`Night Mother

The last night Jessie Cates spends at home is pretty much like the rest of her life: she makes plans, but they don't work out. Before her suicide, she plans to give her mom Thelma a manicure and enjoy a cup of hot cocoa. The cocoa doesn't turn out to be satisfying, and there isn't enough time to do the manicure before Jessie is scheduled to pull the trigger. Such is life, you say, but Jessie has leaped to the conclusion that nothing will ever work out for her. She wants to get off now before the train proceeds to a worse place. Thelma is horrified, angry, and guilty. Worst of all, she is physically powerless to stop her daughter from carrying out her suicide. So she must convince Jessie that her life is worth prolonging - supply the reason for living that Jessie herself can't find. Or she must somehow demolish the reason Jessie has found for quitting on life.

Well, perhaps no one reason is sufficient either way. But Jessie's action might have been plausible enough if Edie Falco, of Sopranos fame, had animated her with some sort of mania, impulsiveness or instability. A more steely determination would have helped. Instead there's a gray serenity too rarely pierced by frustration, anger, or passion. In her Broadway debut as Thelma, British actress Brenda Blethyn's accent wandered from the South to the Midwest and to parts unknown. But when she forgot about sounding American in the heat of the moment, unleashing a mother's primal plea for what was hers -- her child! -- I felt Blethyn ripping out pieces of my heart. Maybe this wasn't the right time to revive such a bleak, despairing play. Or maybe back in 1983, playwright Marsha Norman gave Jessie one reason too many for her decision, namely her epilepsy. Watching Falco and Blethyn playing out their battle, I kept hearing a repellent suggestion that an epileptic's life wasn't worth living. Whatever the reason, this revival gave up the ghost on January 9, 2005.