Mother Play
by Paula Vogel


Highlights
Awards & Recognition
Nominee: Four 2024 Tony Awards, including Best Play Nominee: Four 2024 Drama Desk Awards, including Outstanding Play Nominee: Three 2024 Drama League Awards, including Best Play Nominee: Three 2024 Outer Critics Circle Awards, including Outstanding New Broadway Play
Synopsis
It’s 1962, just outside of D.C., and matriarch Phyllis is supervising her teenage children, Carl and Martha, as they move into a new apartment.
Phyllis has strong ideas about what her children need to do and be to succeed, and woe to the child who finds their own path.
Bolstered by gin and cigarettes, the family endures – or survives – the changing world around them.
Blending flares of imaginative theatricality, surreal farce, and deep tenderness, this beautiful roller coaster ride reveals timeless truths of love, family and forgiveness.
Press Reviews
"Vogel, who loves a dirty joke, knows that laughter is a way of taking things seriously. Sometimes the best way… 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."
— The New York Times
"Painfully honest… The play is a slice of life, served raw. It’s a savage but grudgingly loving portrait of two women stuck together with blood: one who never wanted to be a mother, and one who never chose to be her daughter."
— TimeOut NY
"A genuinely engaging examination of a family trying to find equilibrium… Mother Play is a mostly devastating narrative about a woman who can neither connect to her children nor adjust to the rapidly changing society around her. However, the narrative doesn’t sit in sadness. Instead, the dialogue boasts a web of humor and wit."
— Variety
"Paula Vogel’s latest work delivers all the humor and poignancy of a Tennessee Williams classic."
— The Wrap
Characters
| Character |
|---|
Carl Herman The Son. Ages 13-37. The genius in the family. |
Martha Herman The Daughter. Ages 11-50s. |
Phyllis Herman The Mother. Ages 30s to late 70s/80s. |
Videos
What is Mother Play?
Publication
Mother Play is a play written by Paula Vogel and published by Samuel French (2024).
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Buy Play
Paperback
Samuel French · 2024 · 70 pp
Performance Rights
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