From one of America's most acclaimed playwrights, 4-time Tony Award winner Terrence McNally comes Mothers and Sons, a powerful new Broadway play that explores the truths of who we are and who we love.
Tony and Emmy Award-winner Tyne Daly stars in Mothers and Sons, a play about a mother who pays a surprise visit to the New York apartment of her late son's ex-partner, who is now married to another man and has a young son. Challenged to face how society has changed around her - without her - she is finally able to see the rich life her son might have led. Strikingly timely and deeply compassionate, Mothers and Sons is about the evolving definition of family and the healing power of forgiveness.
Directed by Sheryl Kaller, the play has a rather clumsy construction, with pretexts continuously popping up for characters to leave the room - they answer the front door, go to the bathroom, give Bud his bath - so that the remaining pair can have their private conversations. 'Mothers and Sons,' which runs just 90 minutes, is best experienced as a kind of marker in social history, an expression of pride in progress, dignity and growing power.
'Mothers and Sons,' which opened on Monday night at the John Golden Theater in an impeccably acted production directed by Sheryl Kaller, is wrapped in a sense of urgency that paradoxically saps it as a drama. It wears its significance defiantly and a bit stiffly, rather as Ms. Daly's character, a Dallas matron visiting Manhattan, wears the big, blocky fur coat in which we first see her...It is, in essence, a debate play with fraught emotional underpinnings, and it doesn't avoid the stasis of that genre. It also tends to sabotage its potential to move us by making the debate, rather than psychological credibility, its first priority...The performers are skilled enough that we don't hear the sound of gears stripping. But they can't entirely justify their emotional U-turns, nor keep at bay our sense that we are following a menu of subjects that must be covered before the evening's end.
2014 | Broadway |
Original Broadway Production Broadway |
Year | Ceremony | Category | Nominee |
---|---|---|---|
2014 | Drama Desk Awards | Outstanding Actress in a Play | Tyne Daly |
2014 | Drama League Awards | Distinguished Performance Award | Tyne Daly |
2014 | Drama League Awards | Outstanding Production of a Broadway or Off-Broadway Play | Mothers and Sons |
2014 | Outer Critics Circle Awards | Outstanding Actress in a Play | Tyne Daly |
2014 | Tony Awards | Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Play | Tyne Daly |
2014 | Tony Awards | Best Play | Susan Dietz |
2014 | Tony Awards | Best Play | Jack Thomas |
2014 | Tony Awards | Best Play | Peter Stern |
2014 | Tony Awards | Best Play | Tom Smedes |
2014 | Tony Awards | Best Play | Sanford Robertson |
2014 | Tony Awards | Best Play | Brunish-Trinchero |
2014 | Tony Awards | Best Play | Roberta Pereira |
2014 | Tony Awards | Best Play | Ed Filipowski |
2014 | Tony Awards | Best Play | Mark Lee |
2014 | Tony Awards | Best Play | Lams Production |
2014 | Tony Awards | Best Play | Ken Davenport |
2014 | Tony Awards | Best Play | Paul Boskind |
2014 | Tony Awards | Best Play | Hunter Arnold |
2014 | Tony Awards | Best Play | Loraine Alterman Boyle |
2014 | Tony Awards | Best Play | Barbara Freitag |
2014 | Tony Awards | Best Play | Debbie Bisno |
2014 | Tony Awards | Best Play | Paula Wagner |
2014 | Tony Awards | Best Play | Roy Furman |
2014 | Tony Awards | Best Play | Tom Kirdahy |
2014 | Tony Awards | Best Play | Terrence McNally |
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