When the Lollapalooza rock tour lumbered through town, there weren’t very many mothers to be found amid the cheerfully countercultural crowd (one would only have lost credibility taking Mom to such a self-consciously hip event). But even the most rebellious offspring has a twinge of sentimentality around Mother’s Day, a Sunday when numerous industries conspire to make anyone unfocused on the importance of maternity feel like a heartless piece of stone.
Hence “Mommapalooza!,” the Rivendell Theatre Ensemble’s timely attempt to persuade all of those people thinking about their mom (or about why they became a mom) to head to the Footsteps Theatre on or after May 10.
“We decided to commission six local playwrights to write 10-to-20-minute plays on the theme of motherhood,” says Tara Mallen, Rivendell’s artistic director. “Everyone we approached loved the idea.”
Rivendell is a small but ambitious troupe that has long supported local scribes. Its well-received previous productions include the premiere of Anne McGravie’s recently published “Wrens,” a wartime drama about women serving in the British Navy; Richard Strand’s “My Simple City,” a play that attracted national attention; and Sally Nemeth’s “Holy Days,” a riveting drama about life in the dust bowl during the Depression.
McGravie, Nemeth and Strand are three of the writers who have contributed short plays to “Mommapalooza!”: the others are Christian Stolte (a multitalented young fellow who can currently be seen in the Steppenwolf Theatre’s production of “The Man Who Came to Dinner”), S.L. Daniels and Lisa Dillman.
But if you’re expecting storks, flowers, hugs and emotional reunions (the kind of sentimental stuff that would ease the digestion of a Mother’s Day brunch), this may not be the show for you. If a theater company asks theater writers to do whatever they want on a theme, they tend to avoid cliches like the plague.
“My piece,” says McGravie, a mature woman whose gentle demeanor covers up a wicked sense of the dark side of life, “is a short monologue about an older woman who is in jail for murdering her sweet children. She beats them to death with her rolling pin.”
You won’t see lines from this playlet on a greetings card, which is just fine with McGravie. “If we were going to put up something that’s all hearts and flowers,” she says (in her motherly way), “what would be the point of that?”
“This is not an easy subject,” says Ann Boyd, the director with the job of tying all of these disparate works together. “Each person comes to the idea of motherhood with very personal and deep feelings.”
Other writers’ takes here include children coming home to help their mother die, women in a doctor’s waiting room contemplating the possibility of motherhood, troubled mother-daughter encounters, and kids dealing with the loss of their mom.
“Even if your relationship with your mother is good and strong,” says Boyd, “it’s not necessarily easy. The web of ties and dependency is so strong. Even as adults, many of us are still dealing with our initial relationship with the person who brought us into the world.”
Boyd is a highly creative conceptual artist (she was recently responsible for “The Overcoat” at the Lifeline Theatre and several excellent Powertap Productions shows), and she has the job here of unifying very disparate short plays. She says that Rivendell will be adding little dramatic interludes in between each of the plays, as well as creating a lobby installation in the Footsteps Theatre encouraging audience members to interact with the art on display and muse further on their connections with their own mothers.
Concerning the plays, “we honestly thought we could get little romantic things,” admits a surprised but pleased Mallen. “When I first read them all, there was one thing I wanted to ask the playwrights: `What kind of a family did you come from?”‘
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If you have driven often down Halsted Street, you will likely have seen the ongoing metamorphosis of the parking garage next to the Steppenwolf Theatre. Even though the facility still looks unfinished, the ground-level interior area has been turned into a rehearsal room hidden from the street by curtains. For the first time this weekend, the “garage at steppenwolf” will become the company’s third public performance space (for now, at least) as the troupe presents the American premiere of Hilary Bell’s one-act, “Wolf Lullaby.” It’s another very dark but nonetheless timely take on contemporary familial relations — parents are forced to confront the brutal possibility that their 9-year-old daughter may be a murderer.
A native of Australia currently living in New York and studying playwriting at Julliard with Chris Durang and Marsha Norman, Bell is clearly thrilled that the first major American production of one of her works is taking place at Steppenwolf (even if it is in a parking garage she generously describes as “very funky”). But Bell is a young writer with very serious things to say.
“So many people are a hair’s breadth away from either committing murder or being murdered as a child,” the playwright mused during a recent visit to Chicago.
“My play rejects the idea of a bad seed,” she said, explaining that the idea for the play came from the real-life outrage provoked in England by two young boys who tortured and killed a small child. “No one is born evil. Too often, society ignores children crying for help.”
