Some mothers eat their young.
Few homo sapiens do so literally, but some of the best playwrights, including Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams, have created women incapable of nurturing their children.
In his new play, “Mama’s Boy,” Rob Urbinati has created a monster of a matriarch. Marguerite Oswald, mother of Lee Harvey Oswald, is part Mary Tyrone, part Amanda Wingfield with a dash of Medea thrown in. She is motherhood on steroids — lovingly overbearing, smothering her sons with an unnatural kind of nurture.
“Mama’s Boy,” which is receiving its world premiere at Good Theater company, the resident troupe at the St. Lawrence Arts Center in Portland, is a searing new edition to the canon of American plays that illuminate the destructive turn motherhood can take. The playwright uses the relationship between Lee and his mother not as a lens through which he tries to psychoanalyze the assassin but as a way to present a classic but toxic mother-son relationship.
The two-act play is not a historical drama, but it gives audiences a new twist on the story of President John F. Kennedy’s assassin. Urbinati can stand beside O’Neill and Williams in showing the destruction inflicted in the name of familial love. Act One takes place in 1962, after Lee returned from Russia with his wife, Marina, and infant daughter. The second act is focused on the days immediately after Kennedy’s shooting.
Although Urbinati is not recreating verbatim conversations among members of the Oswald family, the playwright does rely on historical facts that are known about the family.
Marguerite mothered three sons: John, Robert and Lee. The two younger boys’ father died before the youngest was born. Each of them at some point cuts off all contact with their mother. John is spoken of but does not appear in “Mama’s Boy,” but Robert, along with Lee and his wife, do.
Director Brian P. Allen and the playwright share a vision that shines a bright light into the dark closets of a family thrust into the annals of history. Allen ratchets up the pace as each scene unfolds as he keeps the actors moving on the simple set that serves as apartments, homes and motel rooms.
The director perfectly choreographs the emotional dance Marguerite leads her sons and daughter-in-law through. Allen lets the play move to a fever pitch climax but never allows it or mama Marguerite to become shrill.
Betsy Aidem’s Marguerite is fierce. The New York City actress manages to wring sympathy from the audience for this woman, who never tires of telling everyone how much she has sacrificed for her family, how difficult being a single mother has been and how ungrateful her sons are for all she has done for them in the name of motherly love.
In the hands of a less sensitive actress, Marguerite easily could have become a one-dimensional shrew. Aidem’s often manic portrayal offers insight into but never excuses or explains Lee’s actions on Nov. 22, 1963. She gives a powerhouse of a performance but never overpowers her colleagues on stage and leaves theatergoers wondering how she infused this monster of a mother with so much humanity.
Chicago-based actor Graham Emmons looks a bit like Lee, but it is the inner torment he brings to the character that make his portrayal so mesmerizing. Emmons’ waltz, figuratively and literally, with Marguerite is at times agonizing to watch as he tries to accomplish the impossible — to love Marguerite and breathe at the same time.
Laurel Casillo of New York City is charming as Marina, the young woman Lee met and married when he lived in the Soviet Union between 1959 and May 1962. Marina speaks Russian but little English in the early scenes. Quickly, she falls in love with all things American but never really understands the odd Oswald family dynamics. Casillo brings depth to what may be an underwritten role.
As Robert, Erik Moody of Lewiston brings a calm normalcy to the family and tries to shield his mother and sister-in-law from the press after Lee is killed. Moody plays Robert as a man who has struggled mightily to free himself from Marguerite’s grasp only to be pulled back into a tangled web of maternal devotion because of his brother’s actions, which he finds incomprehensible. Moody’s Robert is a surprisingly compassionate man but one overwhelmed by circumstance and history. He is the man Lee might have been.
The technical crew for “Mama’s Boy,” including set designer Craig Robinson, costume designer Justin Cote and lighting designer Iain Odlin do a fine job with the black-box, 200 or so seat space. The photographs of the exterior of building in Fort Worth and Dallas, including the Texas School Book Depository from which Lee fired the fatal shots, give the play a sense of place. It also shows the audience that while the Oswald family is dealing with their own issues inside houses, apartments and motel rooms, the world was seeing something far different.
“Mama’s Boy” is a triumph for the playwright and Good Theater company. This play double-dog dares audience members to deny that it reflects, even in a tiny way, the damage done in their own families
“Mama’s Boy” runs through Nov. 22 at the St. Lawrence Arts Center, 76 Congress St., Portland. For more information, call 885-5883 or visit goodtheater.com.