Long, long ago, while in Boston the weekend of a Yale-Harvard Game, I had the chance to see the stage version of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, starring Mary Tyler Moore and Richard Chamberlain, in its pre-Broadway form. I didn’t go, which is a pity. It was one of the all-time spectacular flops, and I could have been among the privileged few to have viewed it.
Since then, I’ve never seen a New York-bound play in out-of-town tryouts, until last Sunday, that is. Being in Olympia, Washington, I attended the eighth-ever performance of Sins of the Mother, a new play by Israel Horovitz. The world premiere is being presented by Harlequin Productions, a local company that rises well above the “community theater” level. Mr. Horovitz, while visiting relatives in Washington State, became acquainted with it and was sufficiently impressed to offer it one of his new works.
The play is not entirely new. Act One was originally a stand-alone, produced several years back as part of a double bill. Act Two is a sequel, set several months after the first act’s melodramatic close, with almost the same four member, all-male cast. (One character is replaced by his twin brother.) The central figure in both parts, the “Mother” of the title, is off-stage, for the simple reason that she died 25 or 30 years earlier. The action revolves around the reasons for her death and the way in which her son’s return to his home town unburies long latent hostilities.
The author calls this a “working class play”, and my first thought as I left the theater was, Why does he hate the working class so much? The characters are interesting and well-drawn, but none of them is agreeable, much less virtuous. I suppose that Mr. Horovitz, as a standard issue liberal (his photo in the program shows him sporting an Obama t-shirt), can’t imagine workers as anything but pathetic victims, and pathetic victims are hardly ever people one can admire.
The play has many virtues. The dialogue is particularly sharp. It moves the plot along with only minimal forcing and flashes with surprising humor. The story line is not strikingly original, but it also isn’t predictable. At least, I didn’t predict it. The acting is first rate. Scott C. Brown stands out as a man nearing old age under a burden of guilt, Brian Claudio Smith as identical twins who loathe each other and whose lives have taken opposite trajectories.
The one serious weakness: While each act is coherent on its own, taken together they suffer inconsistencies that add up to a gaping plothole. The playwright will, one hopes, undertake the necessary repair work before he ventures to the vicinity of Broadway. With just a little doctoring, Sins of the Mother will last unto more than one generation.
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