Call Me Mother. Or Don't.
Fresh from Broadway and a 2025 season at Melbourne Theatre Company, Mother Play lands at Q Theatre with fierce poise and a matching handbag. This is not a gentle homage to motherhood. It's a work of high style - an outrageous yet intimate portrait of a family that just won't stay packed, no matter how many times they're evicted. Told over five domestic evictions and four decades of American upheaval, it's a story about staying, leaving, returning, and the psychic rent we pay for love.
It's 1962. Phyllis Herman - cigarette in one hand, drink in the other - is dragging her children, Carl and Martha, into yet another cockroach infested crumbling apartment. Since their father disappeared with the family savings, the Hermans have been on the move. Phyllis is fierce, fabulous, and wholly unequipped for the changing tides of the twentieth century, especially when those tides arrive in the form of her children's sexual and political awakenings. As the Hermans lurch through the decades - the idealism of the '60s, the sexual revolutions of the '70s, the grief and reckoning of the AIDS crisis - they carry with them every eviction notice, every insult, every brutal act of devotion. The question that echoes across the eras: can you choose to love, even when it hurts?
Mother Play is both a feast for actors and a balm for any audience member who's looked their mother in the eye and seen both a monster and an angel. Vogel's script is filled with high camp humour, theatrical flair, and moments of crushing vulnerability. It's the poetic intensity of Tennessee Williams entwined with Grey Gardens ' faded flair, and David Lynch's surreal edge, wrapped in leopard print and laced with Schitt's Creek 's sharp wit.
The cast devouring this feast is Aotearoa screen and stage legend Jennifer Ludlam as Phyllis (in the role originated by Jessica Lange on Broadway), alongside Amanda Tito (Scenes from the Climate Era, Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again.) and Tim Earl (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time).
This is theatre for those who grew up queer in a house that never quite felt like home. It's for the children of complicated women and the survivors of tangled family politics. It's for the fans of Vogel's How I Learned to Drive, the readers of American family epics, and lovers of stories that ache and glitter in equal measure. It's not sentimental. It's not safe. But it is spectacular.
Bringing the spectacular to the stage is a stacked design team – lighting and sound design by Sean Lynch (Camping, Hir), costume design by Tautahi Subritzky (A Slow Burlesque, ScatterGun), and set design by Daniel Williams (Taniwha, Camping) and Talia Pua (A Slow Burlesque, Rituals of Similarity).
Mother Play is also a significant moment for Sophie Roberts, who signs off after more than a decade of bold, genre-defying work at Silo Theatre. In curating her final season, she's chosen to explore the theme of motherhood in all its forms, and this play is its crown jewel.
'As I finish this chapter of my life, I've been drawn to stories about evolution, of self, of family, of identity,' says Roberts. 'The 'mother' of the title is metaphor, myth, tragedy and comedy rolled into one. Phyllis is the mother of all mothers. And this play is a riot. And a reckoning.'
Mother Play earned four Tony Award nominations in 2024, won two Drama Desk Awards and an Outer Critics Circle Award, and has already been heralded as a new American classic.
If Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie had a queer cousin who rearranged the furniture, sprayed roach killer, and lit a cigarette with your childhood trauma, this would be it.
The Milford Asset Management Season of
MOTHER PLAY a play in five evictions
By Paula Vogel
04 – 20 September 2025
Q Theatre, Rangatira
Presented with support from Q Theatre
Duration: 105 minutes, no interval
On sale now at qtheatre.co.nz
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