Mother’s Day, Tony nominees and Judith Light

Photo via http://www.theassembledpartiesbroadway.com/cast.php

What better way to celebrate Mother’s Day than by talking about the Tony nominees, right?

Well, okay, brunch or flowers or even just doing the dishes might be a better option. But, those filial duties performed, I wanted to talk about the fantastic Judith Light in “The Assembled Parties” as part of my commentary on the Tonys. Light’s up for best featured actress in a play in this year’s Tonys for playing a mother herself – one whose conflicted relationship with her daughter, her husband and her sister-in-law inform quite a lot of the action. (To be fair, I also think Jessica Hecht, who plays the sister-in-law in question, should have been nominated for best actress; her own character’s expression of motherhood is simultaneously hopeful, loving, blind, driving, forceful and world-changing.)

Light plays Faye, sister of Ben, wife of Mort, mother of Shelley, sister-in-law of Julie. She is, in other words, a woman defined by her relationships with others. Her brother Ben is something of the family golden child, his marriage to the beautiful and gifted Julie (she was a movie star before her their wedding) the sort of shining match that prompts satisfied head nods from parents everywhere. Faye’s own match with Mort was less planned – a night of hasty sex and an unplanned pregnancy later, the two were wed. Even the children of these marriages reflect these differences, with Ben and Julie the parents of a pair of articulate, charming sons and Faye and Mort the parents of the unambitious, underachieving Shelley.

And yet Faye is, ultimately, the character who grows the most over time, whose transformation (helped by Julie’s own brand of selflessness and obliviousness, generosity and entitlement) opens the play to further possibility. I was lucky enough to see Light last year in “Other Desert Cities,” where she gave a bracing performance as an alcoholic aunt goading her niece into delving into family secrets. Here, her character shares some of that same bitterness, but Light takes the character in a completely different direction.

And yet – there is still Shelley. This is a Mother’s Day post, after all, so let’s not forget that Faye’s relationship with Shelley is also part of her character. I admit, when I saw the play a few weeks ago, I found Shelley the most puzzling character. I wasn’t entirely sure what necessity there was for this character, what she brought to the story as a whole, particularly since her presence in the second act is so limited. But the more I think about this, the more I think that it’s not just Shelley who matters, but her relationships with the other characters, and especially her mother.

This is a play about relationships, after all. No one is defined in isolation. I’m usually the first to bitch when female characters are defined by being wives and mothers instead of being themselves, but in this case, the men are defined in much the same way (and really, it’s the unexpected and revelatory relationship between Julie and Faye that takes the spotlight). So Faye’s relationship with Shelley matters – and it matters because it says something about motherhood in general and Faye’s brand of motherhood in particular. It says something about constructed notions of family, about who we choose to surround ourselves with and how we treat them.

Faye is something of a failure as a mother. She and Shelley are a bad match as a mother and daughter. Does love redeem that? The warm and fuzzy answer is yes; the realistic answer is… well, who knows what that is. They play doesn’t tell us, either. Faye doesn’t know and maybe she doesn’t even ask herself the question. Will Shelley ever be any better as a mother? We don’t learn much about the man she presumably spends her life with. He’s a voice in the background – it’s the women’s relationships that are primary here, even when they’re failures.

This could have been a really clunky role in less skilled hands – choppy and awkward and unbelievable. It’s to Light’s great credit that Faye’s evolution feels both so natural and yet so surprising. I hope the Tony voters reward the empathy and skill and steeliness that Light brings to the stage.

Family and adulthood (and the flu)

I’m home sick for a second day today, which means I’m home whiny. I’m a horrible sick person – I’m impatient, restless, demanding. I’ve spent much of the day trying to control the ingrate cat to spend time with me, or trying to stay awake even though my body just wants rest. I keep eating out of boredom, and the constant snacking has not helped me feel any better. Leftover crispy bean curd does not make good flu food, believe me.

