Playwright: Jessica Anne. At: Neo-Futurists, 5153 N. Ashland Ave. Tickets: 773-275-5255; Neofuturists.org; $20. Runs through: June 4
Mike Mother is the second two-person performance piece in a row I've seen at the Neo-Futurists, who seem to be devoting much of its mainstage season to autobiographical auteurist works.
The value of your experience at such performances probably will depend on the degree to which you are engaged by the auteur's personal story, and the theatricality with which the story is told. I liked the last such piece a lot, Pop Waits, featuring partners/clowns Malic White and Molly Brennan. This one I didn't like so much—not because it's bad but because I found myself less engaged in the story and personality of author/central figure Jessica Anne.
Mike Mother is Jessica Anne's tale of her relationship with her mother, and a particularly harrowing tale it is, too, if even half of it is true. But Ms. Anne enjoys leaving her audience in doubt, let alone Mike Hamilton, the Mike of the title who is her close pal of some years—and even he doesn't know. He's the show's sounding board and person-to-do-things-with rather than a character ( although I'll grant him a personality but not a character ). He doesn't really rate being half the title except that something was needed to balance out "Mother," especially given Jessica Anne's grand literary conceit of using Marsha Norman's 1983 play, 'Night, Mother, to parallel her own story. And there's the chief rub of this work: not enough people know the play, or they don't know it in enough detail to place value on its parallels to Mike Mother.
Actually, I think the parallels are weak. It's a two-character play in which a young adult daughter informs her mother that she ( the daughter ) plans to shoot herself later that night. Jessica Anne never plans to shoot herself; rather, it's her mother who demands that Jessica Anne hold a gun to Mom's head. Obviously she didn't pull the trigger, or she hit the wall if she did, but Jessica is coy about that, as she is about whether or not her mother died of cancer, even after Jessica narrates a horrific quasi-gothic end-of-life story.
That story is a dandy, as is the gun-to-head riff and several others, but they all smack of solo material that would be more at home at Fillet of Solo vs. the Neo-Futurarium. Director Josh Matthews works ably with Anne and Hamilton to develop visual and theatrical interest. With a bathtub full of water, rubber balls ( representing puppies ) dropping from the ceiling, puppet scenes from 'Night, Mother and an audience-participation segment, the energy never wanes in this 85-minute piece. But it all seems forced to me, and is not the best showcase for the literary quality and passion of Jessica Anne's story.
