Terrence McNally’s ‘Mothers and Sons’ at PTC (first review)

Nowadays — when AIDS inhibitor drugs are widely available, when straights routinely choose gays to hold public office and run major institutions, and when same-sex marriage is legal even in Alabama — that Reagan-era AIDS crisis seems like a distant page out of the Dark Ages. Mothers and Sons represents Terrence McNally’s attempt to recognize the forgotten AIDS victims whose rejection and suffering helped drag our world into its relatively enlightened present. It’s a noble project unfortunately undermined by a heavy-handed and simplistic dramatic conflict.

The time is the present; the scene is an elegant New York apartment blessed with high ceilings, large closets, a doorman, and a spectacular view of Central Park. Here Cal, a money manager, lives with his novelist husband Will and their precocious six-year-old son Bud. If this modern family suffers from any flaw, I couldn’t discern it: Both Cal and Will are warm, witty, wise, and totally at ease with themselves — the gay equivalent of Dr. Cliff Huxtable’s model black family on TV’s old Cosby Show.

Mother from hell

Into this domestic paradise storms Katharine Gerard, a straight widow in a mink coat who seems everything Cal and Will are not: Katharine is haughty, uptight, ignorant, intolerant, bitter, frightened, homophobic, unforgiving, childless, and terribly lonely. You and I and Terrence McNally know what Katharine needs: a good roll in the hay with a truck driver. But Katharine seems clueless about the therapeutic benefits of spontaneous sex. “I don’t know how my life turned out this way,” she moans.

Katharine, we soon learn, is the mother of Cal’s earlier lover, a promising actor named Andre who died of AIDS back in the ’80s. So while AIDS deprived Katharine of her only son, Cal has survived that tragedy to find a truly lasting relationship, thanks in part to society’s growing acceptance of gays. Katharine is especially angry with Cal for (as she sees it) making her son gay. Precisely why Katharine has dropped in on Cal after all these years isn’t clear, but her visit becomes the pretext for 90 minutes of largely didactic dialogue. “Why,” Katharine demands of Cal, “did your life get better after Andre and mine got worse? Why haven’t you been punished?”

Easy target

This is in fact a fascinating question: Why do some people benefit from adversity while others are destroyed by it? And I have no doubt that uptight homophobes like Katharine abound in this country. But even as forcefully portrayed by the magnetic Michael Learned, Katharine is so obtuse, and such an easy target, that Cal is able to lecture her on her homophobia without ever acknowledging the real elephant in the room, which is not homosexuality but male promiscuity.

When Katharine demands to know who infected her son with the AIDS virus, Cal replies, “It could have been any of us — we were all suspect…Something ugly was killing us. There wasn’t time to hate. We learned to help each other. It was the first time I felt a part of a community.” Cal readily acknowledges that “Andre had slept with someone other than me, but I forgave him.” Besides, Cal adds, “We weren’t allowed to get married.”

Which is all well and good. But if only for the sake of intelligent drama, at this moment I found myself yearning for a savvier Katharine who might reply: “Cut the shit, Cal. Did you guys think you could have unprotected sex with multiple partners without suffering any adverse consequences?”

Softball pitch

In the straight world, not to mention the lesbian world, women tend to exercise a domesticating influence on their partners; but men (straight or gay) are rarely so effective at restraining the sexual adventurousness of other men. My savvy Katharine might have told Cal, “I know you think I‘m an old stick-in-the-mud. And I know that sex is the most sublime pleasure on Earth. But that pleasure is also capable of destroying society, just as it almost destroyed your community. Those of us who lack the rhetorical skills of poets and playwrights must fall back on such less attractive tools as guilt, fear, and coercion to prevent such calamities. You might extend to us the same tolerance of our weaknesses that you seek for yourselves.” Therein lies an opening for a conversation between two thinking adults as opposed to an emotional scolding match.

But of course McNally’s Katharine says no such thing; instead she wails, “I don’t want peace or closure! I want revenge!” And of course Cal knocks that softball pitch out of the park: “You made me feel ashamed and unwanted,” he intones, “just as you made Andre feel.” The best dramas humanize both sides of a conflict; Mothers and Sons prefers a duel between heroes and a cardboard villain.

Katharine's central complaint — that Cal and AIDS deprived her of her only son, leaving her alone in her old age — is a bogus issue in more ways than McNally apparently realizes. All mothers lose their sons — gay or straight — as their boys grow up, leave home, and form other attachments. It’s all part of the natural journey from womb to tomb. Gay or straight, and with or without AIDS, Andre was surely lost to Katharine long before his untimely death. But if we acknowledge that particular elephant in the room, there’s really no logical premise for the dramatic conflict in Mothers and Sons, is there?

McNally’s thought-provoking if intellectually shallow play benefits from Philadelphia Theatre Company’s customarily high production values, with credible performances by a four-person cast, able direction by Wendy C. Goldberg, and a realistic set by John Arnone that uncannily resembles my late father’s own pre-war apartment on Central Park West. Now, if only McNally could do something about those elephants….

For a review by Thom Nickels, click here.