Because I am a whiny sick person, one phrase keeps echoing in my head: I want to go home. I want to go to my parents’ place, which I still think of as home, even though I’ve never lived in the Florida house they’ve now owned for years. But I’ve realized I don’t want to go back there as it is today. I want to go back to this home about, say, six years ago. I want to lie on the plush sofa in the family room, stretched out with a blanket on my lap, a pillow behind my head. I can hear my father asking if I want some scrambled eggs, my mother if I want some yogurt. One or the other brings me water, or a brownie, or finds me the remote. For all that I was in my early 30s at this time, as an only child, I was still the child – the kid of the house, the one to be taken care of. At the age of 31 or so, I still lived in Portland; I hadn’t yet bought a condo or adopted my cat; I was still in my first job after grad school, and my parents still thought I had no real career to speak of.

And my parents, too, were different. My mother was still working as an accountant, a job that required a precision well-suited to her personality. My father, though much older than most dads of people my age, could still easily have been confused with a man 10 or more years his junior. Looking at him, you would never have guessed he had just entered his 9th decade, that he had been born while the first world war was still raging. I think he was even still driving back then, before a series of accidents made clear he was no longer safe on the road. It was still okay for them to take care of me.

Our visits now are different. On a recent visit, I drove my parents each to a number of doctor’s appointments, including getting my father checked for an unburst aneurysm his doctors are monitoring. Another time, I helped sort through their cabinets to toss out expired food; the mountain of cans and packets and dinner mixes filled an entire garbage back. The house is getting to be too much for them; I see small things fraying at the edges, dust in places my mother would never have allowed, a slight tear in the bathroom wallpaper, some peeling paint on an outdoor doorframe. I sort through my childhood books and toys and our family photographs every time I go home now, so that when they inevitably sell the house and move somewhere smaller they will have fewer of my things to burden them. My father used to insist on carrying my luggage when I came home; now I would never let him even try that, because I’m scared he would fall and injure myself.

Someone once told me she knew she was an adult the day she realized good things happen to bad people. For me, I think it took realizing that I’m now the one to take care of my parents. I had the luxury of being a child for a very long time. Now it’s time to put that away.

The gospel of cats and faith

I had no idea what to write today. I’m enjoying blogging, and I want to get better at this. Typically this would mean taking time on my posts, but I think for the beginning, at least, I need to keep posting often, so that I develop the habit of writing here, and writing steadily. There’s no substitution for doing the work, after all, a lesson that is slowly, after a few dozen years of life, sinking in. So I asked myself today: What makes me happy? And the answer was: my cat. Because this is the Internet, I am contractually obligated to post about cats every now and then, so this fits right in.

I started writing a little thingie about how my cat, Regina, has taken to trying to eat my face. Perhaps she’s a closet Walking Dead fan (impressive, since I don’t have cable). Maybe my moisturizer has gone off and now carries a subtle scent of dead fish, kitty’s favorite. Or it could simply be that she’s practicing for the day she gets to eat my corpse when I have a heart attack and die and no one is around to remove my body. Whatever the case, one of these days I might let her have an eyeball or something, just so the poor thing doesn’t feel discouraged.

But the little thingie was somehow not what I wanted to write, really. I did write a line there that I liked: Regina is just a little cat who shares my life.

She is small. She’s maybe 10 pounds – a sliver of what I weigh. She has black fur and green eyes and I get the feeling she is always a little confused about what’s going on, even though she tries to hide it. Loud noises make her jump, she has never tried to escape from the apartment and she once ran away from an ant.

But Regina shares my life with me. She reminds me of the time I saw the Blind Boys of Alabama performing, back at the Waterfront Blues Festival one July in Portland, Ore. Three blind gospel singers, older men, in front of a roaring crowd, thousands of people that the men could not see. They sang, and that was extraordinary enough. But they did more: They started jumping on the stage, up and down, a kind of joyful bounce that looked like they were getting ready to take off and fly someday. They couldn’t see the stage. They couldn’t see the people before them. There was sound everywhere, coming from them, from the musicians behind them, from the monitors, from the crowd. I used to get cranky and disoriented after just a few hours at the blues festival each year, though my then-job as a music critic meant I had to endure the crowds and discomfort anyway.

