'Too Much Sun' and 'August: Osage County'

Take Audrey Langham (the remarkable Linda Lavin), the menacing mother in Nicky Silver’s new black comedy, Too Much Sun, at the Vineyard Theatre this spring. We first meet Audrey outrageously costumed in crimson and gold. She’s rehearsing Medea in Chicago (a stroke of typecasting) and cursing out her director. In the next scene, we discover that she’s quit her role, flown from Chicago, and swooped down on her daughter’s Long Island beach house like an eagle in search of fresh prey.

“How long do you plan to stay, Mom?” asks the traumatized Kitty, as she cowers in the corner, compulsively munching on cookies, watching her mother take control. Audrey is broke, so she pursues Kitty’s neighbor Winston (Richard Bekins), hoping to snag him for her sixth husband. Next, Audrey’s agent Gil arrives from Hollywood and moves in. “You can’t just do what you want, Mother!” Kitty protests to deaf maternal ears, as Audrey turns her world upside down, belittling Kitty along the way with humiliating stories from her past. To make matters worse, Kitty’s husband Dennis starts an affair with Winston’s teenaged son, the drug-dealing Lucas.

A maternal understudy

As her world unravels, Kitty (played by an endearing Jennifer Westfeldt) tries to confront her mother. They exchange accusations (“You sent your understudy to my graduation, Mother!”) and dark revelations about the abuse Kitty suffered as a child. Still, the show must go on, and rehearsals for Audrey and Winston’s wedding proceed, with Audrey reciting lines from Medea. Then, a trauma occurs that veers the play onto a new, unexpected course.

How Kitty finds the cunning and courage finally to stand up to her mother is the heart of the play. “People surprise you all the time, just when you think you have them figured out,” says Gil. The chief surprise of Silver’s clever play lies in his comedic treatment of a serious subject matter.

The daughters in August: Osage County fare far worse than Kitty. That’s no surprise, since their mother, Violet Weston, is played by the unmatchable Meryl Streep in the film adaptation of Tracy Lett’s powerful play (which won the Pulitzer in 2008). Violet is as close to a monster/mother as one can get, the tyrannical matriarch of a family on the verge of self-destruction.

It happened one night

This dysfunctional clan gathers one sweltering August night at Violet’s white clapboard home on the arid Oklahoma plains, awaiting the return of Violet’s husband Beverly (Sam Shepard) who has disappeared (again). The news that Beverly has committed suicide sets off a chain reaction of rage and blame amongst Violet and her three daughters, each of whom rivals the other in aberrant behavior.

Violet herself is suffering from mouth cancer (ironically) and has become addicted to painkillers. We first meet her reeling around the house, high on drugs, her speech slurred, her bald, scabbed head shorn of its black wig, hurling insults at her alcoholic husband and racial slurs at their new Native-American housekeeper.

The filial trio includes the masochistic Ivy (Julianne Nicholson), who cares for her dysfunctional parents while harboring a dark secret. Karen (Juliette Lewis) roams from city to city and man to man; she’s brought home her latest fiancé, Steve (Dermot Mulroney). Barbara (Julia Roberts), the strongest of the sisters, also escaped home, but her life and marriage have fared no better than her mother’s. She’s separated from her husband Bill (Ewan McGregor), and her 14-year-old pot-smoking daughter Jean (Abigain Breslin) hates her just as much as Barbara hates her own mother.

Family business

Hatred seems to be the Weston family profession, and they set off some spectacular fireworks at the funeral luncheon, in one of the blackest and funniest family explosions I’ve ever seen staged. Further family entanglements and revelations ensue, involving Violet’s sister Mattie Fay (Margo Martindale), her husband Charlie (Chris Cooper), and their son Little Charles (Benedict Cumberbatch).

The heart of Letts’s screenplay is the power struggle between Violet and Barbara, the daughter who most resembles her mother. They literally engage in hand-to-hand combat as Barbara organizes a “search party” to rid the house of pills and set their mother on the road to recovery. (Thankfully, the film is out on DVD, and you’ll have the chance to replay the hilarious scene in which Barbara tries to force her recalcitrant mother to eat catfish for lunch.)

But it’s not so funny to witness the pain that mothers inflict on daughters — and vice versa — in an effort to free themselves from bondage. Letts has layered his story with four generations of women suffering under this yoke, and in a touching scene between Barbara and her own daughter Jean, Barbara tells her: “I don’t care what you do, screw up your life, whatever. Just survive. Please.”

Only the strong survive

Survival is all, when it comes to daughters of domineering mothers. Actress Cherry Jones had the challenge of playing two such materfamilias on stage this season. The first was the genteel matriarch we know so well, Amanda Wingfield, in John Tiffany’s radiant revival of Tennessee Williams’s Glass Menagerie on Broadway. Her daughter Laura doesn’t survive, but Penny does, in Sarah Treem’s earnest new play When We Were Young and Unafraid. Perhaps that’s because her mother Agnes (played again by the excellent Cherry Jones) is more smothering than devouring.

Anyway, it’s the '70s, the age of feminism, and Agnes, though imposing, is potentially a positive role model. She runs a home for abused women. Penny is torn between the influences of her formidable mother, her Angela-Davis-lookalike friend Hannah, and one of the new battered arrivals (Zoe Kazan) who wants to return to her abusive husband. For Penny, it’s an issue of identity, and her mother’s shocking revelation at the play’s end rocks her world.

“Blow out your candles, Laura," Tom Winfield say to his beloved sister Laura, for whom there is no hope. Williams’s Laura may have been defeated, but, judging from these newer works, daughters of the future will free themselves from maternal bondage even if they have to set the world on fire.

Above right: Julia Roberts and Meryl Streep in August: Osage County. (Photo by Claire Folger - © 2013 - The Weinstein Company. All rights reserved.)