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On Opening Night, Relishing a Label Debate
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/27/fashion/opening-night-for-terrence-mcnallys-broadway-play-mothers-and-sons.html?_r=0What do you call the same-sex significant other in your life? Husband or wife? Lover? Partner? The actor Victor Garber said it still leads to awkwardness.
“Someone once said to me, ‘Do you have a special friend?’ ” said Mr. Garber, who has a long-term (here’s another option) male companion. “Talk about going back to another time: special friend?”
That was one of the topics Monday night as Broadway veterans came out for opening night of Terrence McNally’s latest play, “Mothers and Sons,” at the John Golden Theater. (“It’s like a fur convention here,” one attendee said.)
Nathan Lane, F. Murray Abraham and Gay and Nan Talese were all there. So was Diane von Furstenberg, as the play has gotten a bit of a fashion push with the Barneys New York chief executive, Mark Lee, and the power fashion publicist Ed Filipowski as co-producers. (At a preview last week, the designers Narciso Rodriguez, Jack McCollough, Lazaro Hernandez and Joseph Altuzarra were all present.)
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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/25/theater/mothers-and-sons-an-aids-tale-starring-tyne-daly.html
Mothers and Sons Tyne Daly and Frederick Weller in this play at the Golden Theater in Manhattan. Credit Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
The curtain rises on two people frozen in what feels like a thaw-proof silence. Their eyes are fixed straight ahead, and the possibility of even their gazes’ intersecting seems remote; forget about a meeting of minds. With these figures implacably embodied by Tyne Daly and Frederick Weller in Terrence McNally’s “Mothers and Sons,” any dialogue that might occur seems destined to be nasty, brutish and short.
Yet a conversation is going to happen, as surely as Gary Cooper faced down his enemies in “High Noon.” It has to. These people have so very, very much to say. More to the point, so does Mr. McNally, a probing and enduring dramatist who has set out to take the pulse of a gay American subculture several decades after the plague that altered its form and content forever.
“Mothers and Sons,” which opened on Monday night at the John Golden Theater in an impeccably acted production directed by Sheryl Kaller, is wrapped in a sense of urgency that paradoxically saps it as a drama. It wears its significance defiantly and a bit stiffly, rather as Ms. Daly’s character, a Dallas matron visiting Manhattan, wears the big, blocky fur coat in which we first see her.
Mothers and Sons Tyne Daly and Frederick Weller in this play at the Golden Theater in Manhattan. Credit Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
The curtain rises on two people frozen in what feels like a thaw-proof silence. Their eyes are fixed straight ahead, and the possibility of even their gazes’ intersecting seems remote; forget about a meeting of minds. With these figures implacably embodied by Tyne Daly and Frederick Weller in Terrence McNally’s “Mothers and Sons,” any dialogue that might occur seems destined to be nasty, brutish and short.
Yet a conversation is going to happen, as surely as Gary Cooper faced down his enemies in “High Noon.” It has to. These people have so very, very much to say. More to the point, so does Mr. McNally, a probing and enduring dramatist who has set out to take the pulse of a gay American subculture several decades after the plague that altered its form and content forever.
“Mothers and Sons,” which opened on Monday night at the John Golden Theater in an impeccably acted production directed by Sheryl Kaller, is wrapped in a sense of urgency that paradoxically saps it as a drama. It wears its significance defiantly and a bit stiffly, rather as Ms. Daly’s character, a Dallas matron visiting Manhattan, wears the big, blocky fur coat in which we first see her.
