Geffen Playhouse
Los Angeles
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“For all the changing fads surrounding motherhood,” the milestones in the journey from giving birth to empty-nest syndrome haven’t changed that much, said Charles McNulty in the Los Angeles Times. That fact makes even the edgier themes of this collection of 20 monologues feel very familiar. As performed by Jane Kaczmarek, Saidah Arrika Ekulona, Amy Pietz, and James Lecesne—the latter “momentarily stealing the show as a soon-to-be gay daddy”—the material is poignant enough to strike a chord with its audience. If only the writing “weren’t so bland.” Even with such playwrights as Theresa Rebeck and Pulitzer Prize winner Beth Henley among the monologues’ 14 writers, there is at best “a decent half-hour of mildly touching, mildly humorous material in this 95-minute show.”
Yet when it discusses the newer challenges of child-rearing, In Mother Words “really sings,” said Tanner Stransky in Entertainment Weekly. Lecesne’s monologue about surrogacy, Pietz’s about raising an autistic teenager, and Kaczmarek’s “tremblingly good” turn as a mom who allows her young son to cross-dress for a play all feel remarkably authentic. The performers’ “collective connection with the material” makes the staged-reading format barely noticeable, said Amy Lyons in LA Weekly. With help from a backdrop of creatively evocative projections and animations, the simple staging allows each actor to get the most out of the writers’ words, which, despite covering familiar terrain, still manage to create moments that “tug at the heart.”