In Adil Mansoor’s “Amm(i)gone,” a tender solo play about the ache he feels for his lost closeness with his mother, we, the audience, never glimpse her clearly. That is not a criticism, only a truth, and it has nothing to do with a lack of love on his part or hers.
Soul-baring and sweetly funny, “Amm(i)gone” — whose title blends “ammi,” the Urdu word for mom, with “Antigone” — is in fact remarkably respectful. As an adult, Mansoor has never found a way to be his whole gay self with his piously Muslim mother. But she held him in her lap when they emigrated from Pakistan when he was 3 months old, and as a young child in suburban Chicago, he clung to her, his best and sole friend.
He remains protective of his mother’s privacy. When he shows us projections of family photographs from before the late 1990s, when she started wearing a hijab, he shields her image from us; in some pictures with darling little him, we see only her embroidered-over outline. But he is now, we sense, just as shrouded from her, albeit metaphorically.
“If coming out to your mom means that you call her and you say, ‘Ammi, I’m gay,’ that is a thing I have never done,” he says. “I have never directly spoken to my mother about my queerness.”
Which is not the same as saying that his mother — a social worker who, he tells us, “holds theater accountable” for changing him — doesn’t know.
Directed by Mansoor and Lyam B. Gabel at the Flea, in TriBeCa, this is a richly designed co-production by PlayCo, Woolly Mammoth Theater, the Flea and Kelly Strayhorn Theater. (Set and lighting are by Xotchil Musser, sound design by Aaron Landgraf and media design by Joseph Amodei and Davine Byon.)
The seed of the play — whose title, Mansoor says, we can pronounce however we want — came from a different project that he embarked on with his mother: translating Sophocles’s tragedy “Antigone” into Urdu. The audience hears audio of some of their conversations about it, in which they are also trying to decode each other. (Mansoor notes, to us, that they both signed a media release form.)
The enormous sacrifice that Antigone makes — insisting on giving her dead brother the dignity of a burial, in defiance of their uncle the king and at risk of her own life — echoes through “Amm(i)gone.” It suggests a sacrifice that Mansoor longs for from his mother: that she accept him as he is, even if that means defying her religious beliefs.
Onstage, he has a heart-on-sleeve vulnerability but also a palpable love and respect for himself and his life, which includes his longtime partner, Luke. Mansoor tells us that he is uncertain whether his mother will see this show. It feels, though, like a hand extended, inviting her to truly know him again, and hoping to know her.
A ways uptown, at Baryshnikov Arts in Hell’s Kitchen, an experimental riff on Bertolt Brecht’s “The Mother” shows what it looks like when maternal devotion begets righteous activism, with a parent enlisting in her son’s cause.
Conceived by Neena Beber and Jessica Hecht, written by Beber and starring Hecht, “A Mother” is a learning play in the same sense that Brecht’s 1932 original is: meant to teach the audience about something — in this case, the belligerent lethality of fascism and racism.
But whereas Brecht’s play, as he wrote, “declines to assist the spectator in surrendering himself to empathy in the unthinking fashion of the Aristotelian dramaturgy,” Beber’s has at least a couple of moments in which the audience will, heaven forbid, feel something.
If you twine the spiritual “Wade in the Water” with the Kaddish to make a profoundly beautiful double song of mourning, as “A Mother” does, you are bound to pierce some intellectual defenses.
Directed by Maria Mileaf, with music by Mustapha Khan, William Kenneth Vaughan and Norman Burns, it is a strange, sprawling, time-hopping work of memory, fiction and adaptation. On a set by Neil Patel, the production juggles moods, tones and theatrical styles, and has some fun with disco dancing and water ballet. (Choreography is by Shura Baryshnikov, lighting by Matthew Richards, costumes by Karen Boyer.) The abundance, however, gets to be unwieldy.
The play spans four decades of American life, from December 1979 in Miami Beach to the spring of 2020 in New York. Hecht, playing a version of herself — warm, funny, charming in that not actually dithery way — starts by recalling Christmas break when she was 15, visiting her grandparents in Florida and having her first kiss with a local named Daryl (Fergie L. Philippe).
She is Jewish, he is Black, and their adolescent romance coincides with the headline-grabbing death of Arthur McDuffie, a Black insurance salesman who was chased and fatally beaten in Miami by white police officers. Their acquittal sparked riots in which 18 people died.
In the play, McDuffie’s devastated mother (Portia) pleads for peace on the news.
“Quit this! Quit this!” she implores. “Look to God. It’s time to stop.”
The play toggles between the grim and the goofily lighthearted, including some episodes at theater camp in Connecticut, where a rebel counselor (Delilah Napier) insists on intercutting a production of “Paint Your Wagon” with scenes from “The Mother.”
“A Mother,” too, is forever enacting scenes from “The Mother,” in one of which the title character (Hecht) learns that her beloved son (Philippe) has been killed: shot in the back.
“They say he was calling for you,” someone tells her. “He was calling for his mother.”
Like George Floyd, whose murder by a police officer in Minneapolis also ripples through this recollection of recent American history.
For all its overstuffedness, “A Mother” does spark contemplation, and the Brechtian mother articulates one of its principal takeaways.
“I need my son, we all need our sons, in this life,” she says. “Not the next one!”
Amm(i)gone
Through April 14 at the Flea, Manhattan; thenewflea.org. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes.
A Mother
Through April 13 at Baryshnikov Arts, Manhattan; baryshnikovarts.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes.
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