Latest news with #MotherPlay
The Spinoff
06-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Spinoff
Why do so many New Zealand plays have such short lives?
Playwright Sam Brooks on the importance of looking back to move forward. Theatre is an ephemeral art form. That's the beauty of it. For an hour or two, the performance exists for the people who are in the same room as it, and then it goes away. The next night, the same actors might say the same lines in the same places, but it's still different. It's never the exact same thing. Then the play closes, and it goes away. Sometimes, it goes away forever. Whether it happened at a tiny fringe venue or a massive stage, there are plays that are one-and-done, for whatever reason. That's especially true in New Zealand, which unfortunately lacks a culture of revival, or revisiting shows. Reviving a show is something that the average theatregoer might be aware of without knowing the exact definition. Essentially, it's the practice of putting on a show again after its premiere run, with a completely new team and interpretation. The recent production of Black Faggot that played at Christchurch's Court Theatre and then Q Theatre is a revival of the 2013 production, for example, with none of the same creative team. That's meaningfully distinct from, say, Silo Theatre's upcoming production of Mother Play – while it might be a New Zealand premiere, it is a completely new production. Other countries, particularly those with strong theatregoing traditions, have much stronger revival cultures. Shows get enshrined into the canon and have new productions, and new interpretations of them produced regularly, with people often showing up in droves. For example: If you're a certain brand of homosexual, you'll have strong opinions on Audra McDonald's take on Gypsy's protagonist Gypsy Rose Lee compared to Patti LuPone's take, compared to Bernadette Peters', and so on. If that meant nothing to you, sub in 'All Blacks kicker' for 'Gypsy Rose Lee', 'Dan Carter' for 'Audra McDonald', 'Beauden Barrett' for Patti LuPone', and 'Andrew Mehrtens' for 'Bernadette Peters' (apologies to both fans of musical theatre and the ABs). This is the kind of thing that doesn't happen here, even for international plays. There have been two professional productions of A Streetcar Named Desire in Auckland in my lifetime, for example, which means two chances for me, and any Auckland theatregoer, to see one of the most acclaimed plays of all time. New Zealand, simply put, does not have that same culture of revival – especially when it comes to our own 'canon'. Once a play is performed, it often exists for its initial season and very rarely again. There are a few reasons for that. The relative youth of playwriting in this country is one of those – Roger Hall's Glide Time is widely regarded as the turning point for audiences recognising that New Zealand could generate its own theatre is only 50 years old, and even the grandfather of New Zealand theatre, End of the Golden Weather, is just 75 years old. (That one was actually revived earlier this year, as the show that opened Christchurch's Court Theatre's new venue.) The worldwide theatre canon is hundreds, even thousands of years old. Compared to that, our canon may as well be a catalogue – and I might say that our best plays hold their own on the world stage with theatre cultures older and better supported. This same thinking has also historically been applied to basically anything New Zealand has succeeded at, but I promise it is also true of theatre. We also have a culture of making, and developing, new work. We develop, we produce, we premiere and we move on. Premiere productions being performed only once is an issue that extends beyond the cultural to the commercial – getting funding for a new work is easy, for whatever reason, but increasingly difficult for subsequent remounts. It does mean, however, that there are absolute diamonds that exist for one moment of brilliance, remembered by only those who saw them, before dipping into the archives, with only the most nerdy theatre people remembering they existed. (I think of work like Silo Theatre's Cellfish, and Miria George's and what remains as works that feel even more relevant now than when they premiered.) There is also a lack of access, for commercial reasons. We are a small country where theatre is often vying for funding against art forms with deeper roots, which means less money is available for venues to stay open, companies to develop and produce theatre, and even for playwrights to write them. With perhaps a little bit too much transparency: of the 53 plays I've written, I have been commissioned to write once, and received funding from Creative New Zealand to write two of these. The rest have been written under my own steam. In short: Less money means less art, less art being made means less art being seen, means less art in the canon. That access extends to it being difficult to find and read scripts in the first place. Places like Unity and second-hand bookstores might have a play section, but very rarely will you find New Zealand plays there. Similarly, libraries might have a resource, but while a great many New Zealand plays have been published, they are more representative of our canon than they are entirely reflective. Playmarket, New Zealand's playwriting agency, is a great resource for New Zealand work if it takes your fancy! Also? Reading a play – and I say this in earnest as someone who both writes and reads plays – is not the most interesting thing. It's a very different thing to imagine the world of a play in your mind compared to, say, imagining the world of a novel. Plays are often written for enthusiasts and experts to read and interpret, not for a general audience. They're less like books and more like blueprints. A play isn't like a book. It's not a song. It's not like a movie – even in the rare case when a play is filmed, it's no substitute for actually being there. Once those things are produced, they exist. If they're lucky enough to be a part of the canon, they're enshrined in perpetuity. Plays are a different beast. 