Life-and-death struggle powers ‘’night, Mother’
BY CHRISTINE DOLEN
cdolen@MiamiHerald.com
The suspense in Marsha Norman’s ‘night, Mother doesn’t flow from what a no-longer-young woman named Jessie Cates plans to do with her life. Quite early in the Pulitzer Prize-winning play, after just a bit of bustling activity that introduces Jessie and her candy-loving mother to the audience, Jessie casually tells Mama that she’s going to kill herself. That night.
Instead, Norman creates suspense – loads of it – from all the questions that come after such a chilling declaration. Will she or won’t she follow through? What has brought Jessie to this point? And can Mama, who at first thinks Jessie is joking, conjure up something, anything, that will make her daughter want to live?
Launching a new series of second-stage productions, the Alliance Theatre Lab has brought a new production of ‘night, Mother to Barry University’s intimate Pelican Theatre. The play marks the professional directing debut of David Sirois, a multitalented New World School of the Arts grad who is also Alliance’s resident playwright and the guy who wrote last season’s smash Brothers Beckett. His staging of ‘night, Mother is sure and clear, so directing is obviously one more thing in his dramatic toolkit.
Sirois is also very fortunate to have the inventive, fascinating Sally Bondi in the role of Mama. As full of life as her daughter is deadened, Bondi’s Thelma Cates is a woman of ever-changing emotional colors. She’s honest, critical, scared, furious, loving, desperate, manipulative – well, the list goes on and on, as Bondi creates a thoroughly believable country gal who accepts the cards life has dealt her.
As Jessie, Aubrey Shavonn Kessler has the greater acting challenge. Life has been one long, disappointing challenge for Jessie. An epileptic whose husband left her, whose son is forever in trouble with drugs and the law, the now-agoraphobic Jessie has become her mother’s caregiver. Thelma has surrendered most of the day-to-day tasks of their isolated life to Jessie, maybe to give her daughter a sense of purpose, maybe because it’s just more fun to watch TV, crochet and eat Hostess Sno Balls than it is to do laundry and order groceries.
Kessler has to convey the determination beneath her character’s almost incomprehensibly breezy manner as Jessie runs down a long list of the preparations she has made for her mother’s future life alone. The actress shifts from an initial disconcerting cheerfulness to emotional flatness. Perhaps that’s what Jessie needs to follow through with her meticulously planned exit, but Kessler’s muted performance allows the vibrant Bondi to dominate what should be a more evenly balanced tug-of-war over Jessie’s future.
Though a critical technical glitch marred the opening night show, Bondi’s skill and power overcame even that one-time flub. In allowing her to show so much range in ‘night, Mother, Alliance reminds us that Bondi is one of South Florida’s acting treasures.
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