Katharine Gerard, a Dallas matron, wears her mink coat like armor, and she’s reluctant to relinquish it. She has arrived unannounced at the New York apartment of Cal, the former lover of her son, Andre, who died of AIDS twenty years earlier. “I’m not staying,” she insists when Cal offers to take her coat. But of course she does stay, and in the 90 minutes that follow in Northlight’s “Mothers and Sons,” playwright Terrence McNally delivers an emotionally affecting exploration of family dynamics and a bitter woman’s struggle with profound loss. The unlikely reunion of Katharine and Cal—they have not spoken since Andre died—yields not only the personal history of the characters but also an account of the political markers of the gay experience.
Not the least of which is the fact that Cal’s domestic situation—he’s now married to Will, fifteen years his junior, and raising a child—is mere backdrop rather than the centerpiece of the story. Acknowledging the generational difference between Will and himself—personal and political—Cal tells Katharine, “I never expected to be a father. He never expected not to be one.” Thus the contemporary “Mothers and Sons,” reflecting legalized gay marriage and parenting, is McNally’s latest work in a career that has chronicled the evolving cultural landscape for gay Americans over the last 50 years. The AIDS era was captured in his plays “The Lisbon Traviata,” “Lips Together, Teeth Apart,” and “Love! Valour! Compassion!” while “Andre’s Mother,” which was made into a television movie, first introduced the characters Katharine Gerard and Cal Porter, meeting for the first time at Andre’s memorial service.
With “Mothers and Sons,” directed by Steve Scott, it is twenty years later when Katharine, recently widowed, arrives at Cal’s doorstep, which is attached to a handsome Central Park West apartment (with a view), evidence of Cal’s successful career as a money manager. Surely his strength is in client relations; he deflects Katharine’s insensitive barbs with grace. Andre left home at eighteen to pursue a theatre career—too young, she thinks, to come to a city like New York. Cal explains, “As a young gay man he didn’t feel comfortable where he was.” To which Katharine responds, “Andre wasn’t gay when he came to New York.” (Laughter in the audience) She thrusts, seeking to assign blame—for Andre’s gayness, for his death from AIDS, and for her pain (stemming in part from her having severed ties with him when he left home). And the affable Cal parries, with gentle responses that explain the life that he and Andre shared. The back and forth between these pivotal characters is the crux of the drama. Even though it’s never entirely clear what Katharine’s motive is for being there—returning Andre’s journal is her excuse for the visit—the conversation is compelling, the revelations heartbreaking. Could it be reconciliation she’s looking for? If so, we’re all in.
Will, an aspiring writer, is the stay-at-home helpmate, utterly absorbed by his role as father to six-year-old Bud. The device of giving Bud a bath—a very long bath—with the two dads switching off responsibility (“Your turn. He wants you.”) allows Katharine solo time with Will, who tells her (TMI) all about how Bud was conceived. Clearly, McNally is thorough in his chronicle of the gay family today.
Interpreting McNally’s work is a strong four-person cast with the pert Bud played by Ben Miller and Benjamin Sprunger as the doting father Will. Jeff Parker gives the anchoring performance as Cal, whose reminiscences about Andre’s life and death feel wholly authentic. That Cindy Gold can endow the despicable Katharine with a humanity that makes her sympathetic, even as she lashes out, allows us—crucially, for the success of the play—to share her grief.