Nearly 20 years after her son’s death, Katharine pays an unexpected visit to the New York apartment of his former partner, who is now married to another man and has a young child.
Confronted with the life her son might have led, Katharine is challenged to face the powerful ways in which society has changed around her and to accept an ever-evolving definition of family.
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Production photos by Michael Brosilow.
REVIEW
Haunting Mothers and Sons asks, how long do we mourn before moving on?
CHICAGO TRIBUNE
By CHRIS JONES
I thought this an important play when I first saw it on Broadway in 2014 (it starred Tyne Daly), in part because I remember seeing a couple of mothers like Katherine at funerals, in part because it reminds us what some (hardly all) family members did to those who died of AIDS, but mostly because it offers a chance to think about guilt, mourning and moving on, while we’re in the hands of one of America’s most compassionate and yet unstinting playwrights.
At one point, Cal, who is played with great sincerity by Parker, wonders aloud whether moving on to a new partner means he did not love Katherine’s son enough. It’s a common worry of the widowed, although the play is, I think, arguing that he has no choice, given how time moves so inexorably forward, leaving some of us behind.
Parker also nails the sheer horror of your past walking right through your front door, dredging up all that complexity. Gold’s performance is an exceptionally sincere and honest piece of acting that moved me greatly in some moments. And Sprunger, playing that new man in Cal’s life, has just the right lack of compassion for that which he was just young enough to miss.
You’ll sense I’m fond of this emotional play, and you would be right. It is honest, fair and moving, and entirely applicable to any number of other circumstances in which we find ourselves.
REVIEW
Mothers and Sons at Northlight Theatre: Theater review
Terrence McNally again considers the AIDS crisis from the perspective of those left behind.
4 STARS, CRITIC’S PICK
TIMEOUT CHICAGO
By KRIS VIRE
McNally has often been at his best as a chronicler of current gay life (or a certain white, upper-middle-class or at least aspirational strain of it, anyway) in plays like Love! Valour! Compassion!. Revisiting the characters of Andre’s Mother (which he expanded into an Emmy-winning episode of PBS’s American Playhouse in 1990) allows him the opportunity to incisively comment on those aspects of the present moment—marriage equality, gay parenting, HIV as a manageable disease—that no one was even considering as possibilities 20 years ago.
But it also allows him to give some room for dignity, even in opposition, to the still unenlightened. Gold’s Katharine is neither sympathetic nor particularly repentant for her rejection of her son’s relationship and reality. But McNally, for the most part, resists encouraging us to jeer her, and Gold’s nuanced performance lets us see hints of the isolation and loneliness beneath Katharine’s standoffish demeanor. In Steve Scott’s sensitive, heartfelt production, we even start to root for her to come around.
REVIEW
Review: Mothers and Sons/Northlight Theatre
NEW CITY
By AARON HUNT
Northlight has assembled a formidable team to live this story. Director Steve Scott guides actors Cindy Gold (Katharine), Jeff Parker (Cal), Benjamin Sprunger (his husband Will) and Ben Miller (their young son, Bud) through McNally’s beautifully crafted play. The anxiety ratchets up before being expertly released through humor or another diversion only to begin the climb to the next dramatic peak, each mountain of hurt taller than the next until the unforgiving apex.
This production left me gasping as I fell headlong into Gold’s needful, vacuum-sealed fury, Parker’s self-deluded graciousness, Sprunger’s disconnected entitlement and Miller’s open-hearted acceptance, doctoring the world with an Oreo cookie and milk.
McNally is right to teach history. History keeps repeating. Cal is right to shout down Katharine’s “Children don’t fix anything!” with “This one does!” Be brave enough to see this play.
PREVIEW
Terrence McNally opens up about Mothers and Sons
CHICAGO TRIBUNE
By CHRIS JONES
Terrence McNally, the author of such celebrated works of drama as Love! Valour! Compassion!, Master Class and Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, and the bookwriter of such musicals as Ragtime, The Full Monty and Kiss of the Spider Woman, is talking about mothers and sons.
“Mother and son really is the most direct flow of unconditional love between two people,” he says, over the phone. “I can never understand why mothers cannot always just love their children.”
McNally is speaking about a particular moment in American history — the AIDS crisis, at its peak around a quarter of a century ago. At the time, there were many mothers (and fathers) angry with their gay children and alienated from them. The separation was often manifest at the funerals of sons who never reached middle age. Anyone who was around at the time, and who went to too many of them, can recall glimpses of parents sitting awkwardly in the pews, unsure about how to process their grief, unable to join in the celebration of their son’s life. That is assuming the parents were there at the funeral.
“My own mother was dead by the time I wrote this play, and I’m not much of an autobiographical writer,” McNally said. “But this play certainly is to some extent my working out my relationship with my own mother. After it opened in New York, a number of young gay people said to me things like ‘we’ve no idea what you had to live through.’ I mean, this was not World War II. This was not 100 years ago. But still they do not know. I urgently wanted to express what has happened in these past 25 years for gay men and women, and how much we’ve pushed under the rug without wanting to have a conversation about. The writing felt cathartic.”
PREVIEW
Northlight’s Mothers and Sons a story of family, grief
PIONEER PRESS
By MYRNA PETLICKI
Grieving has no timeline. Katharine Gerard’s son Andre may have died of AIDS nearly 20 years ago but her wounds are still raw in Terrence McNally’s intriguing Mothers and Sons opening in previews Jan. 22 at Northlight Theatre.
Skokie resident Cindy Gold plays Katharine, who has come from her home in Texas to New York to visit Cal Porter (Jeff Parker), her late son’s lover. Why has she come to see Cal, even though they have had no contact since Andre’s funeral? What does she hope to achieve by the visit? It’s a bit of a mystery, even to Katharine.
“Her husband just died. Now she’s really alone,” Gold said. “She has no relatives. I’m imagining she has no friends. Her world has become very small. She’s very angry still.”
The actor surmised that Katharine likely visited New York many times before without descending on Cal’s apartment. “She probably got her courage up,” Gold said, adding, “It’s curiosity more than anything.”
PREVIEW
Strained relations
WINDY CITY TIMES
By SCOTT C. MORGAN
“Homophobia and racism don’t die because of civil rights and marriage equality,” [Mothers and Sons author Terrence] McNally said. “I think the play is more relevant because you realize that homophobia is a huge subject.”
Homophobia rears its ugly head in Mothers and Sons, which is a sequel of sorts to McNally’s 1990 PBS drama Andre’s Mother. The earlier Emmy Award-winning TV movie focused on a Texas mother named Katharine whose son has passed away from complications of AIDS. Katharine attends a memorial service for her son in New York, and confronts Andre’s surviving lover, Cal, in the process.
For Mothers and Sons, Katharine (Cindy Gold) and Cal (Jeff Parker) meet again more than two decades later in his upscale New York apartment. Yet now Katharine must also contend with Cal’s family that includes his younger husband, Will Ogden (Benjamin Sprunger), and their son, Bud (Ben Miller).
“Mothers and Sons is looking at where we are today with AIDS as very much the unspoken subject of the play,” McNally said. “[AIDS] did decimate a generation of people and there’s a legacy and residue and many scars left.”
PREVIEW
The best things to do in Chicago this month | January – Theater – Dramas
CHICAGO MAGAZINE
By CATEY SULLIVAN
CRITIC’S PICK – The regional premiere of a work by playwright Terrence McNally (Master Class, Kiss of the Spider Woman) is always reason for anticipation. With director Steve Scott at the helm, doubly so. Scott takes on the story of a mother who lost a son to AIDS and meets up with her son’s former partner years afterward.