Review: Patient Storytelling Pays Off in CATCO's MOTHERS AND SONS

Walking into the Vern Riffe Center's Studio One Theatre Friday night, one felt less like an audience member settling into a seat in a performance hall and more like a guest stepping into a stranger's living room.

Frosted light sconces illuminated the walls of an intricately designed set, complete with vases perched on built-in shelves, cushioned chairs nestled in corners and carefully hung jackets arranged on hooks near the door. A scuffed baseball glove and a red ViewMaster haphazardly strewn on a table near the couch, as well as a purse tucked away near a chaise lounge, were the only items that seemed out of place in this well-maintained space.

It was in this environment, a New York City apartment overlooking Central Park, that Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winner Terrence McNally's "Mothers and Sons" made its regional premiere.

The play, which opened on Broadway in 2014, explores the dizzying kaleidoscope of emotions one feels after losing a loved one, and how these reactions simultaneously bond people together and tear them apart.

"Mothers and Sons" unfolds gradually, giving audience members, who are essentially flies on the walls of main character Cal Porter's (David Allen Vargo) gray-walled-and-white-trimmed apartment, bits and pieces of a decades-old story rehashed between two broken-hearted individuals.

References to a tragic event are initially broached skittishly by Porter, who paces nervously around the room in the play's opening minutes. He is visibly on edge because of an unexpected visit from Katharine Gerard (Jacqueline Bates), whose reason for spontaneously appearing on Porter's doorstep is at first a mystery.

After several minutes of small talk -- much of which is coldly rebuffed by Gerard -- the story begins to take shape. "Mothers and Sons" requires a patient audience. McNally does not begin the play with a neatly packaged summary of the backstory and its characters. Instead, viewers get to experience a slice of these individuals' lives. This creative choice, on one hand, contributes to the play's realism, but on the other presents a narrative that requires the audience to invest in the strangers whose lives are played out in front of them.

Yet this is an investment that definitely pays off.

Throughout the play's 90 minutes, more details are revealed, and the characters on the stage evolve into complex beings experiencing a range of human emotions that are empathetically shared with the audience. As pieces of the puzzle begin to fall into place, the delicate threads that connect Gerard and Porter, as well as the latter's family, consisting of husband Will Ogden (Joe Dallacqua) and son Bud Ogden-Porter (Lucas Phillip Cloran and Elliot Hattemer, performed on an alternating basis), are woven into a vivid tapestry of shared human experience.

McNally's prowess as a storyteller effectively addresses the issue of the AIDS crisis and its effects on the lives of many inside and outside the LGBT community without sounding too sermonizing. Even with such a serious message at its core, "Mothers and Sons" does not lose its humanity. On the contrary, its universal message of what it means to love, forgive and grow -- even in the face of death, stubbornness and loneliness -- is something that will resonate with all who view it.

"Mothers and Sons" is set to be performed Feb. 10 - 28 at the Vern Riffe Center's Studio One Theatre.

Tickets are available at the CATCO box office, located at 39 E. State St., or by calling 614-469-0939. They can also be purchased online at Ticketmaster.com or by calling or visiting any central Ohio Ticketmaster location.

The Vern Riffe Center is located at 77 S. High St.

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