Jan. 28--Terrence McNally, the author of such celebrated works of drama as "Love! Valour! Compassion!," "Master Class" and "Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune," and the bookwriter of such musicals as "Ragtime," "The Full Monty" and "Kiss of the Spider Woman," is talking about mothers and sons.
"Mother and son really is the most direct flow of unconditional love between two people," he says, over the phone. "I can never understand why mothers cannot always just love their children."
McNally is speaking about a particular moment in American history -- the AIDS crisis, at its peak around a quarter of a century ago. At the time, there were many mothers (and fathers) angry with their gay children and alienated from them. The separation was often manifest at the funerals of sons who never reached middle age. Anyone who was around at the time, and who went to too many of them, can recall glimpses of parents sitting awkwardly in the pews, unsure about how to process their grief, unable to join in the celebration of their son's life. That is assuming the parents were there at the funeral.
"Many was the time 25 years ago," McNally said, "that I had to call a mother and father and tell them not only that their son had died from AIDS, but that he was gay. That was the kind of denial we all were living in back then. That was the level of secrecy and shame that caused so many families to become strangers to their children, to end up knowing less about their own son than his friends. This has been the whole relationship of America to minority groups. We just put them in the drawer and hoped they would go away."
So. That was then. (Mostly.) Where are those parents now? And, more importantly, as the world spins on and marriage equality has arrived, how are they feeling?
That, in essence, is the subject of McNally's play "Mothers Sons," which opens Friday night in its Chicago-area premiere at the Northlight Theatre in Skokie. The play revolves around one such mother -- to be played at Northlight by the widely admired Chicago actress Cindy Gold -- who goes to New York many years after her son's death from AIDS, visits his former partner and finds him involved in a new relationship. Actually, "relationship" is not the half of it. Today, a relationship can mean marriage.
I saw "Mothers Sons" on Broadway in 2014, starring Tyne Daly, where it received strangely mixed reviews (to my mind, anyway), given that it felt like such an important play -- a drama asking questions that I'd never really heard asked before on a stage. For some of us, it is like those anguished parents went out into the night and never returned to the big city. Although life teaches us that hardly was the case.
"My own mother was dead by the time I wrote this play, and I'm not much of an autobiographical writer," McNally said. "But this play certainly is to some extent my working out my relationship with my own mother. After it opened in New York, a number of young gay people said to me things like 'we've no idea what you had to live through.' I mean, this was not World War II. This was not 100 years ago. But still they do not know. I urgently wanted to express what has happened in these past 25 years for gay men and women, and how much we've pushed under the rug without wanting to have a conversation about. The writing felt cathartic."
So "Mothers Sons," which is directed by Steve Scott, is partly a history lesson, but also a reconciliation play with a past recent history that is rather uglier, perhaps, than some of us like to think. Yet its depiction of the bereaved Texas mother is not one dimensional.
"I wanted to write a real mother," McNally said. "A real person. I cannot imagine what the loss of a beloved child is to a parent."
A loss, of course, without an end.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@tribpub.com