But there the men were, and their joy was easy to see. I was amazed – try jumping up and down in your living room, with your eyes closed, for a minute. Less than a minute – try doing it for as long as the average television commercial. They did this over and over and over. There was no fear. This was faith, right in front of me. Faith in what wasn’t and isn’t for me to say; for all that the universe takes my breath away sometimes, I’m an atheist, and religion puzzles me. But though faith and religion are often conflated, you can have the former without the latter.

And that’s what Regina has. I used to think of her as a little fearful, because so many things spooked her. But she has faith in me. Once, on the plane ride when we moved back to the United States from New York, I woke up to feel something bumping against my leg. I looked down and saw Regina had somehow escaped her little bag, placed under the seat beside me. A nightmare flashed into my mind, of the pilot having to ground the flight because a cat somehow managed to crawl into some duct or other and threatened to take out an engine.

But instead Regina just looked up at me, then jumped onto my lap. She lay in a quiet ball as I pet her. No one saw us, and after awhile she started to purr.

I am telling you a story

One Christmas, before I learned the virtues of shutting the hell up, my father and I had a loud and bruising fight. I believe he had just referred to my mother as “old bitch,” an epithet he clearly thought was quirky and endearing and which I found indicative of repressed rage, which in turn enraged me. “Don’t ever call her that again, you son of a bitch!” I shouted.

He slammed down the pan he was washing and stalked off immediately to his bedroom. He may have slammed the door. At this point I was so angry I can’t remember. I steamed in the living room instead, almost as mad at his reaction as I was at what he called Mom.

My relationship with my father has been rocky much of my life, maybe because he’s never struck me as particularly suited to fatherhood. When I was a kid, he played with me often, singing “How Much Is That Doggy in the Window” over and over. But it was my mother who made sure my homework was done, my teeth brushed. As a five-year-old, I preferred him, but as I grew older I felt my mom held the family together. Dad was along for the ride, however long that lasted; Mom built the foundation on which we grew.

This is not a good thing for a child to think. Once, I lectured him in a Toys ‘R’ Us when I felt he was letting me buy too many things, telling him that he was the parent and it was his job to say no sometimes. Even when my dad retired, when I was 11, and my mother went back to work, she still knew which classes I was taking, stayed with me in the hospital when I developed a chronic illness, knew all my friends by name. He even left us once for a few days after an argument with my mother.

Let me be clear: He wasn’t a bad father. He was never abusive, he was not neglectful. And he was a much better father to me than he was to the children from his first marriage, who I knew barely spoke to him. But while I always knew that he loved me, that love was a different thing from the bond I shared with my mother. The relationship with my father, for one thing, could bear less weight.

That Christmas, after he had spent hours alone and silent in his room, I finally knocked on his door, then just barged in when he didn’t answer. He sat up in bed; he was wearing an undershirt and shorts. He pulled the comforter over his lap. I had never seen him look so frail before. We talked for a while, and at one point I asked him, “Do you understand what’s happening here?”

“Every bad thing I’ve done is coming back to me,” he said.

Everything. Every bad thing, he thought, was here.

And suddenly I realized my father’s story of himself was completely different from my story of him. Rashomon-like, we had lived through the same events and had come away with memories and feelings and perceptions fundamentally different. And both those versions of my father co-existed in the man in front of me, his grey hair rumpled, his eyes downcast. He was my father and he was himself, and both those people, defined by the same events, were only differentiated by the stories we told ourselves. That was the only difference.

Here, now, I am. Writing down this story. Writing down other stories. Collecting them, some kind of narrative, into a person I present to the world.