The Mother NYC Reviews and Tickets

“It is not a tidy performance. And it almost rips the seams out of Zeller’s carefully measured study of one woman’s disintegration. But there’s no denying that Huppert’s Anne is compulsively watchable, even as she drags you, squirming, clean out of your comfort zone...Huppert fills the stage in a hallucinogenic blaze of activity...She’ll take you scary places you didn’t know existed. You may not want to follow, but when a performance is this committed, you really don’t have a choice.”
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"Zeller is presumably aiming for Pinteresque poignancy, but the play winds up in Freud 101, right down to its Oedipal core...As her bipolar bitchiness gives way to despair, confusion and fantasy, the pace slows to a slog. A so-called 'black farce,' this downer of a play is only fitfully funny and almost completely lacking in feeling. By the end, it's hard to tell what's actually happening and what's in Anne's head, but there’s a good chance that your own brain will have checked out long before."
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"’The Mother’ is undone not so much by her losses as by the accumulation of knowledge and flashes of insight that she acquires — into her husband’s betrayals, her son’s withdrawal and into her own unraveling mind...This turns out to be an upsetting play rather than an engaging one, and if it weren’t for Huppert’s mesmerizing performance, it might send you out of the theater and screaming into the night.”
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“The great Huppert is such a uniquely fascinating stage creature she almost makes it possible to overlook the stiff mechanics of Zeller's psychodrama and its familiar structural tricks...Cullman's taut production...does a fine job of dressing up the thin text with stylish design elements...Huppert vastly outshines the material, but watching a consummate artist execute even a transparent dramatic exercise such as this one can be mesmerizing.”
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"A pile of incomprehensible gibberish...If you take the dare and suffer through 'The Mother,' I’m willing to bet you’ll wish you’d stayed home...Huppert enlivens every minute...Mostly a series of shrieks that are boring enough to be numbing, and the ugly set by Wendland is nothing more than a long white sofa that breaks into sections to allow for multiple shrieks at the same time...The dialogue isn’t worth hearing anyway...You go away from 'The Mother' baffled but exhausted."
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“Don’t be surprised about the Oedipal vibe to ‘The Mother’, which gets weird, but Smith and Huppert are so good together that you can’t wait for him to get on stage so they can do their creepy mother/son dance all over again...With its fluid use of time and very dark humor, ‘The Mother’ is certainly not for everyone, but being able to see the legendary Huppert on stage doing a full Huppert Performance and Smith’s future promise is certainly worth the price of admission.”
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“A psychologically incisive look at a middle-aged mother's clinical depression, but never fully delivers the searing poignancy we expect...Once you grasp its structural gimmick early on, there's nowhere left for ‘The Mother’ to go but down, and Zeller doesn't offer many surprises...Overall, the cumulative effect of ‘The Mother’ is like watching a slow-motion car wreck: at times fascinating to gawk at, but leaving us none the wiser as we drive by.”
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"As the audience enters...she is on stage with a book in her hand, occasionally perusing it as she sits on one end of the stage-length couch...the major set piece of director Cullman's tense production...Mother's depression-fueled mood swings are handled with extraordinary finesse by Huppert...The tragedy of her illness, as depicted in the play, is that her behavior pushes away those who aren't willing to deal with the fact that it's the disease that is making her so cold and needy."
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