A man of impending middle age identified as Son (the longtime Wooster Group member Ari Fliakos) stands in a white bedroom (Marsha Ginsberg’s set gently suggests a transitional area between home, hospital and some kind of metaphysical limbo state).
The son, who is eventually referred to as Andy, is watching an older woman, Mother (Caroline Lagerfelt). She is dressed in a robe and nightgown and lying on a bed, propped up on pillows. Through most of the show, he describes his mother’s personality and routine in the present tense, as if providing a voice-over narration. Fliakos’ miking gives his voice a slightly disembodied quality. It’s a simple theatrical trick, and quietly effective, but it also inserts a slightly alienating distance. (Peter Mills Weiss did the sound design.)
The mother lives in the same East Village apartment where she raised her child (and a few blocks from this play’s venue). He’s still in the neighborhood so he visits regularly, and tells us what he sees: “Smoking. Reading. The weather channel is on, muted.” And later: “She draws the smoke in deep, then releases. She draws in and closes her eyes.” (The mother has a lifelong habit; we are told that even her books smell of smoke.)
The son always — well, almost always — speaks in soft, neutral tones as he guides us through his mother’s life. The pair chat, but not directly: It’s as if we were hearing one end of a phone conversation. The woman gives off an impression of calm, elegant composure, with a hint of impish humor. We learn she was a theater buff and is still capable of strong opinions: “Neil LaBute? Oh, come on now,” she says. “He is the worst.”
Knud Adams directs this production for the Play Company and Andy Bragen Theater Projects, which is presented by Next Door at New York Theater Workshop. The audience sits on both sides of the stage, adding intimacy to the already small venue. At the same time, the text’s observational tone and Fliakos’ dispassionate delivery maintain a sense of distance, which can feel overprotective of both characters. We are with them, but at a remove, as if they were in a documentary.
Inevitably, the mother deteriorates. “Her mind is going,” her son says, describing “some kind of softening, an inability to focus.”
It gets worse, and Bragen spares us few of the indignities of old age. By the end, the son’s emotions are harder to describe in tidy little sentences. The show comes alive just as death enters.
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Additional Information:
“Notes on My Mother’s Decline”Through Oct. 27 at Fourth Street Theater, Next Door at New York Theater Workshop, Manhattan; 212-460-5475, nytw.org. Running time: 1 hour, 15 minutes.
This article originally appeared in
.