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'Night, Mother

Anna Maria Gillespie stars in "'night, Mother"

Torn Space Theater, which performs at the Adam Mickiewicz Dramatic Circle on Fillmore Avenue, has made its reputation with avant-garde theater. With Marsha Norman’s 1983 play, ’night, Mother, however, they strike square at the center of the mainstream with a Pulitzer Prize winning Broadway drama.

Originally starring Kathy Bates and Anne Pitoniak, ’night, Mother follows one evening in the lives of mother and daughter Jessie and Thelma Cates. Shocking in 1983, on this particular evening, Jessie reveals to her mother her plan to commit suicide—that same night. The rest of the play involves the two exploring the history of their relationship, old memories and family secrets, all while Jessie mundanely explains how she has prepared for the big event and Thelma works to convince her daughter not to commit the deed.

There have been several local productions of this play with Roz Cramer, Betty Lutes, Lisa Ludwig and others variously embodying the characters that Bates and Pitoniak reportedly implanted indelibly into the memories of the original audiences. At Torn Space, Sharon Strait plays mother; Anna Maria Gillespie plays daughter. In a play that allows actors to tear up the stage with a tour de force, the pair takes full use of the opportunity. Each gives a strong and clearly defined performance.

But acting is not the element that distinguishes this ’night, Mother. Director Dan Shanahan has taken a surprisingly hard-edged approach with a play that has historically been seen as an emotional tug-o-war between mother and daughter and a modern agon on the justifiability of suicide. Torn Space, however, as their very name suggests, looks at the world with a much less forgiving eye.

Designed by Shanahan and Melissa Meola, the play is set in a stylized never-world of primary colors and hard, modern surfaces. Foreboding electronic music accompanies Jessie each time she approaches the site of her intended suicide. But the biggest difference between this production and every other I have seen is in Sharon Strait’s harsh and largely unsympathetic portrayal of Thelma, the mother. More youthful and energetic than any Thelma I have seen, Strait enters the scene in a running suit. More than manipulative, the character’s claims to physical infirmity seem like the complete and total lies of a self-centered harridan. Here is a woman who has undebatably contributed to her daughter’s suicide and who would be very difficult to forgive on any account.

The result is that Thelma’s pleadings that her daughter not kill herself do not seem to originate from the mixed emotions of motherly love and personal need. If her pleading seems sympathetic at all, it is only for being so infantile.

This setup leaves for a complicated resolution of the play. If you are one of the three people in the theater-going world who does not know the conclusion of ’night, Mother, stop reading now, for I am about to reveal it. By the time Jesse utters her haunting final line, “’night, Mother,” her signal that she is about to lock herself in her room and shoot herself in the head, Thelma has reached a place of personal realization. At Torn Space, however, it is difficult, quite, to know what this realization might be. To start, time itself has changed the play, as attitudes toward suicide have changed remarkably in the more than 20 years since it was written. The introduction of Prozac alone, in 1986, created a sea-change in attitudes towards and expectations for the treatment of depression. This suicide, prompted by a life of undiagnosed epilepsy and undeniable disappointment, seems especially unnecessary in 2006.

As Thelma hears the shot and claws, screaming, at the locked door that stands between herself and the daughter whose life she has ruined, what can she be thinking? This resolution, as staged by Shanahan, is deliberately bleak and without absolution. Though Jesse denies it repeatedly, her final act does seem like one of passive-aggressive punishment. In the final assessment, this ’night, Mother seems to be the story of the futility, the anger and the co-dependency at the core of so many modern family relationships.