All family relationships are complicated. If they weren’t, we could jettison more than half of world literature. Teasing out how each of us can find our way through and make peace with those complex, often frustrating, inescapable relationships has kept readers, theatergoers, and therapists employed for a very long time.
There is one family relationship, though, that has gone largely unexamined, at least on stage: the one between a mother and her gay son. Terrence McNally approached it in “Mothers and Sons” and earlier In “Andre’s Mother,” but those were the stories of a mother attempting to come to terms with her denial and anger. We haven’t seen the kind of close, loving, and, yes, fraught, relationship that seems unique to a gay son and his mother.
That’s certainly what playwright Matthew Lombardo thought as he wrote his latest play, “Conversations with Mother,” now running through May at Theatre 555. The play is a series of conversations between Bobby Collavechio and his mother, Maria over about 30 years. The structure is by design, and in an interview, playwright Lombardo said, “I was just trying to show that life is really just a series of moments.”
Lombardo didn’t want to write an autobiographical play. In fact, he says, “I never planned on writing a play about my mother. But about 10 years ago, I was on the phone with mother, and I thought, ‘no one would ever believe this conversation.’” He posted a summary of it on Facebook, and later added more conversations, and friends told him he should write a play.” Lombardo had no idea how to do that, but then, “a few years later I woke up in the middle of the night, and I realized it doesn’t have to be a linear story. It can be a dozen or so snapshots.”
The resulting play follows the relationship between Bobby and his mother from the time Bobby is eight and miserable at sleepaway camp, through some tumultuous years to finding himself an established, and grown-up man. It’s a journey Bobby and Maria go on together, joined at the hip (metaphorically) and the heart (literally).
Caroline Aaron, known for her performance as another mother in “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” plays Maria, and she’s having a marvelous time. She says that Maria “is the kind of character who lives at the top of her lungs, but everyone knows and accepts that about her. She breaks every rule of being a ‘good parent,’ but their relationship is one of incredible quality.”
Certainly, Maria is often severely challenged as Bobby goes through the throes of being a young, gay man in New York City, but hard as it is, she never gives up on him. Aaron can relate to how tenacious Maria holds on. As a mother in real life, she admits that while “you want them to grow up and be independent, your secret heart, you want them to stay connected throughout your life.”
Tony-winner (for the revival of “Company”) Matt Doyle, who plays Bobby, says that he instantly accepted when he was offered the role.
“The issue,” he says, “is not that Bobby is gay, but that we get to examine the closeness between a mother and a gay son. My siblings say that all the time; they don’t know why I’m so much closer to our mom.”
Asked why he thinks that might be the case, he says that when you come out at an early age (Doyle was around 16 when his mother initiated that difficult conversation.), “there’s an intimacy that breaks barriers and really opens a friendship between a mother and a child when you have to be so forward and personal at a young age.”
Doyle adds that Maria is Bobby’s closest constant in his life, as, he says, his own mother is. As Bobby goes through his life, Maria is not just his mother, she’s his closest constant companion. “She’s always going to show up for him,” Doyle says. “She never judges him, and even shows up in the harshest moments, and just by the influence and constantly showing up, that’s what makes him the grounded man he becomes.”
Along those lines, in speaking of his own mother, Lombardo says, “My mother and I talk in a way that she doesn’t necessarily talk with my brother and sisters. We share more about feelings and explore the emotional attachment.” When he came out to his mother, Lombardo adds, “It wasn’t just telling her I was gay. I was educating her. I’m like every other person. It’s just that I love men.
“As gay men we go through a lot — and we continue to go through a lot. I think we’re survivors. I think that [when we come out] there’s a freedom that we’ll never give up again.”
Aaron, Doyle, and Lombardo all stress the importance of connection as the most important element of the relationship between Bobby and Maria, and, as Aaron says, “We need stories about connection right now.”
Doyle added that in his own family after the last election, “my dad looked at us and said it’s time to connect with each other. If we can do that, we’ll be all right.”
At once hilarious and touching, “Conversations with Mother” is, for all its delightful theatricality, very real and very human. You can’t help but wonder whether the levels of honesty and vulnerability and sharing the sometimes messy/often joyful process of life are what make the connection of a mother and a gay son so strong here…and hereafter.
You owe it to yourself to see this play and find out.
“Conversations with Mother” | Theater 555 | 555 West 4nd Street | Weds-Sat 7 p.m.; Thurs, Sat, Sun 2 p.m. through May 11 | $49-$159 at Venuetix.com |85 minutes, no intermission
