At Emerson Stage, A Good Mother

My Mother Said I Never Should

by Charllott Keatley

directed by Jayme Koszyn

at the Eemerson Stage's Studio Theatre

through November 9

It was sheer bad luck for the cast of My Mother Said I Never Should that one of the only British reviewers for this newspaper was the one sitting in the Emerson Stage's Studio Theatre on the opening night last Wednesday. Luckily the program informed me that the play is set in Manchester and London; I would have been lost otherwise, as the actresses' accents veered unnervingly between Boston, Northern Ireland and South Africa. Yet once I had gotten used to being whisked from contintent to continent, I was captivated.

Charllott Keatley's My Mother Said I Never Should is a family saga tracking the relationships between mothers and daughters over four generations. But if this description calls up visions of an evening of sick-making emotionalism, don't despair. The script steers well clear of any such dangerous terrain.

This is partly due to its structure rather than following a linear course down the years, Keatley depicts the four women's lives through a series of short scenes cutting cinematically back and forth across the generations. Comparisons between them are consequently made deftly and without recourse to heavy-handed statement or explanation. A scene where Jackie, the second youngest of the four, tells her mother Margaret about her first sexual encounter is followed immediately by Margaret's discussion of her approaching marriage with her own mother. The gulf separating Margaret's experience in the '50s and Jackie's in the '70s is clearly brought into focus here, yet the transition remains primarily of personal rather than political interest.

Jayme Koszyn's direction is consistently admirable. Unlike the actresses' accents, the script's rapid shifts in time and space never become disorienting. Clever use of props and dramatic changes in lighting create maximum mood changes in minimal time: The pace of the production could not be slicker. Sound effects are used to particular advantage. Although the only characters physically on stage are the four women themselves, the presences of the key men in their lives are made apparent through associated noises. Great-grandfather Jack is represented by a lawnmower, for example, with an efficacy which led me to wonder about the possibility of replacing the men in my own life with key recordings.

But at no point is the production hostile to the male members of its audience. In fact at many points the backchat on stage ("You have the curse `till you're an old woman. Then it stops. Then you die.") got more laughs from male than female spectators.

Koszyn keeps the tone of the production so lighthearted that the underlying melancholy of the script is downplayed, if anything. One by one we see the women's high expectations and ideals sacrificed to the routines imposed by domesticity and work. Jennifer McGeorge as Jackie has particular problems at times portraying the character's inner suffering. There are, however, some remarkable performances elsewhere--notably by Vanessa "Barbara" Milton as her mother.

One of the more moving aspects of the production is a recurrent scenario where all four actresses appear as children playing in a wasteland. As the plot develops, the games they invent provide a painful reflection on the relationships between the adult characters. The children representing Jackie and her illegitimate daughter Rosie, for example, become blood sisters. Yet Rosie's comment "You can never lie to me now" has already been disproven by Jackie's inability throughout the play to reveal herself as her mother.

The theme of concealment of maternal identity invites comparison with Caryl Churchill's contemporaneous Top Girls. But in contrast to Churchill's gritty political realism, My Mother Said I Never Should provides a tender and ultimately uplifting perspective on the experience of women in this century. No one who finds themselves on Beacon Hill with a few hours to spare has any excuse not to go.