A Mother
by Constance Congdon, adapted from VASSA ZHELEZNOVA by Maxim Gorky, translated by Tanya Chebotarev

An adaptation of Gorky’s classic black comedy, VASSA ZHELEZNOVA, A MOTHER concerns a family’s stern, penny-pinching matriarch who will do anything for her family.

“… Dark, invigoratingly sardonic…Constance Congdon’s MOTHER is as uncompromisingly savvy as it is bitingly funny… MOTHER is an exhilarating blend of one of Chekhov’s dysfunctional provincial families run through the wringer of Joe Orton’s iconoclastic comedy.

It’s also Maxim Gorky through and through, providing a canny look at Gorky as a dramatic bridge between Chekhov and Brecht.

Congdon’s A MOTHER is adapted from Gorky’s play VASSA ZHELEZNOVA…MOTHER [is] as much an enlightening rediscovery as an exciting new play.

Vassa, a kind of proto-Mother Courage, is the head of a family one generation removed from serfdom and facing a crisis.

The husband with whom she’s built a fairly successful peat-mining and tile-making business is dying upstairs.

Without a will, all their possessions will pass to their two sons—the uselessly self-pitying Pavel and the slothful, self-indulgent Semyon, a man who can no longer fit into any of his clothes except pajamas

Congdon’s dialogue is crisp, her Gorky-derived characters captivating and her wit devilishly sharp…”Robert Hurwitt, San Francisco Chronicle