Word: mother
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Unfortunately, the play consists mostly of such clumsy commentary. It's got only three characters: Henny (mother), Scooper (son), and Dierdre (bibliophile cum girlfriend). 83 and blind, Henny, has battled breast cancer for two years without anybody catching on--hence bosoms and neglect. Scooper, never too lucky with the girls, was about to run off to Haiti with his best friend's wife when Mom's illness was uncovered. He met Dierdre through their common analyst, Dr. James. In her apartment, while Henny's on the operating table, they spill out their tribulations and prayers. Their idiocyncrasies, it seems, know...
...this which takes up about 45 minutes, is funny, But it's abruptly interrupted by Scooper's semi-Oedipal urge to call his ailing mother at Presbyterian. They put him on hold, and at this point he loses it. He hurls the Byron the lovers once caressed about the apartment, with all her precious books. Insanity, it seems, is contagious: she grabs a letter opener and stabs him. From here, the scene changes to the hospital where he and his mother spend an hour and a half rehashing their unimaginative pasts, their guilt, their dreams. He even has a Rosebud...
...consistently loco that we become dulled by it. There should be a doorman or a maid or something--someone to set off the shrieking and flyings ashtrays. That, or a tauter script. After the play's rambling dialogues, its climactic scene in which Scooper leaves his blind mother talking to a wheelchair while he and Dierdre run off (to Doubleday?) leaves you cold...
...divorced and only then learns how to be a father. A woman goes to work and worries about failing as a mother. A man and a woman attain the same professional pinnacle; she rejoices in surpassed expectations, he mourns fallen dreams. Everywhere Boston Globe Columnist Ellen Goodman turns, grownups are suffering growing pains, and so is she: "It has begun to occur to me that life is a stage I'm going through...
Goodman describes herself as "a 38-year-old woman, mother, vegetable gardener, failed jogger and expert on only one subject: the ambivalence of life." Her extended family shares "not only an area code but also a zip code" near her native Boston, and rarely does a week go by when she doesn't see some relation or other. Divorced and the mother of an eleven-year-old daughter, she is at her most eloquent when tackling subjects close to home. "The pleasure of being a parent," she wrote last year, "is the extraordinary experience of having short people...