No risk, no reward

Tulsa needs more productions like the challenging ‘Mothers and Sons’

“In a Town Full of Musicals…” reads the tag line on a press photo for American Theatre Company’s production of Terrence McNally’s “Mothers and Sons,” directed by Norah Sweeney. It felt like a poke at other troupes in town whose seasons are loaded with familiar song and dance.

“That line has engendered a lot of comment, most of it positive,” said Richard Ellis, ATC’s set designer and longtime board member. “But it’s that straightforward. There are an awful lot of musicals going on in Tulsa.” 

In fact, almost a dozen have been announced for this fall alone. 

At just shy of 50 years old, ATC prides itself on being a regional theater company in the strict sense, with actors, directors, designers, and leadership who share historical memory spanning decades. (They’re not averse to musicals; they produce “A Christmas Carol” every year.) 

“Our mission,” Ellis said, “has always been to do good shows well.” 

“I see a lot of good things happening in town, but that can lead everyone back to ‘there’s so much going on that we have to have that name recognition and we have to do fill-in-the-blank musical.’”

“Mothers and Sons” has closed, so this column isn’t about getting you to see it. Instead, it’s a challenge to risk an evening out seeing something unfamiliar. Why? The more places we’re willing to go and see ourselves in someone else, the more honest and open we become. And it’s possible we might have an experience as rich as the one this play provided.

On a bitterly cold night, Katharine Gerard shows up unannounced to the Manhattan apartment of Cal Porter, widowed lover of Katharine’s late son Andre. Cal, who waited eight years after Andre’s death to start dating again, now enjoys a comfortable life with his writer husband Will Ogden and their son Bud. 

Katharine has arrived under the pretense of returning her son’s journal, but her true motivation is something more complex. She refuses to accept Andre’s life as a gay man and his death from AIDS, and she struggles to allow that others’ perspectives and experiences in her son’s life are as important as her own.

“I guess you had to be there,” she says, as she wrestles with the uncomfortable memory of a risqué story told at Andre’s memorial service years ago. 

The passing comment is an attempt at tolerance and empathy in a play filled with many such attempts. Many of them fail. But again and again the characters show that the effort, the fight for connection, is itself a noble act. 

As Katharine, Lisa Wilson would have given Kate Hepburn a run for her money as a proud Yankee widow with a trim figure, a glass-cutting wit, and a hatred for pleasantries (among many other things). From the very first lines, through subtle shifts in tone and flickers of light and shadow across her face, Wilson showed a chasm of grief, fear, and guilt hiding under Katharine’s veneer of bitterness over her son’s life and death. 

Perhaps the most powerful moment of the play came in the milliseconds of hesitation she showed before putting her hand on Cal’s arm in comfort as, together, they read from Andre’s diary for the first time.

As Will, Chad Oliverson matched Wilson’s ferocity with the sharp strength and mercurial humor of a man who knows who he is and who he isn’t (namely, a second Andre). Will Lane was a bit broad as six-year-old Bud, but his winning openness propelled the play’s touching conclusion as he tells a new story for their family, one that might include Katharine. 

As Cal, who cared for Andre as AIDS ravaged him and an entire generation, Sterling McHan quietly held the heart of the play: the regret, the hope, the sustenance of love through happiness and pain. 

Few things here were single-layered, because love and loss and family are not, and the production carefully folded the audience into this complex reality. “Mothers and Sons” was some of the best theater I’ve seen anywhere—an evening of masterful writing, acting, directing, and design that (in Shakespeare’s words) held “a mirror up to nature.” This was invigorating, heartfelt, intelligent work. 

Going to the theater is an act of faith in the entire human project. It needs an audience, not just for financial support, but as a witness to the search for the unknown—what we’re missing in our hearts, what we’re longing for. You really have to be there.

For more from Alicia, read her article on being a critic.