Mother Play Is Paula Vogel’s Theatrical Tribute to Her Late Mother and Brother

Mother Play is the play Paula Vogel has been trying to write for decades — but even as it’s getting ready to open cold on Broadway (the first play of hers to do so), she’s not feeling like the pressure is on.

“I’m more relaxed than I thought I would be,” Vogel remarks during tech rehearsals at Second Stage’s Helen Hayes Theater with some amount of disbelief. “I have a complete trust in all the collaborators and it’s happening organically, so I’m just going with it. I do drink a martini on critics’ weekend. Vodka.”

That martini will be well-deserved: amid illustrious writing and teaching careers, Mother Play is perhaps Vogel’s most personal, and autobiographical, play yet (in the text, it’s gin that’s swilled). Loosely based on her childhood experiences, the dark comedy follows Vogel’s mother Phyllis (played by Jessica Lange), her brother Carl (Jim Parsons), and Vogel herself, renamed Martha (Celia Keenan-Bolger), as they move from apartment to apartment in the DC metro area, circa the 1960s. Along the way, Carl and Martha start forging their own path, much to Phyllis’s disdain.

“I’ve been calling this play Mother Play for 15 years. I wanted that title because it’s my mother play,” Vogel says, matter-of-factly. “It resonates in a different way at this moment in time, since we now use “mother” as a superlative.” And in her catalog of works, this one might just be the mother of them all, serving somewhat as an origin story for both The Baltimore Waltz, about a sister imagining a trip to Europe to shield herself from her brother’s impending death from AIDS, and How I Learned to Drive, where a young woman recounts the sexual abuse she faced at the hands of her uncle.

“My mother really enjoyed How I Learned to Drive, which she saw right before she died,” the playwright remembers. “She just laughed so much at her own character, and I thought ‘Well, ok, let me give you more lines, mom. I really think my mother would be honored. I’m honored, for me as well as her, that Jessica Lange us doing this. She is one of the GOATs. She comes in, absorbs what everyone is giving, and then, in her typical style, she tops it.”

Much of the play is the back-and-forth between the devoted siblings; in life, as in both Mother Play and The Baltimore Waltz, Vogel lost her brother Carl to AIDS in 1988. “There’s so much homage to Tennessee Williams and Paul Zindel and Gypsy, because that’s how my brother and I communicated. We literally were at the kitchen table quoting The Glass Menagerie at each other.” There’s even a section of Mother Play where Phyllis harangues her landlord on the phone, much like Amanda Wingfield. “I think phone calls are one of the mandatory elements of a memory play,” Vogel notes, ever the teacher.

Those who know her work, or at least, those who’ve read her published plays cover-to-cover, might notice a familiar-sounding monologue late in the play, where the Carl character, who is actively dying, instructs Martha on what he’d like for his funeral. Filled with humor and heartbreak, it reads like it was specifically written with Parsons’s matter-of-fact vocal cadences in mind. In reality, it was penned by the real Carl Vogel as a letter to his sister before death, and it’s included in the published text of The Baltimore Waltz. “There’s no such thing as true autobiography on stage. It’s not possible to do in any form, I think. But there’s this sense of, ‘Is there any way that I can have Carl speak for himself?’ I’m really delighted that we figured out how to do this, and it works beautifully. Carl was such a great writer and Jim is magnificent. He always is, but in this role, he’s just mesmerizing.”

The Mother Play process has accelerated very quickly by theater standards. After gestating in Vogel’s mind for 15 years, she finally wrote it over a three-week period in December 2022. Landau came on board instantaneously (they last worked together on A Civil War Christmas at New York Theatre Workshop in 2012). Second Stage did a reading of it last April, “and here we are a year later,” as Vogel says. Working with Landau has tempered Vogel’s initial set of nerves: “I love being in the room with her. She is so positive. I’m in the hands of the very best in the field.”

After all these years, Vogel is enjoying herself. But with this company, how can she not? “The last time I opened cold in New York was How I Learned to Drive [at the Vineyard Theatre in 1997]. For me, that’s tremendously exciting. And the fact that I get to hear and discover these characters in the mouths of Jessica Lange, Jim Parsons, and Celia Keenan-Bolger isn’t the worst fate. There is a rollercoaster of emotions that we always feel in the theater. The highs may not be as high and the lows not as low, but the ride is still a lot of fun.”