Theater Arts- Recommended

"...Toward the end of Paula Vogel's The Mother Play: A Play in Five Evictions, Phyllis Herman blurts out to her daughter Martha, "I never wanted to be a mother ... it's a life sentence." Her declaration is hardly a spoiler. Phyllis's dubious parenting skills have been on display from the first moments of this emotional drama, which spans nearly 40 years of the Herman family's life, beginning in the mid-1960s."

MetroWeekly- Highly Recommended

"...Paula Vogel's eloquent The Mother Play: A Play in Five Evictions, now at Studio Theatre, evokes memories of that well-adjusted mom with its incisive depiction of a sorely maladjusted mother of two queer siblings, who have to spend their lives adjusting to their mama's sundry moods and episodes."

Talkin Broadway- Highly Recommended

"...Director Margot Bordelon demonstrates a strong but not overbearing affinity for Vogel's semi-autobiographical work, which follows the playwright, here named Martha (Zoe Mann), and her family from their teens into adulthood. Martha and her brother Carl (Stanley Bahorek) both have their own dreams, but no one else in the family can really stand out when their mother Phyllis (Kate Eastwood Norris) is around. (Her former husband, also their neglectful father, hovers in the background as an unseen presence.)"

MD Theatre Guide- Highly Recommended

"...The show, subtitled "A Play in Five Evictions," follows this dysfunctional family of three through a series of DC area address changes-from basement apartment all the way to "Leisure World." Roach infestations, slumlords, and the affordability factor all play a role in their succession of moves. These moves prompt transformative mother/child moments, good and bad-mostly bad. Though, nostalgically looking back on it all, a begrudgingly "older and wiser" Martha, in a fourth-wall-eviscerating moment, urges the audience to remember the better parts of Phyllis's distinctive parenting style, despite the booze and the "didn't-know-any-better" fallbacks."

The Georgetown Dish- Highly Recommended

"...The Mother Play is a serious comedy about family, responsibility to others, and the difficulty in loving a hostile parent. It is about what it was like to come out at the beginning of AIDS. It is about life and death; all told in a charming, and often funny way. Author Paula Vogel is a wonderful writer, clearly devoted to the memory of her brother Carl, who died of AIDS. In this play, her brother Carl is a major character. The author is represented by the character Martha. And whether or not Phyllis is a representation of their mother or not, she represents so many mothers."

BroadwayWorld- Highly Recommended

"...The autobiographical world of playwright Paula Vogel comes alive in the illuminating and fragilely evocative "tone poem" of a play entitled The Mother Play at the Studio Theatre. This very moving and occasionally caustic play explores all the hard issues of life in a family-such as death, illness, financial problems and -above all-the dislocation that occurs from constant moving to new locations. (Indeed, the subtitle of the play is " A Play in Five Evictions"). The Herman family is composed of a very peripatetic mother who has survived the onslaught of a divorce and unwanted children, but she passes so much rage onto her two children, and she drowns herself in martinis."