Agita and shpilkes play equal roles
Actress Caroline Aaron offers insights on ‘Conversations With Mother’
“Conversations With Mother” is a heartbreaking comedy.
While that sounds like an oxymoron, thanks to brilliant, nuanced performances by its two stars, Caroline Aaron and Matt Doyle, the audience is effortlessly transported back and forth between these emotional extremes.
Ms. Aaron plays Maria Collavechio, a widow whose youngest son, Bobby, has been troubled since childhood. A would-be playwright, he is gay, given to relationships with the wrong men, and drug-addicted. He drains her financially and emotionally.
Yet she continues to support him, offering unconditional love until, well, no spoilers here. But this is exactly the kind of production theater geeks invented off-Broadway for: a small two-hander that more than fulfills its lofty ambitions.
Ms. Aaron, 72, is a veteran character actor with an extensive resume in theater, film, and TV. Her first role was as “Teenager” in “Come Back to the 5 and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean.” That was in 1982. More recently, she probably is better known for her five seasons as Shirley Maisel on “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.” That’s how I always pictured her: the Jewish mom, as in the recent “Between the Temples.”
So when we Zoomed, I asked her about making the transition to Italian Catholic. “I was talking to someone about this the other day,” she told me. “And I said, ‘You know, there’s a lot of overlap between an Italian mother and a Jewish mother. The home is the center of their hearts, and their children are the center of their lives.’
“That may be universal, but it’s certainly true of Jewish mothers, and it’s certainly true of Italian mothers, that’s for sure.”
Fortunately, Ms. Aaron never had the difficulties Maria does. “I am grateful every time I do this play that my children didn’t have this particular problem,” she said. “The idea of having an addict child is pretty scary, because, you know, you can get that phone call one day. But even just the idea of that is terrible.
“I have this line in the play. It’s when she goes to her son’s apartment to confront him. He says, ‘This is none of your business.’ And I say, ‘You are my business. Everything about you is my business.’
“Well, I felt that way as a mother.”
I asked Ms. Aaron if she could encapsulate the relationship between Maria and Bobby. “Friendship is the word I would use,” she said.
“I learned a lot from Matt, who is my son in the play. When we first met, I asked him, ‘Why are you doing this?’ He’s an incredible singer. He’s a huge Broadway musical comedy star. For these kinds of people who are triple threats, to do an off-Broadway play is unusual.
“He said, ‘I read the first 10 pages and I said yes, because I’m a gay man and I have this relationship with my mother that no one has written about accurately. The relationship between a gay man and his mother is different than any other relationship between a mother and child.’”
Mr. Doyle told Ms. Aaron that his sisters, who were close with their mom, always asked him, “How are you such good friends with Mom?’”
Ms. Aaron also checked in with playwright Matthew Lombardo, who based his play largely on his own life. During the pandemic, Mr. Lombardo, who is gay and eight years sober, spoke to his mom three times a day and posted those phone conversations on his Facebook page.
“Friends of his read them, said they were funny, and told him he should make a play out of this. And that’s exactly what he did.”
Ms. Aaron asked the playwright for guidance, an explanation of how his mom (and Maria’s character) understood that the son had the talent necessary to succeed.
“I said, ‘Where did I get that idea from? If I had a child who was a piano prodigy, I’d hear him practice and know.’ But how do you know the promise of a writer?
“Matthew told me, ‘My mother always knew about me.’ So one of my favorite lines in the play is when I say to Bobby, ‘You’ve always had an agita about you. I don’t know where it is or where it came from and I did everything in my power to make it go away, but it never did.
“It’s something my mother might have called schpilkes. This kid always had some buzz going on inside of him, and the mother just knew.”
Her moving performance, which bespeaks her continued enthusiasm for her craft, can be credited in part to advice she received from Jerzy Grotowski. She heard Grotowski, a theater director and early disciple of Konstantin Stanislavski, “speaking at the Smithsonian. Someone asked him, ‘What is your advice for a beginning actor?’
“And he said, ‘Never stop being a beginning actor.’
“I found that very true. Every play, every movie, every television show, it’s all about starting over. Can you master the narrative of this story in these particular circumstances and make it interesting?
“You know, most people quit at a certain point. I have a daughter who is an artist. She applied for a job and didn’t get it. She was very disappointed and called me and asked, ‘Mommy, how do you do it? How do you go through this time and again?’
“I told her, ‘I learned a long time ago you have to make friends with uncertainty, and that’s not for everybody.’ Some people can’t survive that way, and I understand that. Even I’m tired of uncertainty, of not knowing what’s going to be next.
“Where are the great roles? Where are the great stories? How many people do I have to knock off to get that great part?
“It’s a very competitive business. That’s why I’m so delighted to have this great role.”
Another reason is that producers cast her despite her image as the Jewish mom. “I was as surprised as anybody when they offered me the role. I went for my costume fitting, and the costume designer said, ‘Now this is a woman who probably only shops at K-Mart and lives in the Midwest.’
“I was like, ‘Why did they cast me?’ But I was delighted, because I’m really well trained. I’ve had great teachers in my life. And it’s wonderful when people give you the opportunity to express different parts of yourself. You may expect one thing from an actor, but all of us have many cards in our hand that we can play.”
Ms. Aaron was dealt at least some of the cards in her hand as she grew up in Richmond, Virginia’s small Jewish community. In that environment, she said, you couldn’t be a secular Jew. You had to be a practicing Jew.
What they practiced may have been what she herself calls “Jewish light.” But they did practice. “I went to Sunday school. I was at confirmed at 16. They didn’t have anything like bar and bat mitzvahs back then. The synagogue I grew up in looked like a church. We had a choir. But still, it was very content-oriented. What does brotherhood mean? What does being charitable mean? All those kinds of discussions were part of my upbringing.
“When I actually moved to New York, where everyone is Jewish whether they’re Jewish or not, I was kind of surprised by cultural Jewishness, because I’d never experienced that before. I knew a lot more about Judaism than my Jewish friends did. If you were a Jew from the South, it had to be based on content, not form. You had to know what it meant.
“I had a friend married to a very observant woman. She was away one year and he came to my house for Passover. Later he said to me, ‘I’ve been married 15 years. I’ve done Passover every year. I’ve been to Israel several times. But I never had any idea what this holiday was about.’
“They were repeating the rituals but never bothered to understand why. But when you grow up in a place where there are no other Jews, the only way you know you are Jewish is by understanding what it is. So I ended up getting a much better Jewish education than people who grew up in a big Jewish community.”
“Conversations With Mother” runs at Theater 555 (555 W. 42nd St.) through May 11.
comments