'You had to be there' is tragically real – for a play if you actually weren't there for the premiere production, there's a very real chance that you might have missed it. This week at Auckland's Basement Theatre, I've been fortunate enough to be asked to curate a series of playreadings called Firing the Canon, which will involve five plays being performed for free, with 37 actors, emerging and experienced, performing across the week. These five include the aforementioned Glide Time by Roger Hall (marking his Basement Theatre debut), Smashed by Tawhi Thomas, Rēwena by Whiti Hereaka, The Packer by Dianna Fuemana and Cow by Jo Randerson. The goal is for the series to run long-term, in venues across the country, and to breathe new life into plays that might otherwise not be performed, for any of the above reasons. There's no way I can cover the huge spectrum of New Zealand theatre with only five plays. I couldn't even do it with 50. But it's a little bit of a light shone in the right direction. Our theatre history might not be as huge as the UK's, or the USA's, but it's pretty mighty. But without an audience showing up, an audience taking interest, it might not be there at all. Theatre is an ephemeral form, but when an audience shows up, it can feel eternal.
Scoop
06-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Scoop
Call Me Mother. Or Don't.
A gin-soaked martini of memory, glamour, and Mommie Dearest theatrics, The Milford Asset Management Season of Mother Play is the latest triumph from Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Paula Vogel, playing 04 – 20 Sep at Q Theatre. This gloriously unhinged new work makes its Aotearoa debut in a Silo Theatre production directed by Sophie Roberts, whose 11-year tenure as Artistic Director comes to a close with this bold, beautiful farewell. Fresh from Broadway and a 2025 season at Melbourne Theatre Company, Mother Play lands at Q Theatre with fierce poise and a matching handbag. This is not a gentle homage to motherhood. It's a work of high style - an outrageous yet intimate portrait of a family that just won't stay packed, no matter how many times they're evicted. Told over five domestic evictions and four decades of American upheaval, it's a story about staying, leaving, returning, and the psychic rent we pay for love. It's 1962. Phyllis Herman - cigarette in one hand, drink in the other - is dragging her children, Carl and Martha, into yet another cockroach infested crumbling apartment. Since their father disappeared with the family savings, the Hermans have been on the move. Phyllis is fierce, fabulous, and wholly unequipped for the changing tides of the twentieth century, especially when those tides arrive in the form of her children's sexual and political awakenings. As the Hermans lurch through the decades - the idealism of the '60s, the sexual revolutions of the '70s, the grief and reckoning of the AIDS crisis - they carry with them every eviction notice, every insult, every brutal act of devotion. The question that echoes across the eras: can you choose to love, even when it hurts? Mother Play is both a feast for actors and a balm for any audience member who's looked their mother in the eye and seen both a monster and an angel. Vogel's script is filled with high camp humour, theatrical flair, and moments of crushing vulnerability. It's the poetic intensity of Tennessee Williams entwined with Grey Gardens ' faded flair, and David Lynch's surreal edge, wrapped in leopard print and laced with Schitt's Creek 's sharp wit. The cast devouring this feast is Aotearoa screen and stage legend Jennifer Ludlam as Phyllis (in the role originated by Jessica Lange on Broadway), alongside Amanda Tito (Scenes from the Climate Era, Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again.) and Tim Earl (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time). This is theatre for those who grew up queer in a house that never quite felt like home. It's for the children of complicated women and the survivors of tangled family politics. It's for the fans of Vogel's How I Learned to Drive, the readers of American family epics, and lovers of stories that ache and glitter in equal measure. It's not sentimental. It's not safe. But it is spectacular. Bringing the spectacular to the stage is a stacked design team – lighting and sound design by Sean Lynch (Camping, Hir), costume design by Tautahi Subritzky (A Slow Burlesque, ScatterGun), and set design by Daniel Williams (Taniwha, Camping) and Talia Pua (A Slow Burlesque, Rituals of Similarity). Mother Play is also a significant moment for Sophie Roberts, who signs off after more than a decade of bold, genre-defying work at Silo Theatre. In curating her final season, she's chosen to explore the theme of motherhood in all its forms, and this play is its crown jewel. 'As I finish this chapter of my life, I've been drawn to stories about evolution, of self, of family, of identity,' says Roberts. 'The 'mother' of the title is metaphor, myth, tragedy and comedy rolled into one. Phyllis is the mother of all mothers. And this play is a riot. And a reckoning.' Mother Play earned four Tony Award nominations in 2024, won two Drama Desk Awards and an Outer Critics Circle Award, and has already been heralded as a new American classic. If Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie had a queer cousin who rearranged the furniture, sprayed roach killer, and lit a cigarette with your childhood trauma, this would be it. The Milford Asset Management Season of MOTHER PLAY a play in five evictions By Paula Vogel 04 – 20 September 2025 Q Theatre, Rangatira Presented with support from Q Theatre Duration: 105 minutes, no interval On sale now at
