Last day of theatergoing in New York for me this trip, and another doubleheader.
In 1990, during the height of the AIDS epidemic, Terrence McNally expanded a brief play into a made-for-public-television movie, Andre’s Mother, about an intractable woman grieving over the death of her gay son. It has now been expanded further, updated and produced on Broadway with the new title, Mothers and Sons.
Many of the reviews have been underwhelming, but I fell for it, happily manipulated into sniffling by the final curtain. Tyne Daly is terrific as a tough widow from Dallas who has come to New York to confront her son’s former lover, accusing him of being responsible for his death.
The lover (Frederick Weller) is now married, to a writer (Bobby Steggert), and together they have a 6-year-old son. McNally certainly has a pro-gay political agenda here, but he wraps it inside a very human, affecting evening of theater.
Unfortunately, Mothers and Sons, which has only been open a month by now, is limping along at the box office and needs a few Tony wins to survive much longer. That probably won’t happen, but the four-character, one-set play is bound to have an afterlife in regional theaters.
In the evening, I headed to Greenwich Village to a one-man off-Broadway comedy that had just opened when I was in New York a year ago. It’s Buyer & Cellar, a slight, but amusing performance piece about a out-of-work actor hired by Barbra Streisand to work in her basement where she has created and stocked a complete shopping mall for a single customer — herself.
A ridiculous premise, you say? Perhaps, but such a string of subterranean stores just may exist, it you believe what she wrote in a coffee table book titled My Passion for Design. Puckish actor Christopher J. Hanke tells us up front that the play is fictional, but then proceeds to persuade us that the mega-talented Streisand is just crazy enough — and surely rich enough — to construct and staff such a retail complex for herself.
In any event, playwright Jonathan Tolins (The Twilight of the Golds) playfully considers “what if” with a gay character who idolizes La Barbra, but finds that being in close proximity with her is not the dream job he thought it would be. After 11 plays and musicals, from heavy dramas to overblown musicals to well-crafted and otherwise new works, Buyer & Cellar is a welcome bit of dessert to cap the week.
Tomorrow: Dim sum in Chinatown and flying to Florida (neither of which are play titles, fortunately)