Mother of the Maid
Director Desiree Clark’s letter to the audience says that this play is about family, and notes that “throughout history, children have rebelled against parents, pushing all the limits and challenging the status quo and societal norms.” That is surely true, but there’s a special sort of turmoil that gets visited upon those parents when the person telling your daughter to leave home and lead an army is someone Mom regards as a saint, and when the accepted religious authority is telling Dad that “she has a greater Father to obey now.” It’s one thing when bad influences threaten to destroy your child, but what about good ones? Such is the case for poor Isabelle and Jacques, the French peasants who find that their daughter Joan is not having romantic fantasies out in the fields like a normal teenager, but is instead getting filled, slain, and taken apart by St. Catherine. (It doesn’t help that the girl is hotheaded, profane, and borderline contemptuous — where is the odor of sanctity?) And there is a special sort of pain that comes when that saint and that Father, the ones who told her to drive the English from her country, who gave her the grace to achieve her teenage dream of military glory, suddenly abandon her in the way no decent natural family ever would. Jane Anderson’s play takes its characters’ religion seriously, which only highlights their profound humanity. Jennifer Eve Thorn opens herself wide to play the titular Mother, and gives a gutting performance as a smart, strong, self-assured woman who finds that those qualities avail her naught in the face of her daughter’s experience. Makaela Rae Macias more than holds her own as daughter Joan. The result is thrilling and heartbreaking — rather like family.
When
Ongoing until Sunday, May 22, 2022
Hours
| Sundays, 2pm-3:30pm |
| Thursdays, 7:30pm-9pm |
| Fridays, 8pm-9:30pm |
| Saturdays, 8pm-9:30pm |