Sydney Morning Herald
05-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
Sigrid Thornton strips away the glamour in sweeping tragicomic vision
THEATRE Mother Play: a play in five evictions ★★★★ Southbank Theatre, until August 2 Fresh from a Broadway run featuring Jessica Lange, the Australian premiere of Paula Vogel's three-hander Mother Play stars Sigrid Thornton as the latest mother with queer children to haunt the canon of American drama. Phyllis Herman is a real piece of work. A chain-smoking, immaculately coiffed glamour-puss abandoned by her husband, she's been left to raise two kids alone in Washington, DC, in the 1960s. As young Carl (Ash Flanders) and Martha (Yael Stone) dutifully unpack boxes in their down-at-heel rental apartment, Phyllis reclines in fur coat and sunglasses, as if looking like a movie star can somehow magic away the bitterness of life below the poverty line. Phyllis's situation – and the aspect of her character that's obsessively bound up in her physical attractiveness – might remind you of the smothering Amanda Wingfield from Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie, though this work melds the claustrophobia and emotional brutality of domestic drama with a sweeping tragicomic vision that spans decades and delivers us swords drawn onto the social battlefield covered by Tony Kushner's Angels in America. Thornton isn't afraid to be unsympathetic. Phyllis is a victim, an unwilling mother who reluctantly chose giving birth over the risks of a backyard abortion, but Thornton doesn't hold back on the cruelties inflicted on her children. Parentification (parent-child role reversal), binge-drinking, psychological and emotional abuse, and deeply ingrained bigotry will blight the childhoods of Carl and Martha, whose bond with each other deepens as they make their escape. The foreshadowing of their queerness is about as subtle as a drag queen's make-up, yet Flanders and Stone bring vitality and aching nuance to siblings compelled to discover what real love feels like in the absence of a healthy example of it. Flanders' gift for camp comedy can make the audience cheer or howl with laughter. As the narrator figure in this memory play, Stone's depth of feeling and implacable quest for emotional truth carve out a sharp elegiac frame. Both actors sketch the maturation of their characters in the face of maternal betrayal with grace and nimble economy.
The Age
05-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
Sigrid Thornton strips away the glamour in sweeping tragicomic vision
THEATRE Mother Play: a play in five evictions ★★★★ Southbank Theatre, until August 2 Fresh from a Broadway run featuring Jessica Lange, the Australian premiere of Paula Vogel's three-hander Mother Play stars Sigrid Thornton as the latest mother with queer children to haunt the canon of American drama. Phyllis Herman is a real piece of work. A chain-smoking, immaculately coiffed glamour-puss abandoned by her husband, she's been left to raise two kids alone in Washington, DC, in the 1960s. As young Carl (Ash Flanders) and Martha (Yael Stone) dutifully unpack boxes in their down-at-heel rental apartment, Phyllis reclines in fur coat and sunglasses, as if looking like a movie star can somehow magic away the bitterness of life below the poverty line. Phyllis's situation – and the aspect of her character that's obsessively bound up in her physical attractiveness – might remind you of the smothering Amanda Wingfield from Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie, though this work melds the claustrophobia and emotional brutality of domestic drama with a sweeping tragicomic vision that spans decades and delivers us swords drawn onto the social battlefield covered by Tony Kushner's Angels in America. Thornton isn't afraid to be unsympathetic. Phyllis is a victim, an unwilling mother who reluctantly chose giving birth over the risks of a backyard abortion, but Thornton doesn't hold back on the cruelties inflicted on her children. Parentification (parent-child role reversal), binge-drinking, psychological and emotional abuse, and deeply ingrained bigotry will blight the childhoods of Carl and Martha, whose bond with each other deepens as they make their escape. The foreshadowing of their queerness is about as subtle as a drag queen's make-up, yet Flanders and Stone bring vitality and aching nuance to siblings compelled to discover what real love feels like in the absence of a healthy example of it. Flanders' gift for camp comedy can make the audience cheer or howl with laughter. As the narrator figure in this memory play, Stone's depth of feeling and implacable quest for emotional truth carve out a sharp elegiac frame. Both actors sketch the maturation of their characters in the face of maternal betrayal with grace and nimble economy.
