My Mother's Brief Affair

[edjames]

Opened last night. Starring Linda Lavin in one of her recurring Jewish Mother roles, this play by Richard Greenberg at MTC portrays Lavin as a Jewish mother from LI and her relationship with her twin children (boy & girl).

I can't really say I was enamored with the play. I thought it was never came together.

I love Linda and she is very good in her role. As she lays dying (for what the author tells us is a recurring event) her children uncover a secret affair. The play moves back and forth between the current day and the time she had the affair.

 

I think Ben Brantley's review was fair and honest:

 

Review: ‘Our Mother’s Brief Affair,’ a Play About Unmoored Lives

 

By BEN BRANTLEYJAN. 20, 2016

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From left, Kate Arrington, Greg Keller, Linda Lavin and John Procaccino

• Every mother is Greta Garbo to her children, at least upon occasion. The woman you were closest to in the world, the one who weaned and wiped you, could suddenly seem so ravishingly remote it was scary. What was really on her mind those nights she tucked you into bed, deliciously lipsticked and perfumed for an evening out?
   
  Such is the enigma who presides over “Our Mother’s Brief Affair,” Richard Greenberg’s untethered play about unmoored lives, which opened on Wednesday night at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, starring a marvelous Linda Lavin. Her name is Anna, and while she has a way of wearing a Burberry trench coat with a certain je ne sais quoi, this Long Island housewife would be few people’s idea of a glamorous sphinx.
  But to the twins she gave birth to and reared in a state of otherwise-engaged preoccupation, Anna is a tantalizing unknown, especially as she nears death. “Who was she?” asks her son, Seth (an anxiously neutral Greg Keller), as the play begins. Seth works as an obituary writer but can’t begin to sum up this particular life.
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  Linda Lavin and John Procaccino in “Our Mother’s Brief Affair.”
   
  He gropes for the words and comes up with one of those sparkling gems that Mr. Greenberg delivers with such gratifying frequency. We should think of Seth’s mother as we might of Julie Andrews: “Tundra or hearth? It’s impossible to tell.” One look at Ms. Lavin’s face — amused and rueful, resigned and impatient at the same time — and you know exactly what he means.
   
  It can’t be easy for anyone to live up to Mr. Greenberg’s analytical eloquence, especially in a lyrical memory play in which the object of his descriptions is often required to stand mute and embody what’s being said about her. Yet throughout this Manhattan Theater Club production, directed a shade too tentatively by Lynne Meadow, Ms. Lavin’s poses unfailingly match, and even amplify, Mr. Greenberg’s exquisite prose.
   
  Anna is but the latest addition to a memorable gallery of sharp-tongued Jewish mothers created by Ms. Lavin during the past several decades. It’s a pairing of performer and part that by rights we should be tired of. Yet this resourceful actress keeps proving there’s more than one way to skin a stereotype, even within the confines of broad comedy, in plays ranging from Neil Simon’s “Broadway Bound” (1986) to Nicky Silver’s “The Lyons”(2011).
   
  But none of those roles asked quite as much of her as Anna, who is required to exist in both middle and old age, in recollection and reality, sometimes all at once. Ms. Lavin fulfills these demands with such thoroughness and subtlety that I wish the play that surrounds her were more compellingly realized.
   
  “Our Mother’s Brief Affair” is the sort of everyday detective story in which the prolific Mr. Greenberg has long specialized, in works that include the excellent “Three Days of Rain” and “The Assembled Parties.” In this latest offering, too, he juxtaposes a generational then and now to consider how little we know about the lives that impinge upon and shape our own.
   
  The setup is fairly simple. Mom is on her deathbed (one of many deathbeds, it turns out), and she has a secret she needs to disclose to her semi-beloved children, Seth and his sister, Abby (Kate Arrington, very good). Make that several secrets, to be delivered in attention-grabbing installments, as in a cliffhanger serial.
   
  The first of these previously untold stories is that suggested by the play’s title. When Seth was 15 (or was it 12?), and Mom was accompanying him to Manhattan from Long Island for his viola classes at Juilliard, Anna was conducting afternoon trysts with a man (John Procaccino) she met on a Central Park bench.
  
  • As he approaches the second act, though, Mr. Greenberg introduces a screeching plot twist, culled from the pages of Cold War history, that upsets the play’s delicate balance. It’s not that this revelation doesn’t fit his overall scheme; but it requires unwieldy exposition and analysis that rip the gossamer-spun mood.
     
    If the production’s confidence falters, Ms. Lavin’s performance never does. You’ve no doubt seen characters grow old onstage before, but it’s rare that a performer ages as instantly or fluidly as Ms. Lavin does.
     
    Poised in ripe middle-age in pre-coital seductiveness and then, seconds later, reclining into geriatric frailty, her Anna remains much the same glamorous and humdrum, poetic and prosaic creature. Time may have withered her, to misquote Shakespeare, but custom will never stale this mother’s infinite, and exasperating, variety.