Sydney Morning Herald
26-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
I'm not averse to exposed situations: Sigrid Thornton is back on stage
Mother Play: a play in five evictions traces the fortunes of a single mother named Phyllis, played by Thornton, and her two children. Beginning in the 1960s when the children are barely teenagers, the show follows the family over the next 40 years. '[This] is an homage or a way of talking to her mother, after the fact, which I think anyone who has experienced the death of a parent will understand,' Thornton says. 'It's a memory play, and by that I mean it's Paula's direct memory of her childhood and her early years, living on the poverty line in the states around Washington DC. She had a complex and challenging childhood in many ways, not least because the mother, who I play, is a functioning alcoholic. She has aspirations for both her children … and these revelations are played out through conversation and action.' 'She's clearly a difficult mother but no less inspiring in her way. She was a force, the kind of figure that people noticed in the room. She knew it but was trapped in a paradigm that didn't suit her personality. This is not too much of a spoiler to say: she has had very, very bad luck with men.' Does performing in a piece like this provide a degree of catharsis? 'No question, it is therapeutic. Anyone who's making creative work would say that it is both cathartic for them personally, but also that the hope is it will also have some ... connection with the creator's experience,' Thornton says. 'And perhaps, if one is very, very lucky [there will be] some kind of healing from that.' Going back to the theatre after a few years away is like returning to the gym after a break for the Melbourne-based actor. 'You work up to it... The memory is still there but it might take a little while to get it back.' It also changes with every production. 'You have to develop a whole set of new muscular responses that match your character, which will always be different.' As well as a degree of muscle memory, there's also intellectual memory involved, 'wrapping your head around that combined with an exercise of making a play, making a story together with people who all have their sensitivities and learning about each other and how to work in particular ways that suit each individual, and all of those things add to the mix when we're discussing and working on extremely personal material.' Therein lies the joy – discovering the characters and their stories, along with the director and other creatives. The show has been fascinating to research. 'There's a lot of information out there about [Vogel's] experience: her output, her sexuality and coming out, and all of those things in relation to her own parents,' she says. 'We are playing a person's real-life experience and the obvious dysfunction in the family I think anyone can relate to. It's not that far from Christmas, is it? We'll still have those memories.' One of this country's favourite actors, Thornton has grown up on our screens, big and small. In 1977, she starred as a fresh-faced 18-year-old in Bruce Beresford's The Getting of Wisdom, but it was her work in All The Rivers Run, beamed into lounge rooms around the nation, that cemented her in our hearts. Then came The Man From Snowy River and later Prisoner and its more recent offspring, Wentworth. Then in the '90s, there was SeaChange. Theatre has been a constant since her 30s – aged six she knew she wanted to be an actor – and returning to the MTC, she says, feels like a homecoming. As well as Mother Play, she has three projects underway, details of which remain under wraps for the moment. Several scripts are in development: that's always the core – the strength of the writing. 'But I'm going to be working on both sides of the camera,' she says. Thornton argues creative work is essential in every society. 'First Nations people valued above many, many things – it could be argued, above everything, apart from getting enough food and water – storytelling because it was an essential component in understanding the world, teaching future generations so that they could move forward with some clarity and a sense of connection, which is also critically important.' Loading Many of the themes in Mother Play resonate powerfully in a world with right-wing politics on the rise and under the Trump administration, particularly women's rights and queer rights. He is wreaking havoc in so many ways, Thornton says. The attacks on the arts and on free speech are incredibly worrying. 'The dismantling of the arts in any way, shape or form is anathema because creative work is in no small part about helping people feel connected to others, helping people feel that they are not alone. 'I do sincerely believe that the making of good stories, even purely to entertain people and make people smile, all of that storytelling needs to stay alive, malleable, flexible and free.'
